Secret Spices, We Discovered

Dear Readers,

I am not going to touch upon technology today. Take this blog as revealing some secret spices we discovered, to achieve best from our human resources

Some crazy non-technology things we have been doing in the last 11 years are worth sharing.

A. Die for 7 days

Regularly identify key people in the organization and make them go on company paid, 7-days compulsory break every year, without work phone and work laptop. When they come back, they are presented with a list of the things that were stuck up in their absence. Motivate them to train their team for those stuck-up things. Next time they go on a break, the list of stuck-up things goes shorter and shorter. FYI, my last 4 breaks had zero stuck-up things. This crazy policy encourages and inculcates a culture of delegation, knowledge sharing, and team building.

B. Relay the responsibilities and incentives

Break up your operation cycles and relay the accountability at each piece. Take an example of a typical B2B Sales Cycle. It can be broken up in the following pieces.

    1. Generation of MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead)

    2. Organize Meeting with an MQL and present product/service/ solution

    3. Build a relationship to transform an MQL to SQL (Sales Qualified Lead)

    4. Get your first order from an SQL

    5. Strengthen the relationship and get repeat orders

Here, pieces 1 and 2 are mostly acted by back-office team/telecaller/junior executives. Pieces 3, 4 and 5 are acted by deal makers/sales managers. Most enterprises make mistake by announcing incentives on business generated. Frankly, back-office team/telecaller/junior executives cannot generate sales on their own. They can at the most fix meeting for your deal makers/sales managers to an eligible prospect. Why not incentivize them on the number of meetings they fix between your deal makers and eligible MQL (prospects)? Their job is over as soon as they arrange a meeting. Relay further responsibility to “deal makers”/”sales managers” and incentivize them on sales.

You can apply this logic to any operation cycle. You may respond to me with any operation cycle and I will be happy to give my inputs. FYI, at Synersoft, almost every operation cycle has built-in incentives. This emerges entrepreneurs from employees.

C. Task culture

Break up each activity/project/process in small tasks and for each task decide on an individual’s accountability and ownership. Use good task management software to track the flow of processes through the progression of small tasks one by one. With the completion of each task, let there be a rating of individuals who owned the task by head of the respective process. At the time of appraisal, take average rating and decide on the appraisal. Thus, people with an extraordinary rating average will get extraordinary appraisals and vice versa. It will eliminate all subjectivity and biases. It has worked for us greatly.

D. “D” culture

We call it “D” Culture or Documentation Culture. Every task, process, follow up, reminder, meeting, and discussion is documented and cataloged. This practice leads to valuable insights to improve processes, delegate decision making and standardization of responses to normal and abnormal situations.

Our innovative instincts have made us realize the importance and effectiveness of the above points. We could never have learned it academically. I hope it is useful to all my readers and will explore the adaption of these points in their operations. Please contact me with your feedback, suggestions, inputs or share your discovered success spice. I will be happy to respond,

Best Regards,

Vishal Shah

Founder and CEO,

Synersoft Technologies Pvt Ltd