Ever feel like your magazine Deadline Day tends to swallow up your sales productivity? Often even before and after your deadline day, you're exhausted and distracted from all the stress!
Although urgent, Deadline Days are far from your most important task of growing your magazine. And over the course of a year, those pesky Deadline Days can eat up 2-1/2 weeks and more of your calendar.
In this episode, Charlie McDermott shares numerous ways successful publishers are extracting themselves from their Deadline Day process. Now, you too can reduce your numerous Deadline tasks down to one, and spend just a few minutes instead of hours to days!
Ever feel like your magazine Deadline Day tends to swallow up your sales productivity? Often even before and after your deadline day, you're exhausted and distracted from all the stress!
Although urgent, Deadline Days are far from your most important task of growing your magazine. And over the course of a year, those pesky Deadline Days can eat up 2-1/2 weeks and more of your calendar.
In this episode, Charlie McDermott shares numerous ways successful publishers are extracting themselves from their Deadline Day process. Now, you too can reduce your numerous Deadline tasks down to one, and spend just a few minutes instead of hours to days!
This is not your typical episode of the no Call Calls ever show, because, well, let's face it, there's a lot more to grow in your magazine and building your worth as a publisher than, yeah, not making cold calls. Notice how I weaved in cold calls, and this show goes way beyond not making cold calls. Yeah, yeah, I know, there I go again. Anyway, one of those items is what I call Deadline Days, the A-Z-E Think walking dead. You're walking, functioning like a publisher, but there's something off. You've got this dazed. Look. And until you get through it, as in those Deadline Days, your productivity, known as revenue-generating activity, comes to a screeching halt. The best publishers have minimized these days, even to the point of completely getting themselves out of the Deadline Days process, and in this episode I'll demonstrate how you can minimize and possibly even eliminate the distraction of Deadline Days. Hello.
Speaker 2:
Hi, it's the no Call Calls. Ever show Go away.
Speaker 1:
Oh, those Deadline Days Now, yeah, I call them days D-A-Z-E because of all the effort and stress that goes into getting your magazine ready for the Deadline Day. That can not only cause you to have that walking dead look, but take you days D-A-Y-S to recover. And I've heard of some publishers losing up to a week of sales productivity because of their magazine Deadline Responsibilities. Now, certainly that's the extreme, but think about this Even if it's one day a month that you have that Deadline Day distraction where your focus is not on growing your magazine, that's two and a half weeks of lost sales productivity over the course of a year. Now, what if your Deadline Day wasn't Deadline Days, or Dreadline Week for that matter? What if your Deadline Day required just a few minutes of your time so you could do a quick review and then, bam, hit the submission button. That's it. I'll prove the ads Done. There'll be no more dreading deadline day. Deadline day becomes just another day Now. There's no more deadline day late nights either, ugh. And no more last minute frantic calls, texts or emails from your sponsors who still haven't submitted their ad.
Speaker 1:
I can remember those exhausting deadline days in my early publishing career. Way too often I felt like Bill Murray in Groundhog's Day every month it would be about 4.55 PM. I'm waiting, waiting, waiting for that final ad update to come through hitting the refresh email button through the 15th time over the last 10 minutes. The anxiety and stress. It would just completely drain me and before I knew it it would be 8, 9, 10 o'clock or later at night and I'm still dealing with deadline day tasks. In addition, there were other distractions during the month that, even though they didn't happen during my deadline day, they were still a time and energy suck during the weeks leading up to the deadline day. Things like sending out ad change reminders or getting business profiles and expert article submissions and getting the real estate statistics in on time, just to name a few. Finally, I said enough and I pulled myself out of this high priority, but think about it low impact work. I recognize that this work did nothing to move my publishing business forward and worse, it could actually keep me from growing my company, because the more my magazines grew, the more time I would need to devote to this non-revenue generating activity going forward, which, by default, would mean less and less time might have to devote to growing my magazines. Now it's easy to say just hire an assistant. Right, and I could easily justify this move to any publisher, assuming they have the budget and or can find a few dollars available to invest in an assistant.
Speaker 1:
The wonderful thing here is hiring an assistant is an investment in your business that gets paid off in your first sale and by pulling yourself out of the deadline day madness, you instantly add 12 or more sales days to your schedule over the course of the year. The biggest one, however, will be you'll just have more fun right. You're doing the stuff you enjoyed, and freeing yourself up from this administrative work is liberating and something few publishers realize. It elevates your stature. You feel better, you have more confidence. Think about it. How many of your clients and quality prospects spend that kind of time doing administrative work? The successful ones, they're certainly not. They're not spending a day or, for that matter, hours, doing admin work. They have employees and assistants so they can focus on revenue generating activity, so they can grow their companies.
Speaker 1:
Okay, so how do you find an assistant? Well, the best place to start is always with your existing team. Talk to your content coordinator. He or she is probably already familiar with pieces of your deadline process and they have access to the back office, so the learning curve is greatly reduced and you may find that your content coordinator is better at this task than you are, and you can get it done in less time. You could pay your content coordinator just a few hundred dollars extra a month to cover for the additional time needed to take on your deadline day responsibilities. Okay, you found your assistant. Now comes the time to train them.
Speaker 1:
Now, this step keeps so many publishers trapped in deadline day purgatory. They convince themselves that training an assistant to do everything takes more time than doing it all themselves. They get stuck on the what ifs what if they make a mistake, what if they forget to do something? Or what if they leave? And then I have to go through this process all over again with someone else. Okay, valid questions, but easily answered, as I'll get to in a moment. Now, training your assistant could take hours going through the intricacies of your deadline day process, and you'd probably need to go through it again next month and the month after with your assistant, because, hey, let's face it, there's a lot to remember, especially since 30 days pass between deadline days. But here's the trick. I've used this for years in training my team and it will save you countless hours and eliminate any frustration on your assistant, not remembering what to do or worrying about mistakes being made, and even ensuring that you'll never need to personally train a new assistant if your current one ever leaves.
Speaker 1:
How Video? You record your whole process on video. Now, one big benefit besides the obvious is if you were to train your assistant yourself without the use of video, should questions about the process come up which you know they will your assistant will be hesitant to ask because you've already explained it. They don't want to bother you, so they fret over asking. They'll waste time trying to figure it out on their own and sometimes yeah they'll do it incorrectly. But if they have a video that walks them through the process step by step, they can watch it as often as they need to and should they move on from your company, you can quickly get your next new assistant up to speed without you needing to go through the training process all over again.
Speaker 1:
Now, the tool I use for these trainings is called Loom. You can find it at loomcom that's L-O-O-M dot com and the cool part is you can get a free account which will allow you to record up to 25 videos. Now that's way more than you'll need to create your deadline day training program. And what's nice, you can easily edit your videos inside loom, so if you mess up, you don't need to start all over again Now. Personally, I use loom for all kinds of things training, explaining tasks to my staff and communicating to clients. It's so much faster than typing out an email and you can share your screen, which allows you to provide so much more detail and depth to your communications, and it saves you from attaching a bunch of images to your email. So here's how to train your new assistant without spending any time or money doing it. Number one yeah, open up a free loom account. And two, when your next deadline day occurs, go through your normal process while you record a loom video explaining the process. Training done Now, I recommend breaking up your process into steps.
Speaker 1:
Create a few shorter videos rather than one lengthy video. So, for example, shoot for a series of two to five minute videos instead of one 30 minute video. It will save your assistant time and finding the right information, and it won't be as overwhelming for them to take it all in. Then, when you're ready to add your new assistant hopefully next month all you need to do is send him or her an email with the link to your loom video deadline process training, training, done right, all right, we've greatly simplified your ad deadline process. What about the other deadline day's tasks? Well, the answer automation. Look at every deadline day related email, text, phone call received by or sent by you or your team and ask yourself how can we automate these so we provide better service and significantly reduce the time and distraction caused by the current manual process. So here are a few examples that we use in our my publisher CRM to downsize deadline days to deadline minutes.
Speaker 1:
One we use a communication center. Think about it. We've all been there searching for the email from that sponsor, from God knows when, right, and maybe it was a series of emails. Well, those days are gone. Searching for an email, replying to a text or even listening to a voicemail may seem like small potatoes, but the distraction can eat up a lot of your time. So we use a central hub for all communication. This way, nothing gets lost and you or your assistant can quickly respond without logging into an email counter, even picking up the phone to listen to voicemail or or to return the call. It's all done within one page inside the CRM and everything is there voicemails, text messages, notes, even direct messages from Facebook from that person and more. And all the communication history, even if it was from years ago, is all right there. There's no need to waste time searching your email, looking for an ancient text stream on your phone that you're praying you didn't delete right. Every single communication and your replies to those communications are right there and always will be All right.
Speaker 1:
Let's move on to business profiles. Man, what an awesome benefit for your sponsors. It's better than having a full page ad in your magazine. But why doesn't everyone take advantage of it? I mean, that was a question I always asked when I was a publisher, and I think one of the main reasons is that they just forget, and we either forget to remind them or, yeah, after a few reminders we kind of give up. Right, we don't nag them. Well, we've automated the full process, so not only reminding sponsors, but educating them on the value of being featured via a business profile in your magazine. And this sequence of reminders continues for up to a year. And we've simplified the whole process. Now your sponsors can quickly complete the profile questionnaire on their computer or even their cell phone via a custom business profile form, everybody. Once the form is submitted, your content coordinator immediately gets all the answers he or she needs to write the article, along with any photos, company logo and all that other stuff that they include in the article. Now, as a publisher, all this happens in the background, with zero time or involvement on your part. Think about it Now you get more business profiles and you see an increase in client retention because your sponsors, they're just going to get better results from their campaigns, having been featured in your magazine.
Speaker 1:
All right, what about ad update reminders? So two schools of thought here. Number one let's let sleeping dogs lie, reminding your sponsors to update their admins. More work for you. And for sponsors who aren't happy, they could encourage a cancellation request.
Speaker 1:
I've never really understood this way of thinking. I mean, if I have an unhappy client, I want to know as soon as possible, and if you wait too long, by the time they make that inevitable call to you, it may be too late, but even more so aren't we in the service business and helping your clients get the best results? Okay, yeah, maybe it requires an ad update. That doesn't mean an ad update every month or even every quarter, but why not offer it and avoid the awkward email or phone call that arrives the day after your deadline when your sponsor needs to make a timely update to their ad and oh, it's too late, all right, how about the other view, the high service view? Automate your ad reminders so your sponsors get notified 10 to 14 days before your deadline, and I'd recommend giving your sponsors a deadline date that's about five days before your actual deadline. So if your deadline, for example, is the fifth of the month, tell your sponsors it's the first. Now you get everything in early, with plenty of time to address any 11th hour emergencies. I also recommend sending your sponsors via a link in your email or text message to your submission form. This way, the moment your sponsor submits an ad update, the details can go straight to your assistant, who can submit the ad for design.
Speaker 1:
So here's the form we use in my publisher CRM. Using a form eliminates the possibility of missing an email. Think about it if your sponsor were to send their ad update request via an email and it ends up in your spam or just simply gets missed. You're kind of up a creek, right? So when the form is submitted, whomever is responsible for submitting the ad update on your team gets notified right away. They can even receive a text message letting them know the ad update form was submitted.
Speaker 1:
So nothing gets lost and stuff gets done right away. And again, like the business profile. As a publisher, you spend zero time involved in ad update reminders. Okay, how about real estate statistics? Well, they're handled the same way. Reminders go out every month reminding your real estate sponsor to submit their stats. They click the link in the email or text reminder that takes them to the submission form. Yes, your content coordinator gets the update the moment the form is submitted. Nothing gets lost, no emails to search for. All right, if you're keeping score here so far, all these deadline day tasks that were consuming hours of your time a month now take minutes and many of these tasks take no time at all because all the automation is in place and I'll bet a few of these tasks aren't even getting done. I mean, that was me. Everything as simple as sending out an ad reminder email didn't happen many months because I either forgot or I had other pressing matters and just ran out of time. Before I knew it, it was the end of the month and the emails never went out.
Speaker 1:
Let's take a look at one more deadline day process that's worth automating the feature resident process, and just like the business profile and the ad updates and the other tasks that we've automated in my publisher CRM, we've done the same thing for the feature resident. We've simplified this process so you get more and quicker responses from your nominated feature residents. They also have access to a form with all the questions and once they send it in you guessed it it goes straight out to your content coordinator. Another wrinkle I'd recommend that we do inside the system is what we call a resident nomination submission form. Now, this is an easy way to get more feature family resident stories. Your content coordinator, photographer and the feature resident can use it to nominate another resident. You could even use the link to this form on your magazine Facebook page, for example, to get more local residents to nominate their neighbors. Another nice feature within this campaign, we have an automated sequence that reaches out to past feature article residents and invites them to nominate fellow residents for your magazine feature story. This way, you and your content coordinator are never scrambling to find the next resident to appear on the cover of your magazine. The system helps you build a waiting list of residents requesting to be featured in your magazine and, once again, publisher time spent managing this process zero, all right. So you get the idea. Now you see how your whole deadline days process can be reduced to mere minutes and at the same time, provide your sponsors better and more timely service, translation, better retention Think about it.
Speaker 1:
What's the long term impact on increased retention?
Speaker 1:
Heck, saving just one client a year is worth thousands of dollars, and that adds a fast.
Speaker 1:
You create more time that you can spend growing your magazine and by reducing the amount of time your team needs to spend on chasing feature, families and business profiles and real estate stats and all the other tasks means you can afford to pay them more and never lose a quality team member over pay or too much stress from the job. You have more fun and you can't overestimate the energy and mood drain when you're in involved in work that doesn't move the needle forward. You deserve to be doing work that you're passionate about, work that makes a difference in your community and that's helping local businesses grow. You can't do that when you're bogged down, stressed out and impacted by deadline days. So remove the days from your deadline. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Go ahead and leave your questions or comments or both, and I'll cover those in future episodes. And if you like this show, please remember to like it and leave a review so we can help more publishers find us and create their magazine empire. See you next time.
Speaker 2:
Say goodbye to cold calling, chasing leads and waking up on Monday with a blank calendar for the week. Now you can join publishers throughout the US who have plugged into a systematic path to sales growth without adding more work or overhead. If you're ready to have more fun while you scale your business and income, go to no-coldcalls-evercom.
