When I first started in Sales I was not, by nature, a hugely organised person. Having and maintaining effective systems is something I really had to work on.
I was also someone who really loved to be moving on to the next thing.
Those two personality traits often combined in a way that left my paperwork in a real state of disarray.
Luckily, through experience and maturing, I eventually came to realise that paperwork is not a waste of time; in fact it is actually a very effective time saver in most cases.
A lot of people in marketing and small business have personalities very like mine in the way they always want to get moving onto the next exciting project.
Sometimes so much so that they fail to do the after sales paperwork to any sort of real standard.
They feel like they are saving time by moving on quickly but the reality is that the ten or twenty minutes they failed to spend at the end of a sale filling in the right documents is likely to morph into a huge waste of time at a later date.
Keeping tax records for example.
None of us like to sit down and painstakingly record every income and deduction but if you fail to do it on a regular weekly or at least monthly basis, come tax time it is a task that is likely to rob you of not just hours of your life but possibly days.
The same can be said for failing to record the details of each of your clients thoroughly and in an easy to use system.
How often do you spend hours looking for a phone number that it would have taken you minutes to record and file at the time?
Failing to properly complete your paperwork not only costs you time but in many cases it can directly cost you money. A lost receipt, or worse yet a late tax return results in money you have worked hard for leaking out of your pockets.
There are quite a few examples of software out there that can help you with this paperwork, in that regard we are lucky as we have moved on from the era of pen and paper and huge filing cabinets.
But the principle remains the same; we all put an extraordinary amount of effort into making our business successful with sales and marketing, don’t waste that effort by losing time or money to bad paperwork skills.
Happy Marketing – SK
