No matter what type of business you have, whether you are doing Internet marketing, or have a brick and mortar store, there are deadlines, meetings and other time critical responsibilities. If you are not on time, your clients will not get their services delivered when you promised them, or your own schedule can be set back.
Since my days are so busy with phone calls, website updates, client requests and Yahoo Messenger conversations, I decided it was time to start scheduling appointment. So I recently started using a scheduling program that is added into Mozilla Thunderbird email, my favorite email program. The scheduler has a reminder that pops up at a set time before an appointment. That is supposed to keep me on time.
However, there are situations when I do not see the reminder, such as when I am away from my desk, or have another program running that keeps the reminder in the background. In that case it flashes an icon at the bottom of the screen. Depending on how busy I am on the phone, I may not see that icon for a while.
While keeping appointments is important in business, giving your clients more than they pay for is even more important. For example, some of my marketing was scheduled at various times today, but those scheduled times were dismissed because I was dealing with paying clients. That to me was more important than advertising for more business.
When the current issues are taken care of, I can schedule the marketing again for the next working day. Think about how you manage your schedule and keep your customers happy. Giving them more consultation time than what you originally agreed on will instill good feelings that you care about them.
Of course there is a limit to how much time you give them. I had one scheduled for an hour today and the call lasted almost 2 hours. Just before the 2 hour mark I reminded my client that I was late for another appointment. I also did not consider that rude or unprofessional since he already received almost an hour more of my time than we had scheduled, time that would have been spent with others.
This all comes down to time management. You have probably heard or read about it many times. However, until you experience missed appointments, or wonder why you are not getting as much done in a day as you wanted to, you will not realize the full potential of good time management.
Schedule all of your customer appointments, marketing time, lunch, website updates and anything else you normally do during your day. Be realistic with the amount of time you schedule for each task. As time goes on you will be able to adjust those times shorter or longer, depending on the average time it takes you on each one.
So get yourself a day planner, preferably electronic, so it can remind you of your appointments and start using it. You will see an improvement in the amount you get done during your day. As we all know, time is money. Make the most of them both.
Until next time, have an awesome week!
Jim Hutchinson
Affiliate Referral Sources
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