I’ve gotten hours of my life back over the past year by borrowing a practice employed by customer service departments.
For whatever reason, people approach me with the same questions over and over again. How do I get a job in business development? How do I get access to the SinglePlatform API? Is it free? How do you break into startups as a non-technical person?
Instead of continually answering these on a one-off basis, one approach to enhance productivity is to create assets that address your life’s F.A.Q. At SinglePlatform, these take the form of PDF’s that address many preliminary questions potential partners may have. Outside of SP, I try to write blog posts or canned email responses about anything I’m continually asked. Specific examples where I’ve done this include:
How I got into Business Development
How to Ask Someone to Meet for Coffee
What do I need to Know About Subscription Commerce
What type of Company Should I Work For
These assets act as a filtering mechanism that brings interactions closer to a resolution. When someone approaches me asking how to get into business development, pointing them towards a series of posts that outlines my trajectory probably answers some questions they have. Our interaction afterwards is much more efficient because I’m given them the context to ask more specific questions. Customer service departments engage in this practice all the time because getting to a resolution with the least amount of human effort saves companies’ time and money.
Helping as many people as you can is an awesome thing to do for a ton of reasons. Unfortunately, it’s just not scalable and can actually be detrimental to us achieving our goals. Creating assets to address my life’s F.A.Q. has been a beneficial practice to manage this challenge.
First-time reader? Get future posts on how to get your time back by subscribing via email or following me on Twitter.
