In an article entitled Your Scarcest Resource, the Harvard Business Review makes the sensible case that "Time is money, but few organizations treat it that way."
According to the article:
MOST COMPANIES HAVE elaborate procedures for managing capital. They require a compelling business case for any new investment...An organization’s time, in contrast, goes largely unmanaged. Although phone calls, e-mails, instant messages, meetings, and teleconferences eat up hours in every executive’s day, companies have few rules to govern those interactions...Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, once wrote, “Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment, you shouldn’t let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers.” Of course, such thievery happens often, unintentionally.
With many sales organizations in the throes of multi-day sales kick offs and time-consuming account planning and QBRs, sales pros' time is scarcer than ever. Their time is quite literally, money.
The HBR article claims that the average organization spends hundreds of thousands of hours just preparing for meetings. Prepping for sales calls is a huge--but necessary--time suck for salespeople. High performers often spend their own time (nights and weekends) doing customer research so they can be ready to have real business conversations. Sub-par performers don't do this due diligence at all, leading to bad sales calls which end up wasting everyone's time, the customer included.
This is certainly the worst-case scenario: wasting everyone's time PLUS a bad outcome.
We have shared many tips in the past about how Boardroom Insiders can address both sides of this equation.
1. We save our customers hundreds of thousands of hours of research time every year by providing deep and actionable customer insight at their fingertips. These hours, as the article points out, amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars saved.
2. We help improve the outcome of these meetings by supporting real business conversations that are valuable to customers and help salespeople close bigger deals, faster.
The HBR article concludes:
TIME IS AN ORGANIZATION’S SCARCEST—and most often squandered—resource. No amount of money can buy a 25-hour day or reclaim an hour lost in an unproductive meeting. To get the most out of your employees, you must treat their time as precious, creating disciplined time budgets and investing effort to generate the greatest possible value for your company.
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