Stop trying to reinvent the wheel
Why that is preventing you from scaling
All of us have experienced those first days on the job, as we try to figure out what’s going on, find information, rummage through disorganised files and folders, and contact people spread through the organisation to collect knowledge.
Without much luck (and a lot of stress), we give up and try to reinvent the wheel, once again.
This means that we continue to make the same mistakes, waste time searching for specialised information or expertise, and incur productivity costs and opportunity costs for the organisation.
Let me illustrate how companies suffer from employees with a specific use case. It’s based upon countless conversations and experiences I have personally had with both big and small companies over the last 4 years.
Meet Nicolas 👋
Nicolas just joined Company X as a new Sales Rep. He’s super excited to start on Monday!
During his first days on the job he goes through the generic employee on boarding process of Company X:
- Get your badge
- Fill out paper work
- Setup your computer and accounts
- Meet the office dog
- Say hi to your co-workers
- and some other generic stuff
Nicolas ticks of all the boxes and had the chance to cuddle with Jacky the office dog. He’s all set!
📅 Day 4 in his first week:
Nicolas arrives at work, opens up his inbox and has a new email from Cedric, his sales manager.
His sales manager seems super busy, and Nicolas is scared of him. He accepts politely and gets to work.
However, can he get to work?
Nicolas kind of knows how to write a cold sales email, but is quite unsure about to specifics. He is totally unaware of the best practices of the company:
- Do they type long or short emails?
- What is the tone of voice?
- Do they include attachments, like a sales deck?
- Do they talk about the product?
- Do they use funny images?
Luckily Nicolas isn’t the only person on the sales team 👨👨
HR appointed Alex as a buddy to Nicolas. He’ll answer Nicolas questions at all times during the first few months.
Except for today.
Alex is very busy. He’s selling - $$$.
Alex briefly mentions a word document on the company dropbox that has an example cold email in it.
😥 Nicolas is stressing out.
He opens dropbox and hopes to find that example mail.
The folders and files aren’t organised, and a lot of files seem out of date.
BINGO! There’s a sales folder with some documents.
Let’s open coldemailtemplateV2revisionCDF4.docx.
Hmm.
It’s 2 years old and still features our previous product. The author of the document has already left the company.
Crap.
The deadline is tomorrow. He asked his buddy for help, plowed through dropbox and ended up with nothing.
Guess he’ll need to wing it with his basic email writing skills.
Oh wait, there’s a thing called Google.
Let’s fire up the search engine! 🔎
This should be easy right?
Just type in: HOW TO WRITE A SALES COLD EMAIL.
and press enter.
Well here we go, a sh*tload of information.
Ok what to chose?
Let’s read, watch and listen.
🕒 3 hours later.
WOW I’M AN EMAIL EXPERT!
He might feel like a cold email expert, but he hasn’t written the damn email.
Time to send the email proposal to his manager.
Fingers crossed!
Wait a minute.
This happens when companies fail at scaling their knowledge.
Imagine having the same experience during your first week. Or every week. Frustrating right?
Why does this happen?
Companies have trouble scaling their knowledge:
- It gets stuck in the heads of your people. It is often not shared and needs to be repeated.
- It’s scattered and stored in different ways and in different forms.
- It gets lost. When people leave your business they take knowledge with them.
- It gets isolated in training and disconnected from the job in hand.
Did you know?
Fortune 500 still lose a combined $31.5 billion per year from employees failing to share knowledge effectively. By trying to recreate the wheel, repeating others’ mistakes, or wasting time searching for specialized information or expertise, employees incur productivity costs and opportunity costs for the organization.
Hivemind puts your knowledge to work.
After 4 years trying to reinvent the wheel we decided to try and solve that problem by building a new software product called Hivemind.
Let’s say 👋 to Nicolas again.
Nicolas just joined Company Y.
Company Y uses Hivemind and captured their company’s best practices into actionable how to manuals.
Day 4 in his first week:
Nicolas opens his mailbox (or slack) and has been assigned a goal with a clear path. His manager asked him to write a cold email by the end of the week.
He accepts the goal invitation and gets to work.
How does he get to work?
He gets access to a living manual (in a nice web interface, or in a conversational interface like Slack) that he can play and pause whenever he wants. Whenever he hits play, the manual fires each step for him to complete.
Nicolas is fired up!
He has a clear path to reach his goal, and he’s manager is one click away from support.
🎯 Nicolas reached the result 🎯
Each goal leads to a (measurable) result. In Nicolas’ case it is the conversion rate of his cold emails.
His manager approves the result. Nicolas crushed it!
One more thing
Nicolas needs to improve the manual, he found some new interesting things.
Let’s scale your knowledge.
Hivemind helps teams be more productive by connecting existing and new best practices with their goals.
