Powerful discipline of clear articulation of the problem

Edit from an article from SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 
sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-most-underrated-skill-in-management/

There are few management skills more powerful than the discipline of clearly articulating the problem you seek to solve before jumping into action.

Academic research suggests that the ability to incorporate new ideas and technologies into existing ways of doing things plays a big role in separating leaders from the rest of the pack, It is easier to manage a sequence of bite-sized changes than one huge reorganization or change initiative but - while many strive for continuous change and learning - few actually achieve those goals on a regular basis.

In the late 1990s, one of the authors, Don Kieffer, was ready to launch a big change initiative: implementing the Toyota production system in one of Harley-Davidson Inc.’s engine plants and hired a seasoned consultant:  Hajime Oba,  But in Don’s office, when he started asking questions: When do we start? What kind of results should I expect? How much is it going to cost me? But, Mr. Oba wouldn’t answer those questions. Instead he responded repeatedly with one of his own: “Mr. Kieffer, what problem are you trying to solve?” 

Don was perplexed. He was ready to spend money and he had one of the world’s experts on the Toyota production system in his office, but the expert (Mr. Oba) wouldn’t tell Don how to get started. To Don, it seemed like a word game. Eventually the consultant walked out of Don’s office. It was later realized that Mr. Oba was trying to teach one of the foundational skills in leading effective change: formulating a clear problem statement. 

We have now come to believe that problem formulation is the single most underrated skill in all of management practice. There are few questions in business more powerful than “What problem are you trying to solve?” 

As valuable as good problem formulation can be, it is rarely practiced because (cognitive scientists) suggest that “jumping to conclusions” can be effective, particularly when done by experts facing extreme time pressure, like fighting a fire or performing emergency surgery. But, when making change, neglecting to formulate a clear problem statement often prevents innovation and leads to wasted time and money. In this article, we hope to both improve your problem formulation skills

How Our Minds Solve Problems

Human brain has at least two different methods for tackling problems and which method dominates is situational : automatic processing and conscious processing. They are fundamentally different and happen at different speeds.

Conscious Processing : happens in the part of the brain that you control and you are aware that you are using conscious processing. It is the only process in the brain capable of forming a mental picture of a situation at hand and then playing out different possible scenarios, even if those scenarios have never happened before. With this ability, humans can innovate and learn in ways not available to other species. But, despite its power, conscious processing is “expensive” in at least three senses (1) it is slow (2) our capacity to do this is quite because there is no "background processing" (3) it burns scarce energy and declines when people are tired, hungry, or distracted. Because of these costs, the human brain system has evolved to “save” conscious processing for when it is really needed and, when possible, relies on the “cheaper” automatic processing mode.

Automatic Processing : works differently as we don’t have control over it or even feel it happening. Instead, we are only aware of the results, such as a thought that simply pops into your head or a physical response like hitting the brake when the car in front of you stops suddenly. You cannot directly instruct your automatic processing functions to do something; instead, they constitute a kind of “back office” for your brain. When a piece of long-sought-after information just pops into your head, hours or days after it was needed, you are experiencing the workings of your automatic processing functions.

When we tackle a problem consciously, we proceed logically, trying to construct a consistent path from the problem to the solution. In contrast, the automatic system works based on what is known as association or pattern matching. When confronted with a problem, the automatic processor tries to match that current challenge to a previous situation and then uses that past experience as a guide for how to act. Every time we instinctively react to a stop sign or wait for people to exit an elevator before entering, we rely on automatic processing’s pattern matching to determine our choice of action.

The automatic processing functions are the only parts of the brain capable of processing information quickly enough to return a serve in tennis or hit a baseball. Psychologist Gary Klein has documented how experienced professionals who work under intense time pressure, like surgeons and firefighters, use their past experience to make split-second decisions. Successful people in these environments rely on deep experience to almost immediately link the current situation to the appropriate action.

However, because it relies on patterns identified from experience, automatic processing can bias us toward the status quo and away from innovative solutions.  It should come as little surprise that breakthrough ideas and technologies sometimes come from relative newcomers who weren’t experienced enough to “know better.” Research suggests that innovations often result from combining previously disparate perspectives and experiences.  Furthermore, the propensity to rely on previous experiences can lead to major industrial accidents like Three Mile Island if a novel situation is misread as an established pattern and therefore receives the wrong intervention.

That said, unconscious processing can also play a critical and positive role in innovation. As we have all experienced, sometimes when confronting a hard problem, you need to step away from it for a while and think about something else. There is some evidence for the existence of such “incubation” effects. Unconscious mental processes may be better able to combine divergent ideas to create new innovations. But it also appears that such innovations can’t happen without the assistance of the conscious machinery. Prior to the “aha” moment, conscious effort is required to direct attention to the problem at hand and to immerse oneself in relevant data. After the flash of insight, conscious attention is again needed to evaluate the resulting combinations.

The Discipline of Problem Formulation

When the brain’s associative machine is confronted with a problem, it jumps to a solution based on experience. To complement that fast thinking with a more deliberate approach, structured problem-solving entails developing a logical argument that links the observed data to root causes and, eventually, to a solution. Developing this logical path increases the chance that you will leverage the strengths of conscious processing and may also create the conditions for generating and then evaluating an unconscious breakthrough. Creating an effective logical chain starts with a clear description of the problem and, in our experience, this is where most efforts fall short.

A good problem statement has five basic elements:

1. It references something the organization cares about and connects that element to a clear and specific goal;
2. it contains a clear articulation of the gap between the current state and the goal;
3. the key variables — the target, the current state, and the gap — are quantifiable;
4. it is as neutral as possible concerning possible diagnoses or solutions; and
5. it is sufficiently small in scope that you can tackle it quickly.

Is your problem important? The first rule of structured problem-solving is to focus its considerable power on issues that really matter. You should be able to draw a direct path from the problem statement to your organization’s overall mission and targets. The late MIT Sloan School professor Jay Forrester once wrote that “very often the most important problems are but little more difficult to handle than the unimportant.” If you fall into the trap of initially focusing your attention on peripheral issues for “practice,” chances are you will never get around to the work you really need to do.

Decades of research suggest that people work harder and are more focused when they face clear, easy-to-understand goals. More recently, psychologists have shown that mentally comparing a desired state with the current one, a process known as mental contrasting, is more likely to lead people to change than focusing only on the future or on current challenges.  Recent work also suggests that people draw considerable motivation from the feeling of progress, the sense that their efforts are moving them toward the goal in question. A good problem statement accordingly contains a clear articulation of the gap that you are trying to close.

Quantify even if you can’t measure.  

Being able to measure the gap between the current state and your target precisely will support an effective project. However, structured problem-solving can be successfully applied to settings that do not yield immediate and precise measurements, because many attributes can be subjectively quantified even if they cannot be objectively measured. Quantification of an attribute simply means that it has a clear direction — more of that attribute is better or worse — and that you can differentiate situations in which that attribute is low or high. For example, many organizations struggle with so-called “soft” variables like customer satisfaction and employee trust. Though these can be hard to measure, they can be quantified; in both cases, we know that more is better. Moreover, once you start digging into an issue, you often discover ways to measure things that weren’t obvious at the outset. For example, a recent project by a student in our executive MBA program tackled an unproductive weekly staff meeting. The student began his project by creating a simple web-based survey to capture the staff’s perceptions of the meeting, thus quickly generating quantitative data.

Remain as neutral as possible. A good problem formulation presupposes as little as practically possible concerning why the problem exists or what might be the appropriate solution. That said, few problem statements are perfectly neutral. If you say that your “sales revenue is 22% behind its target,” that formulation presupposes that problem is important to your organization. The trick is to formulate statements that are actionable and for which you can draw a clear path to the organization’s overarching goals.

Is your scope down? 

Finally, a good problem statement is “scoped down” to a specific manifestation of the larger issue that you care about. Our brains like to match new patterns, but we can only do so effectively when there is a short time delay between taking an action and experiencing the outcome. Well-structured problem-solving capitalizes on the natural desire for rapid feedback by breaking big problems into little ones that can be tackled quickly. You will learn more and make faster progress if you do 12 one-month projects instead of one 12-month project.

To appropriately scope projects, we often use the “scope-down tree,” a tool we learned from our colleague John Carrier, who is a senior lecturer of system dynamics at MIT. The scope-down tree allows the user to plot a clear path between a big problem and a specific manifestation that can be tackled quickly.

Narrowing a Problem’s Scope

For example, the overall problem of excessive equipment downtime at a company’s plants is broken down first into two types of equipment (rotating and nonrotating), and then further into different subcategories of equipment, ultimately focused on a specific type of pump in one plant. The benefit of reducing the problem’s scope is that instead of a big two-year maintenance initiative, a team can do a 60-day project to improve the performance of the selected pumps and generate quick results and real learning. Then they can move on to the next type of pump, and hopefully, the second project will go more quickly. Following that, they move to the third type of pump, and so on.

People generate great results when they have the discipline to scope down their projects to an area where they can, say, make a 30% improvement in 60 days. The short time horizon focuses them on a set of concrete interventions that they can execute quickly. This kind of “small wins” strategy has been discussed by a variety of organizational scholars, but it remains rarely practiced.

Four Common Mistakes

we have observed four common failure modes. Avoiding these mistakes is critical to formulating effective problem statements and focusing your attention on the issues that really matter to you and your organization.

1. Failing to Formulate the Problem : The most common mistake is skipping problem formulation altogether. People often assume that they all already agree on the problem and should just get busy solving it. Unfortunately, such clarity and commonality rarely exist.
2. Stating the Problem as a Diagnosis or a Solution  : Another frequent mistake is formulating a problem statement that presupposes either the diagnosis or the solution. A problem statement that presumes the diagnosis will often sound like “The problem is we lack the right IT capabilities,” and one that presumes a solution will sound like “The problem is that we haven’t spent the money to upgrade our IT system.” Neither is an effective problem statement because neither references goals or targets that the organization really cares about. The overall target is implicit, and the person formulating the statement has jumped straight to either a diagnosis or a solution. Allowing diagnoses or proposed solutions to creep into problem statements means that you have skipped one or more steps in the logical chain and therefore missed an opportunity to engage in conscious cognitive processing. In our experience, this mistake tends to reinforce existing disputes and often worsens functional turf wars.
3. Lack of a Clear Gap : A third common mistake is failing to articulate a clear gap. These problem statements sound like “We need to improve our brand” or “Sales have to go up.. The lack of a clear gap means that people are not engaging in clear mental contrasting and this creates two related problems. First, people don’t know when they have achieved the goal, making it difficult for them to feel good about their efforts. Second, when people address poorly formulated problems, they tend to do so with large, one-size-fits-all solutions that rarely produce the desired results.
4.  The Problem Is Too Big : Many problem statements are too big. Broadly scoped problem formulations lead to large, costly, and slow initiatives; problem statements focused on an acute and specific manifestation lead to quick results, increasing both learning and confidence. Use John Carrier’s scope-down tree and find a specific manifestation of your problem that creates the biggest headaches. If you can solve that instance of the problem, you will be well on your way to changing your organization for the better.

Formulating good problem statements is a skill anybody can learn, but it takes practice. If you leverage input from your colleagues to build your skills, you will get to better formulations more quickly. While it is often difficult to formulate a clear statement of the challenges you face, it is much easier to critique other people’s efforts, because you don’t have the same experiences and are less invested in a particular outcome. When we ask our students to coach each other, their problem formulations often improve dramatically in as little as 30 minutes.

Tatas Should have sold Nano in the US First:

Interview of Patrick Whitney

US design visionary says Tatas may have lost an opportunity by not positioning Nano as product of choice for middle-income groups in the West before selling it in India

Patrick Whitney, often called a design visionary and known for marrying process design and business strategy, says that the Tatas may have lost an opportunity in Nano by not positioning it as a product of choice for the middle and upper middle class consumers in developed world and then sold it in India. Instead by marketing it directly to the middle- and lower-middle class in India, the product ignored the aspirational ambitions of the class of people it is currently targeting, said Whitney, Dean of the Institute of Design (ID), at Illinois Institute of Technology, the largest graduate school of design in the US. As many as eight of Whitney’s design students from ID is working closely with senior executives at Godrej, through Indian Immersion Programme, a crosslearning initiative where the students will learn business imperatives of design in real world situations while Godrej executives will seek to learn principles of design by observation and abstraction of a user need. In an interview to ET’s Lison Joseph & Satish John, Whitney says that ID is looking to work closely with more Indian corporations as India leads the current wave of design revolution. Excerpts : 

Is it true that India missed the first wave of design innovation but is now leading the second wave? You (India) were late to the first wave and you have a high chance of being a pioneer in the second wave. The challenge is it is a different kind of design now compared to the earlier wave because that type of design is not what the world needs. So, rather than catching up, India can be a co-creator in this new world that we are moving into.

And which sectors do you see this playing out? Any sector that has direct interface with consumers. The first wave was limited to manufacturing and the industrial age. Henry Ford said, ‘give them any color as long as it is black’. And designers didn’t have a humanised approach because in the industrial age it was all about the economies of scale. But now, we have moved into the economy of choice where there is a power shift to the consumers.

In 2003, you quoted a Fortune 25 CEO as saying “we know how to do things, we just don’t know what to do.” Do you see a similar predicament in India? Yes, but it is less evident in India because you are growing and going through the growth phase of a late industrial age economy. So, India and China can get away with a lot in avoiding the new way of doing things. But not forever. And the real problem is there is a train wreck coming. Down the same track on the one way is rise of the poor and the middle class and on the same track coming from the opposite direction is the question of sustainability. India has the chance to grapple with that problem and turn it into an export opportunity. For example, the Nano might have been done in a different way. Rather than positioning it for poor people in India, what if the Tatas had positioned it for the middle class and upper middle class in America? And then sell it to India too. America needs that car too, we are energy hogs. Maybe not the way it is. Europe needs that car as well. There is tremendous opportunity for India and China to show the world how to be sustainable. We’re not going to do it in the US. At least, we don’t seem to be.

You don’t think that Nano met the needs of a certain section of users? Apparently not. Rumor mill tells me that they are re-launching it and repositioning it as a car for the middle class or the upper middle class.

So you are saying it is a lost opportunity for the Tatas to have positioned it the way they did and not in another way? It is easier to say in hindsight. Everybody is smart looking backwards. Poor people like good things too, you know? There used to be a tradeoff between quality and cost in the old age of design, but in the new age of systems and platforms, it is possible to have quality and control cost at the same time.

It’s generally held that most designers don’t understand business, but you are trying to prove otherwise? It is true. Typically, designers have an arts background. In Institute of Design, where I teach, we seek design students who are interested in using business to make the world a better place. We are the first school to create a dual degree programme with design degree and an MBA in the same graduate programme. We believe good design can help businesses serve customers better.

Your institute has a partnership with Godrej? From our point of view, the India Immersion Programme is spectacular in that graduate students are having their lives changed by getting to spend very intense few weeks in India working with managers here who are working on innovation at Godrej. I can’t tell you what they are working on. They are learning a lot and I’m sure they are producing some great ideas.

How would you respond to this general Indian perception that innovation comes at a high cost and hence it is not affordable? You can think of innovation as coming in three ways: Really expensive technological innovation, business model innovation through mergers and acquisitions and human-centered innovation by looking at things from the user’s point of view. The third type does not need to be expensive and it is known to be very good for organic growth. If you pry open an iPhone or iPad, there is almost no new technology in that. 

New Products must be launched with customer centricity

In many B2B businesses, the marketing and sales departments live in different worlds and this results into :    

• the "ball not being caught” by any of these two
• new products failing to reach their potential (not to speak about their targets)
• reduction in the morale of both the sales and marketing teams
• grass-root salespersons consider promoting new products a waste of their time

what can be done about to avoid all this ?

NEW PRODUCTS : ENGINES OF GROWTH

CEOs love the  new product program because these launches

• are visible events - inside and outside - to rally people together
• make functional silos to work as towards a common goal cross-functionally
• improve the technology quotient in the overall product line
• give something to talk about to the customers and employees
• may serve as preemptive technological obsolescence of one’s own line
• are seen as “new ammunition” to fight the competition

HOW MARKETING LAUNCHES NEW PRODUCTS

In most companies, the marketing department conducts road shows in various branches. During these road shows they dump a huge load of data and materials during the internal launch seminar

• Explanation of how it works
• What are the multiple configurations
• What are the various connectivity options
• How to demonstrate various features
• Feature-Price comparison with the competition
• What campaign has been planned in print, magazines, websites
• Glossy and nice brochures, fact sheets, tech specs, FAQs, gifts.

NEW PRODUCTS : WASTE OF SALES FORCE TIME

But no one really asks what do the front line salespersons REALLY NEED from the company. Because, unless your products are so outstanding and so well promoted that the customers will queue up for them on their own,  this way of launching will not work. And this statement is particularly true if you do “solution selling” (also called “consultative selling”) i.e. you sell your products as “solutions” to the customers’ “problem”.

So, although the marketing department has taken a lot of effort to launch the products, the entire effort has been product-centric.  It is not clear who will make the  salesperson effective in selling the new product in a consultative / solution mode. This requires a the salesperson to have a deep understanding of the following in the context of new products

• the customer’s pain points
• how the new product addresses these pains
• how the new products is a better solution than the competition to alleviate these pains
• who is a prospect and how to locate them
• how to find where is the prospect on his “buying journey”
• how to provide comfort to him in context of “business”, “stakeholders”, his “persona”
• what specific messages are relevant at what stage of the buying journey
• Generally how to increase the sales velocity.

After all, the sales department wants marketing to give it the ammunition to jump-start the acceptance and sale of new products, to shorten time to revenue, to improve the lifetime profitability of their offering compared to customer needs and competition and to keep major competitors out of key accounts.

THE RESULT IN THE MARKET

The way things are in most companies right now,  this important stage is really no one’s responsibility and, since it is so, ultimately the burden falls on the shoulders of the poor front line salesperson to learn it all by himself - through trial and error - with some help from their own direct first-line supervisor.  

But the front line salespersons are so busy in their day to day job of selling the whole product line - and achieving their monthly targets - that most sales people cannot give a focused attention to how the new products are to be put across to the prospects. As a result, many salespersons take a long time to internalize it many do not get it at all.

The outcome of all this is that the productivity remains low for a new product for a far longer time than it is planned.  The salespersons and the sales channel member get disillusioned and demoralized and their expectations from the new product become low. All sales and marketing people connected with the new product begin to feel small due to constant needling from the top management. The product becomes a victim of self fulfilling prophesy and never meets the potential had been launched properly and given proper attention by both the marketing and sales departments. 

WHOSE RESPONSIBILITY IS IT?

Is marketing responsible? Many would take a pragmatic view and say that the marketing department cannot be held responsible because they are situated at HO and do not deal with – and hence have no visibility of - individual customers. And therefore they cannot possibly craft an individual messaging strategy for an individual customer.

With this kind of mindset it is easy to understand that most marketing departments in B2B business are product-centric. When you generally do not get to meet individual customers, you really do not know what drives them to behave in the way they do. And therefore the marketing people cannot be anything but product centric! What an irony!

THE ANSWER  

The REAL answer is that Marketing need not customize messages but should develop training material (based on research and testing) to help the sales force to prepare themselves for customization.  

The Marketing should develop "Buyer Personas" and "Buying Journeys" for each such persona so that this can be used in the field to train the sales force. If the sales force are just given product knowledge, demo and print material; they flounder when they personally meet the customers. But when they are trained in dealing with the customers and how to create consultative conversations with them, their trial and error time reduces drastically, they become more productive, more confident. This  results into the sales curve of the new products go up faster resulting into all round feel good factor and this lays a solid ground work for the company to introduce new products.

THE HIDDEN BENEFIT  

When the sales force is well trained not only in what the products offer but also in how to sell them to the customers, the time spent in "Sales Support" after the new products is launched comes down sharply. I know that in some companies, the sales force is so untrained that they call the marketing managers to deal with many customers as if it is their job to close the sales.   

How to market professional services like consulting, degrees, hospitals, R&D firms?

You probably know that the marketing of Products and Services is different. In this article I am giving thoughts on how the marketing of professional service firms is different than that of other services. Please do write your comments at the end by clicking on the comment button.

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Generally the term “Professional Services” covers 5 types of firms

1. Law and Accounting firms characterized by high knowledge intensity, professionalized workforce, and low capital intensity
2. Hospitals and Universities (Campuses of experts and teaching ) characterized by high knowledge intensity,  professional workforce and high capital intensity
3. IT service firms (Campuses of getting process done) characterized by high knowledge intensity,  professional workforce and high capital intensity
4. Consulting Firms characterized by high knowledge intensity and a low capital intensity
5. R&D and Biotech firms characterized by a high knowledge intensity and a high capital intensity.

Do not be embarrassed to do marketing!  

1. They would secretly like to market in order to expand their revenues and yet, for the sake of maintaining their “professional stature”, they would not like to be seen marketing!  
2. As a result most firms ignore marketing in the belief that "our work speaks for itself" or "Marketing does not go with the dignity of the profession". Of course there are few professional service firms that hire ‘marketing people’ but leave them to their own devices and essentially expect them to be busy with developing websites and brochures and designs.
3. And yet, the very same people secretly admit they are worried what is happening behind their back. They know there are competitors out there who are soliciting their clients and undercutting their fees. They know that there are competitors out there doing well even in depressed markets because they “market”. There are competitors who have the right relationships with their clients and have good referral sources.

Do not market as if it is a product

1. They often use a “Product Marketing” model and express their expectations from marketing as “getting the name out”, “put the information into the hands of the buyers”, “build company reputation” etc.  When people buy products, they do so because of what they can see, see, hear, feel, taste and smell in the item. The item!
2. But in professional services, there nothing to see or taste or feel. It is not an item! Howsoever well known your firm may be,  you will get hired (or not hired) only  after they meet you – in person ! The fact is that people buy other people, not firms.
3. Professional marketing is about the trust that the clients have in the people, their expertise and their network.

Do not forget your existing clients

1. Sometimes the professional service firms consider their existing clients as “annuities” on which they can live without measuring their satisfaction, communicating with them, seeing if they can mine them for more business and to exploit their reference potential. Ideal mix of business should be :   
• 50% “existing clients” and their referrals
• 25% “referral sources" like alumni, people in the field
• 25% from "strangers"  seminars, articles, speaking, ads, direct mail
2. Unfortunately, most firms don't even know what other services their customers buy and from whom. You must be wary of others who may be providing a different service to your existing client because there is a scope for infection. The relationship is now at risk because they themselves– or can bring their buddies into your client relationship - can compete with you. It secures their position and pays back referrals received.
3. It's also important to continue to market to your clients to let them know how valuable they are and why using you is such a good idea.

 Do not ignore your own employees

1. Successful professional service firms know that their marketing -  no matter how great – will be useless if the employees back at the firm who will need to deliver it – are not on board. They must involve everyone at the firm in marketing of the firm's services.
2. They must know that everyone is conveying a message all of the time to the outside world? How is your phone answered? What do your finished reports look like? What does your office look like? How do your people dress and talk? How do they come across to your clients?
3. If your firm and your people aren't in alignment with the kind of client you're trying to attract, marketing can't work. Everyone in the firm needs their own "personal marketing plan" . Even the receptionist. Everyone needs to know what's expected of him or her as his or her part of the marketing effort.

Do not aim for too many different customer types

1. Most professional service firms want everything! They say; “You want it? We got it!”. But in reality, if you cannot be good at everything for everyone. You need to be good at “vital few” things  which people really want. That is where you must invest and focus on. And for this you must know your market very well. 

Do not forget : Marketing is a process, not an event

1. Marketing  process is slow to start. Do not let there be a gap. It needs to be done not only when you need new business but when you are doing your existing business. If you do it sporadically, you will need to restart the process all over again - almost start from scratch – and that reduces the morale.
2. That is why successful professional service firms set aside a percentage of gross revenues for marketing.  
3. Most professional service firms (and individuals too) don't take the skills of personal marketing and selling seriously enough nor are willing to spend enough on making them bring in more business.
4. There is time in everyone's day to go to market: it's called lunch (or breakfast, or dinner). Most people eat lunch, even when busy. However, we usually eat lunch by ourselves or at our desks or with our friends at the firm. We suggest not less than two lunches or breakfasts or after-work meetings a week with clients, referral sources, prospective clients, etc. even during busy season.

Do not rely only on the marketing people

1. Many professional service firms  allocate someone to the marketing function (sometimes a clerical person with no real knowledge or background in marketing) and expect him or her to be the ones to bring in business. This does not normally work.
2. Everyone must be involved in the marketing effort! The partners can't pass it on to the staff and to the marketing person.  All that a marketing can do is to provide the bigger and more frequent opportunity. Somebody still has to show up and get the work done. The biggest complaint of the marketing people in professional service firms is "I can't get our people to do anything."

Do Not Forget to use leads generated by marketing

1. Good leads are hard to come by for most of us. So you must jump on referrals and hot leads immediately before they cool off. The longer one waits, the colder that lead gets and the harder to convert into business.