Monday, October 26, 2009

Things Are Getting Out of Hand

In a quiet moment during last night's free seminar I realized that while my 1-6-10 method was generating prospects and leads, I was spiraling out of control with the data I had harvested.
In particular I had data in too many places.
I made a simple list:
(1) I have a database of client data; it currently holds 300 contacts. I am shedding deadwood (that's the "6" in 1-6-10) and adding prospects at the rate of one per day (that's the "1" in 1-6-10). The data base is a simple flat-file with Company, Name, Title, Address and so on. It contains date fields such as date-last-modified (I can detect stale records) and date-follow-up (I can use the table as a tickler file).
(2) I use a 1987 DOS program ToDo (written by Art Hill) which makes it easy to see what's to be done today, and permits easy roll-over of dates by day, week, month and so on.
(3) For each prospect or client I maintain a folder on my hard drive with a Diary.doc in which I record the journey to sales.
(4) I maintain notes on paper, for two reasons: I like to sit with a hard-copy dossier on a company and study it. (2) I make penciled notes during phone calls.
My problem is that data gets recorded in four separate places and no matter where I look, there's something missing.
· I have resolved that I will make a single efficiency each week.
That means that each week I have to come up with a new idea for trimming flab.
This week my "trim" is to use the little ToDo list solely for birthdays and other anniversaries. That's probably a personal type of use anyway.
When I have issued an email to Global Conglobulations saying I'll phone them next week, I must use my client database ((1) above) and set the follow-up day field to reflect the event.
Thus each day should see me work through the client database in ascending follow-up sequence until I have cleared all entries that require follow up.
Next week, who knows? Perhaps I'll add a field to the database form that allows me to establish a hyperlink to the Diary.doc, then from the form I can quickly pull up the diary. The diary is really a Microsoft Word document form of a memo field, held separately from the database table.

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