How can building product manufacturers increase their efficiency and open more doors for specification? Essentialism is the belief and workflow that “less is better”. An essentialist work flow may offer manufacturers several benefits which we will review.

Important Versus Trivial

How can managers, product reps, admin, and other professionals discern what is essential and what is trivial in their daily routines? According to author Greg McKeown in his book Essentialism, essentialists explore many options, eliminate the trivial, and go big on the most important activities and goals. Manufacturers who are essentialists weed through the noise to find the signal.  

McKeown lays out how professionals can choose the most important tasks and eliminate the rest. He recommends to saying “yes” to 10% of opportunities and projects and ditch the rest. This might not work very well if you’re the forklift operator in the warehouse and tell the boss that you’re not doing 90% of the tasks assigned to you! Therefore, these strategies are targeting management and sales and marketing folks.

What if the top product rep in your company could focus 80-90% of their time on product specification? Are there activities, trivial tasks, mundane chores, etc. that could be eliminated so your star product rep could focus on architect visits/AIA webinars, outreach to specifiers, and the occasional high-profile tradeshow?

Once Decision That Makes A Thousand

Essentialists use “clarity” as one of the driving strategies for workflow. Eliminating office politics helps team members focus their energies and resources. Office politics can waste precious time, distract sales and marketing from their goals, and result in lower morale.

Employees need a leader and they need a direction to go. When product reps are involved in too many activities, they can fail to achieve their product specification goals. Essentialists make one decision that helps eliminate a thousand. Effective product reps make trade-offs to achieve their goals and get their products specified.

How do you motivate your team? What strategies do you use to help your product reps be effective team players?