When marketing works silo like and generates leads, but doesn’t focus on converting them into sales, sales are trapped in the “bad multitasking” and productivity decline.
The consequences can go even further: sales can sell faster than production is able to produce. You need a global synchronization to maximize company efficiency, because nobody is a desert island. We are rather elements of the chain. And the chain is only as strong as its weakest link.
What is Bad Multitasking?
Bad multitasking is a situation when our efficiency is lower than it could be, because we are doing too many things at the same time.
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Just imagine yourself juggling orange balls. You begin with one ball. It’s easy, too easy. Juggling one ball can’t be even called juggling. Your effectiveness is too low. You will easily deal with one more ball.
At some point someone throws you another ball. Now we can call it juggling. It’s a little bit harder but your productivity increases significantly. So you get another one. You need to concentrate more but you manage to keep three balls in midair. Your productivity is really high.
It’s simple to predict what will happen next. You’ll get the fourth ball. A person who is throwing the balls thinks: one is not enough, two is good, three is even better , so four will be great.
This line of thought I call “bus induction method”: if 200 people got on the bus, a one person more would always fit in. Unfortunately, life is brutal. With the fourth ball everything falls apart. Your productivity falls to zero.
The conclusion is obvious: too few balls is bad, and too many is also not good. We need a balance.
At this point you may object and say that you are better juggler than the others. That you can deal with four, five, six or even more balls. So, what does it prove?
Well, actually nothing special. The conclusion is always the same. One ball is rarely too much but even the best juggler in the world has his limits. When the number of balls is too big in proportion to the juggler’s abilities, the only solution is to reduce the number.
See the graph illustrating functional relationship between our productivity and the number of balls being juggled at the same time.
Our effectiveness reaches its maximum when the number of balls is optimal – not maximal. Somewhere between “too few” and “too many”, we can find “just right”.
So, we can divide multitasking into GOOD – when adding balls boosts productivity, and into BAD – when the right choice is to reduce on the number of balls.
Effective Marketing vs. Bad Sales Multitasking
Marketing is like a person throwing the balls for Sales to juggle. Sometimes, sales complains about the number or/and quality of generated leads. Sales juggle one ball.
To keep with the times you implement SALESmanago system. The system does work. Your productivity level is distinctively higher: you throw sales two, three, four, five balls…. The more hot leads and offer inquiries, the better, right? Marketing, empowered with new software and accounted for its local targets (generating as many leads as possible), maximizes the production, ignoring the fact that sales are not able to process them effectively. “That’s not our business they can’t manage”, marketers say.
However, like with the balls –at some point the productivity of sales, overwhelmed with the excessive number of leads, doesn’t increase with the amount of added leads, but declines dramatically.
When marketers start to fall into bad multitasking, they are jumping from one topic to another, switching from project to project, unable to finish a single offer properly, because a new potential client is calling.
Nothing good will come of it: the quality of offers declines, the amount of dissatisfied clients rises and, as a result, they choose your competition. All marketing budget is wasted, your company good name is tainted, you lose clients and you are frustrated.
For people who constantly experience leads deficit, lead generation is always an answer. But sometimes low sales problems stem from processing too many leads at the same time. Paradoxically, we need to reduce amount of leads to boost sales. It doesn’t necessarily mean cutting on marketing activity in lead generation, but under some circumstances that may also be essential. Because spending money on irritating our potential clients with long response time seems pointless.
But what if the excessive amount of business opportunities served simultaneously poses the problem? A good solution for sales is to implement the limits of work in progress (WIP), temporal freeze on processed prospects, and focus on closing transactions in progress. Kanban is a safe, practical and low-priced method to implement this solution in life.
In my article- “Bad Multitasking: The Productivity Arch Enemy” I write about an exercise 1-A-X, which will help you and your staff see the nature of bad multitasking. I also present a way to implement Kanban. You can download the article for free from my website www.mandarine.co/zlawiel (article in Polish).
About the Autor
Marek Kowalczyk is known as Bad Multitasking Slayer. With his team he supported realization of the biggest IPO project in Europe. He created MANDARINE Project Partners and MINT Books. Contant him at mko@mandarine.pl
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