Après le Déluge, What?

The Avalanche is dissipated.

I am close to completing the mail-out of nearly 400 cards celebrating the Christmas season. It looks like that task will be accomplished by the end of November.

Then what?

My plan is to take a break from mailing out material and spend December on the phones.

I think I might phone every person on my list to wish them Merry Christmas.

It can be a short call.

For one thing it will establish voice contact with those I’ve not previously called.

For another it will allow me to determine which of all these new numbers are direct lines, and which are not.

It will help if I have something up my sleeves to offer to them. Such as a PDF file I can send by email.

Talk to Me!

A Stamp Date Stamp

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

I’m feeling quite pleased with myself.

In Staying Ahead of the Avalanche 4 and related posts I’ve described my efforts at touching contacts, mainly with postal mail.

Inevitably I run out of my customized postage stamps, (Running out of Picture Postage Stamps), or get enthusiastic and run of an abundance of letters, and then I’m faced with a small hill of addressed envelopes waiting to go out.

Of course I want to keep my mailings roughly in sequence, and one day last week found me sorting a wad of envelopes in name sequence, then cross-checking them, record-by-record, against my data base.

What a waste of my time!

This morning I hit on the idea of augmenting my envelope macro to drop the print-date right where it will be hidden by the postage stamp.

Once they arrive!

Talk to Me!

Staying Ahead of the Avalanche - 4

My first week of “slack time”, but not really slack. I now have 377 contacts on my list. Two were due for processing today – instances where The Prospector alerted me to a promotion.

Those done I check the “follow-up due today”, and find none.

Makes sense. These past few weeks I’ve strenuously “touched” every contact and set their follow-up date to be 2 months ahead.

Now I have a sense of foreboding: Is this the calm before the storm?

I decide to check the distribution of my follow-up dates in an Excel pivot table:

weeks	Total
-38	1
-30	2
-28	1
-27	1
-25	1
-18	1
-14	1
-12	1
-11	1
-9	1
-8	1
-5	2
-1	2
0	31
1	18
2	22
3	35
4	20
5	7
6	13
8	2
9	39
10	81
11	59
12	29
13	5
Total	377

The average number of follow-ups per week starting at today (week zero) is 27. That means if I “touch” 27 contacts per week, I’ll stay on top of things.

The follow-ups prior to this week need attention. Are they inactive records? Did they slip through the net?

Given that every day or so I receive an “immediate” update from The Prospector, I should contemplate a goal of 30 contacts per week from now on. That would be 6 envelopes, emails or phone calls per day Monday through Friday.

Talk to Me!

Staying Ahead of the Avalanche - 3

Well! This feels good.

I have run through all 376 records in my contact list.

For the past few weeks I have opened up the database form and clicked on the button “FollowUpToday”; there are usually 3 or 4 records that had been marked for flow-up on that particular day.

Once those were done I’d click on “FollowUpPast”, and it’s that count that I’ve been whittling down at the rate of 15 envelopes printed per day.

This morning that command showed up empty at around 10 a.m., so I have not one single contact record untouched over the past two months.

I’m taking a break.

Tomorrow I’ll click the “FollowUpToday” and probably come up empty.

Then I’ll click the “FollowUpPast” and probably come up empty.

Then I’ll click the “StalestActive” and it will show me a record due for follow-up on the 31st of October (I just checked). I’ll be able to reduce the interval on my “touchings” and make a point of working on anything up to 10 records per day to keep up to date – postal mailings, emails, phone calls – all part of the mix.

Talk to Me !

Staying Ahead of the Avalanche - 2

I’m almost up to scratch!

This morning there were 19 stale addresses, and I have been churning out 15 per day, so that means I’ll probably get completely up to date tomorrow.

Or so I Thought

Part of my procedure is to research each contact on CNW before printing a letter; that way I get to add a personal touch to each letter.

But today, CNW is not slow; it is unresponsive.

My rate has dropped from one letter each 5 minutes to 30+ minutes per letter.

Not a Good Use of My Time

So at 2pm, with 9 outstanding envelopes, I’m calling it quits for the day.

Finishing on Friday instead of Thursday is not a big deal.

Better I do something useful than sit staring at the monitor screen, drumming my fingers ...

Talk to Me !

Staying Ahead of the Avalanche

There’s no other way to describe it, unless it’s ‘”Trying to make it to the beach before the huge surf wave dumps me”.

When I rose this morning my little contacts database told me that there were 14 contacts required “touching” today, and a further 102 were in the backlog.

My plan for touching a contact every 2 months is failing; I can’t keep up with the workload.

Why Not?

Management Measures.

It’s time for some figures.

I explore the database and check the Date-Last-Modified field on the personal records.

The earliest Date-Last-Modified is May 18^th this year. That’s 17 weeks back, as I compose this draft.

I have 340 personal contacts on this list.

That’s above my goal of two years ago, which I had pegged at 300.

It seems that I’ve been able to maintain a steady rate of 340/17=20 contacts per week.

That’s certainly not ten per day, and most of these, recently, have been straightforward mailings.

If I tabulate the count of contacts-per-week against the week number I see this:

Wk	Ct
1	8
2	10
3	12
4	1
5	1
7	24
8	55
9	41
10	24
11	9
13	35
14	25
15	28
16	57
17	9

I Work in Spurts

Over the past 4 weeks I’ve contacted 35, 25, 28 and 57 people respectively. An average of 36.

The other spurt averaged 36 contacts per week, too.

My running average over the period works out to 23 per week; better than 17, but “Christopher can do better”, as my school report card said.

It seems that 35, or even 40 contacts per week ought to be doable.

If I make 40 contacts per week over 340 contacts, that means I’ll make contact once every 8.5 weeks, which ought to be about right.

In other words, my number of contacts is correct, and my goal of touching each one about once every 2 months is correct.

A New Goal

I just need to be more diligent in reaching my goals each day.

A running average of 23 per week is 4 per business day.

I need to double that to 8 per day.

Aiming for ten is a good idea, a doable stretch.

Catching Up

In the meantime, I need to catch up, to give myself breathing space while aiming for my goal.

I can do that by temporarily stretching my next-contact-date button from 2 months to 3 months.

To Justify that I HAVE to see at least 10, but preferably, 15 ENVELOPES waiting to be mailed out at the end of each business day.

P.S. So, obviously, I should drop ten, or fifteen blank envelopes near the printer each morning and churn out postals until the day’s supply is gone.

Talk to Me!