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For your HR people to bring value to your company, the research done by The Conference Board found the following six “people-related activities”: 1 Effectively managing and utilizing peo

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must be on his or her to-do list until the task is complete A supervisor should not have to delegate the same task more than once If someone cannot handle the task because of time, skill, or other constraints, the supervisor should be made aware so they can then reassign the task as soon as possible

In return, staff should not only react to management’s demands but should push the envelope to a new level by offering to take on new responsibilities, which will advance the company and therefore themselves All employees should be cross-trained in multiple responsibilities, so they are as productive as possible Everyone’s responsibilities should be clear because the whole team needs to be on the same page for everyone to succeed

Fire the Deserving

Firing someone is the most difficult task in running a business Not everyone is cut out for this, for it can go against many people’s natural instincts However, as unpleasant as it may be, if you want to be a boss and ensure the best for your company, then it is a skill you must master

There may be times when you need to fire friends or family members who are your partners or employees Firing someone in general is difficult—firing someone close to you is even harder If they do not follow the letter of your written and verbal agreements, and they have been provided ample, polite warnings, then they have to go, or you too are being negligent

If your otherwise effective team is being dragged down by someone, then it is like a hole in a dam If your competitor were to apply the same amount of money as you to an employee who is better than yours

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is, then this will nip at your market position Of course, you need to work with people who you trust Can you trust them to protect and enhance your market position?

Managers and employees should be judged on their results alone Being a hard working, nice, well-intentioned, and well-qualified person or friend to the boss should never negate the importance of the financial outcome of that person’s presence in the company

Cronyism and nepotism are not profitable You cannot let nice guys and gals who are your buddies or relatives negatively affect the otherwise positive flow of the organization, its morale, or its operational results Even if their weaknesses can legitimately be construed as honest mistakes, it just does not matter If they are not benefiting the company financially, they will ultimately have to go— the sooner the better

From a self-preservation perspective and despite your affection for most of the characteristics of this individual who you ostensibly “like,” the most important characteristic of a business always over-rides— profit Profit for a company is equivalent to the oxygen mammals need

in their evolutionary pursuit If you are not acting in an evolutionary way by weeding out weak characteristics, you are not optimizing your business, and your competitors will eat away at your profit margin until you fail

  You do not ultimately need a traditional pyramid-shaped organizational chart for your company to succeed Instead, you might

be able to do much of your human resources scaling plan through independent contractors, or even friends, family, and former coworkers You could even hire a delicate, cost-effective balance of

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telecommuters, employees, and contractors Either way, the goal is to get scale and instill efficiency throughout your organization to give you a leveraged market position

Nature of Human Resources

In almost any search for the definition of Human Resources Management (HRM), you will come up with the following: “A fancy word for people.” Certainly, there is an obvious truth to this, but this definition is far too simple in our experience At the most fundamental stage, your HRM team should know their apparent roles: deal with hiring, firing, training, and inter-personal issues

Beyond the foundation, what your human resources specialist should offer is a slew of qualifications because they are in charge of one of the most pertinent positions within your company—your team Since their job is to fuse together the company’s competitive needs with the greater demands of the employees, the person to fill the HRM role would be by someone who has a loyalty to you and your SOPs, is trustworthy, and believes in building a team filled with real people who have real values, like yourself

The HRM’s objective, as stated by Schwind, Das & Wagar (2005), is this: “Human resource management aims to improve the productive contribution of individuals while simultaneously attempting to attain other societal and individual employee objectives.” Wikipedia claims the objective of the HR role is “to maximize the return on investment from the organizations human capital.”

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Responsibilities include hiring, compensations, evaluations of performance, promotions, relations, and planning, and they should uphold these responsibilities effectively, fairly (to the business and the employees), legally, and consistently

For your HR people to bring value to your company, the research done

by The Conference Board found the following six “people-related activities”:

1) Effectively managing and utilizing people

2) Trying performance appraisal and compensations to competencies

3) Developing competencies that enhance competitiveness

4) Increasing the innovation, creativity, and flexibility necessary

to enhance competitiveness

5) Applying new approaches to work process design, succession planning, career development, and inter-organizational mobility

6) Managing the implementation and integration of technology through improved staffing, training and communication with employees

When going through the hiring process, be sure to outline your qualifications and specifications, so they are written clearly, honestly, and with fairness; as a result, you should end up with more than just a

“fancy term for a person.”

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Some managers see their HR role as “laying down the law” and

“keeping people in line.” However, that attitude is not conducive to the teamwork required within the organization Typically, younger and less experienced managers are the ones who disregard this lesson Building a team is a matter of trust and communication; talk to each other

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Chapter 7: Get Off Your Tuchus and Go Sell

Objectives:

1 Review some critical concepts for top quality sales and marketing operations

2 List selling techniques for your efficient sales team

3 Utilizing contact management system

4 Discuss targeting your high-level prospects through diligent networking and research

5 Identify successful methods to selling your products and services

Contact Management

When you start a new business, maintaining your contacts is one of the first things you absolutely must do thoroughly, correctly, and perpetually—and is probably one of the easiest and least expensive projects ahead of you relative to the value it will bring Thankfully, the days of awkward and overpriced contact management software have ended

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It is surprising to see that a large portion of the business community takes no interest in proper contact management since technology has made it so easy to keep your information in systems such as Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, Act, or Goldmine

Systems like these can store all of your contact names, addresses, and phone and fax numbers, while integrating the data with your business calendar, phone services, PDA, Word documents, fax software, email, web links, and web data

As a side note, we dislike Outlook for several reasons, including that it

is by far the most virus prone software in existence

In your contact manager, you should import, key-in, save, and update detailed information on all possible leads or contacts including calendar items, dated notes, callback dates, their current service providers, their industries, quality rankings, size rankings, income rankings, links to press accounts and industry reports, and even their birthdays and kids’ names

With this consolidated data set, you can easily query the contact records and pull up only the records that meet your select criteria, such

as everyone who has a birthday this month, or every client organization with more than one million dollars of annual revenue, or every person with whom you went to college

  You must assertively build your data set year after year with all potentially relevant sales or commerce contacts and ensure your follow-ups are well-timed and organized, so you can contact just the right people at just the right times

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If you have organized your contact management system properly, then having huge amounts of data will not be clutter; instead, it will be power at your fingertips

The key is to have as much data as possible about each lead stored in the right fields, and to make sure every lead has a calendar date for when they are to be reviewed or contacted again If you have determined them to be a critical lead and a likely deal, then the calendar date is tomorrow; if you decide the lead is unlikely to ever close, then you can make it five years from now or delete it In each case, your data set will be clean and meet a logical, simple business flow

The most important source of data for you to gather and input is your personal network of contacts, which includes the people you have met

or solicited within your immediate business community This is a relatively low volume of contacts to work with compared to the broader community of those who you have yet to meet

Vast additional raw data to upload and cull through are sold in electronic form and can be easily imported to your contact management system (generally comma-delimited ASCII text files are the easiest to move around)

One of your first tasks as a prospective business owner is to do your research, at the library as well as on the Internet, for the best sources of information in your chosen industry while taking in to account your target service area Also, ask any of your colleagues or friends who might have insight into your industry and get referrals to additional data sources