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•104 The 100 Greatest Business Ideas of All Time

Here comes the twist

When you come back to the office from holidays and find 1149 e-mails in your
in-tray, don’t just rave and delete them all knowing that the important ones
will be followed up. Think through how you and your company are using e-
mail and how it could be improved.

Idea 61 – Just give me the highlights

It is fashionable to describe current business people as ‘living in the information age.’
And there is no doubt that more information, or maybe I should say data, is available
now than ever before. There’s probably a number of fortunes to be made out of sorting
all the Internet data into useable chunks, because the current search engines tend to
leave surfers wading through the treacle of data trying to find the one fact they want.

Once you have it, either on the screen or in hard copy, the highlighter pen
comes into its own, and it is my last nomination for greatest little office helpers.
Everybody must have their quirks about where highlighters can most help them, so
here is mine.

In the training and coaching of salespeople, role play has an important role to
play. Managers or trainers should regularly exercise their salespeople by adopting
the role of a customer whom the salesperson is shortly to meet. Salespeople don’t
much like it. They complain that they are much better with real customers than with
role players. (Probably not true. The real difference is that most customers are too
polite to tell a salesperson what they thought of a sales call at the end of it.)

To guard against the criticism that the role play is not like real life, the manager
should have at his or her fingertips all the information a customer is likely to have. In
fact their own briefing for the role must be extensive. So they lay out all the data on
the desk in front with, of course, the key passages highlighted. Works every time.