Top Healthy Travel Tips for Road Warrior Success
OK, yesterday in our top subjects for road warrior success, we mentioned taking care of Clients/Customers so we want to finish up today. The best way we know to take care of Clients/Customers is that you need to take care of your self first.
If you are stressed, chances are your client(s) will be stressed. So here are 3 simple but key things that help make our projects a success, will contribute to keeping you healthy (minimize stress) and will certainly keep clients very happy because these items help us out in the crucial times:
Contacts Sheet(s)
Even if you have joined a project at the last minute and had to make travel arrangements while racing to the airport, spend a few moments in your company’s marketing applications and get the key individuals’ phone #, positions and email addresses associated with this project and by all means, understand who the project’s sponsor is. You might have to call an administrative resource if marketing applications are not available but get it done! And continue to collect this information throughout the project because players will change.
At the beginning of every project, we always set up a contact spreadsheet with appropriate contact info (also make sure you also have cell #s or after hours #s) that somehow I end up keeping up-to-date. Send this list out to project team members on a regular basis – it has saved us many a time so we keep doing it.
And the most crucial thing is not to just have this Contacts Sheet in a notebook or folder somewhere, but to make sure you input these names, phone #’s and email addresses, etc. into your cell or PDA tool. It takes some time but in an emergency, you will be glad you have this information available in multiple places. Save yourself some stress and grief and keep track of everyone.
Project Documents
There is almost always a trail of documents that leads up to the actual “Go” for a project and if you are lucky to receive a copy of those documents at the beginning of a project, you can begin to understand some of the history of why this project is taking place and possibly the deliverables required for success.
If your company doesn’t have a central repository for such documents, obtain them from the key sales and marketing resources and read them all before meeting the client face-to-face. Even if you cannot locate these crucial documents, hopefully your project upline will fill you in on how the project came about and what the real objectives are. You don’t want to meet the client for the first time and not understand their needs. This is a major stressor!
Gatekeepers
Having been a gatekeeper early in my career, I can absolutely say, these are the folks who really run the company on many levels. They know the politics, they know where all the resources (and bodies) are, they know the schedules, the underground leaders and instigators, they know the roadblocks and so on. Keep yourself as stress-free as possible and figure out who these key resources are on day One or as early on as possible because they will save you when you least expect it.
Summary
In summary, these items will help you organize and minimize the mundane details that can really cause stress during a project. You are going to be much healthier if you are not stressed. This list (contacts, project documents and gatekeepers) is not everything we need to keep ourselves as stress-free as possible and our Clients/Customers happy, just the initial ones.
So, our next subject, air travel of which I am going to do more of today, will be focused on what we need to do to help you through air travel disasters and keep our Clients/Customers happy in that arena as well.
Let us know what you think.
Thanks,
Mel
