The mailing to the client list for the opening of the clinic’s new location should have gone out yesterday, but no one had got round to it. At our team’s first meeting with an aesthetic medicine clinic, we learnt that the business has been operating for a long time, more than half its clients are regulars, and the sales team has two salespeople and a senior salesperson. The business owner runs sales personally.
The work has already been divided up: reception staff handle regular clients and repeat bookings, while the sales team handles new clients and brings back past clients from the database. The owner’s main concern is that the team will overlook this work and fail to collect the information.
The task is clear. The people are there. But getting it started once again requires a free hour from the person who assigned it. It is easy to start talking about forgetful salespeople here. It is too early to blame them: the owner is still in charge, and it is the owner who has not got round to this work. The owner’s time is what is holding up the launch.
Bringing clients back has no reminder of its own
I believe that in this situation it is risky to judge the team only by whether it handles current enquiries. There is a person on the other side of each enquiry. The client has come to you, wants to book an appointment and is waiting for an answer. Bringing back clients from the old database comes with no such reminder: someone the company has not contacted for a long time is under no obligation to call and demand that the company remember them.
That is why these tasks end up differently. An enquiry needs a response now. You have to start and continue work with the database yourself, even when no one outside the company is hurrying you. If the owner is responsible for starting it, it competes with everything else they have to do in the business. Saying “we’ll get to it when we’re free” puts it last from the outset.
The proportion of regular clients makes this distinction especially important. More than half is a substantial share of the clinic’s work. But serving people who keep coming back and bringing back those who have stopped require different kinds of initiative. The second does not follow from the first. In this case, the owner does distinguish between these tasks and assigns them to the right departments. The gap comes next: who makes sure, every day, that the delayed work gets started?
Look at your most recent unfinished task: who was supposed to be the first to notice that it had stalled? If it was you, your salespeople still need your reminder. Even if the assignment already names the person responsible and the deadline.
A new mailing service will provide a way to send a message. A detailed description of responsibilities will explain who should work with the database. Both tools are useful, but neither will choose what to sacrifice today to get the work started. That decision will still be made by the person running the team.
An assignment must take time away from other work
All we know in this case is what happened at the first meeting. What follows is my suggestion for how an owner can solve this problem in their own business, without inventing what happened next at the clinic.
Start by making a choice: do you really need to bring past clients back in time for the opening, or are you deliberately postponing it? If you need it, it gets a place in the sales team’s working day. If people do not have enough time, you have to reduce other work, narrow the scope of the first launch or move the deadline. Adding a requirement while keeping the same workload means asking the person in charge to guess which of your tasks they are allowed to leave undone.
For the launch period, put one person in charge of this work. The title “senior” alone does not mean this person will take it on: you need to give them authority to allocate salespeople’s time within agreed limits and insist that the work gets done. You will need to assess how they do this work. If all of this stays with you, set aside time for it in your own schedule — you cannot consider the launch handed over.
Here is an assignment you can give the person in charge. These are suggested preparation deadlines, not facts about the clinic or a promise to launch any mailing in two days.
By the end of the second working day, prepare to start work with the old client database. Show me who we plan to write to and what we will offer them, who is preparing the mailing, who will handle replies and what will be recorded after an enquiry. Give me the date of the first launch and the staff time set aside for it. Specify which current work will need to be reduced or postponed. If the launch depends on a decision from me, bring me a specific choice before this deadline. Once agreed, follow through every day to make sure tasks are completed; moving the date without approval is not allowed.
The owner needs to approve the offer to clients, how much of the team’s time can be taken away from other work, and the deadline. The person in charge needs to organise the work within those limits. Preparing everything and then waiting each day for permission to start means keeping the same dependency under a new name.
What to accept instead of a promise to get to it
When reviewing the preparations, three answers are useful. They let you make a decision without going through every entry in the database.
| What the person in charge presents | What it means | The owner’s decision |
|---|---|---|
| A date, people responsible, time set aside, and work that needs to be postponed | What the launch requires is clear before it starts | Agree the scope and let the person in charge allocate that time |
| A date and people responsible, but all existing tasks remain | The competition for time has not been resolved | Require a choice: reduce the scope of the first launch or reduce other work |
| A specific condition that must be met before work can start | A decision is needed beyond the authority of the person in charge | Make that decision or explicitly postpone the launch and set a new date |
Once the work has started, the owner needs a brief report from the person in charge: when the mailing went out, how much work was taken on, how many replies came in and how many were left unanswered. Preparing this report should also be assigned to the person in charge. It shows two things at once: whether the launch happened and whether the team is coping with the work it started. A successful mailing followed by unanswered enquiries brings back the owner’s original fear — information has been overlooked again.
Every postponement must also be visible separately: what got in the way, what action the person in charge chose and whether a decision from the owner is needed. With this approach, the owner no longer has to happen to remember the mailing to find out what became of it. Silence no longer means that everything is on track.
At RENTROP, turnkey sales management also includes this daily work with the client database: keeping it going should not depend on reminders from the owner. During a free sales review, we can look at your delayed task and identify which decision or whose working time is still keeping it on hold.
The clinic’s mailing was meant to go out yesterday. To stop the same thing happening again tomorrow, the work needs time set aside in the sales team before the owner finds a free hour.