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Benjamin Franklin said “time is money.” That is very true, especially in the financial planning world. How do you manage your own time to make sure you are on top of everything that needs to be done? Things that are scheduled tend to happen on time. Things that are not scheduled may never happen. If they don’t, do you lose that client or miss an important deal? fficeffice" />
Time management is all about self management. The key to changing your habits is to identify them first. Where do you need the most help? Where are your strengths? What areas are most critical to the success of your business? There are several programs that can help you identify your time drains. One in particular, the DISC system, has a time mastery test that quickly points out where your time is escaping. Take a time mastery test and establish a set of goals to best utilize your areas of strength and improve areas that need help.
Once you have identified and established those key time management goals, using software tools can dramatically help with time management. ACT! for Financial Professionals is a superb application for keeping track of clients’ needs and financial interests. In addition, it has numerous features that can increase and improve your time management. Examples are task management and calendaring (meetings, to-dos and reminders), activity series, meeting alarms, and specific sales processes and stages.
What are some ways you can take advantage of these features? One of the things you will discover when learning about your time management strengths is when you are at your “working peak” during the day. Put this to your advantage. Leverage this peak time by putting a “do not disturb” meeting in your ACT! calendar. This blocks out the time, and establishes a discipline for you to use this precious timeslot for working on the things that need your absolute concentration. Time management is all about discipline.
Something as simple as having ACT! notify you of meetings can be a tremendous help in keeping you on time. All you need to do is check the Remind Me box on your activities. ACT! will show you these reminders when you start the application or a few minutes before the actual event. No more missed meetings or calls.
Another time-saving tool in ACT! is Activity Series. In financial planning, there are always a set of steps that need to be performed for a variety of processes. For example, when a new client comes on board, you may need to pull prospectus sheets, set up a preliminary meeting, add a follow up call and so on. These steps may even be performed by someone else in the organization. How do you do this today? Do you send an email to the front desk or walk over to the front office? Do you leave a sticky note on a folder on a desk? Or do you call back a client, write a quick note, again on a sticky note, and then lose the note? Sound familiar? Rest assured, it happens to all of us.
Here’s a way to automate those steps. We’ll use the New Client series example noted above for our series.
To create a new Activity Series, here’s the process step by step.
Click on Schedule – Manage – Activity Series templates
Click NEXT and give your series a name – like New Client Process
To add steps, click on the Add button. When you add a step, you assign it a name, choose the type of activity, choose when the step occurs and schedule it to be performed by whoever is logged on or by another ACT! user. In our example we’ve added a step that will occur immediately to pull financial brochures. We’ve assigned it to Jessica.
Continue adding steps to the series. In our example, we’ve added two more steps. Notice the last step is set to “fire” in 7 days after the series is started.
Continue adding steps. Once your series is done, to add someone to a series, make sure you are on their contact record. Click on Schedule – Activity Series
Select the correct Activity Series from the dropdown box. Here we are scheduling the series for Cindy Richardson.
We then click on the Activities tab for Cindy’s record and see that the activities have been scheduled. Note - you can highlight several people on a contact list and add them to a series at the same time as well.
As you can see, this is a powerful feature that can automate many time-consuming steps.
In summary, here are some things you can do within ACT! for Financial Professionals to improve your time management.
Use the calendar to keep track of appointments, calls and reminders.
Use Activity series to automate common tasks.
Use established Sales processes and stages so you don’t miss any steps.
Use calendar alarms so you don’t miss that important meeting.
Whenever you use a tool to automate and perform actions for you, it gives you back valuable time. It’s like having an extra set of hands. Technology can’t solve all your time management issues, but it sure can help.
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