Productive people ask the question, why a lot. Now, ideally, you can learn to do this without annoying people. I can't say I never annoying anyone I try not to. It's not about being needlessly provocative. But it's about trying to dig deeper to figure out how everyone can win. So for example, in my own core business, I get people call all the time and say, well, TJ, I want a two day media training workshop.
And I want each executive to be worked with individually. And I need you to send a written proposal. And my first response always is why y and y y two days, rather than one day in a blended learning experience over a year, why would you have the people pulled out of the room and worked with separately? If they can't perform in front of their own colleagues? How are they going to perform on tv live when the whole world is watching and then the final Why I have is why do you want a written proposal? For a workshop or seminar?
You're asking someone to teach your people how to speak to the media. Why do you want to see how well they write? Don't you want to see how well they speak? and variably people say, hey, that makes a lot of sense, to all of the questions I asked. And what I do is I just send video proposals. I don't send text proposals.
Guess what, it saves me a tremendous amount of time. And the prospects like it and they end up hiring me. Now that might not be applicable at all to your industry or what you do or the places where you're trying to be more productive. But I do want you to see, it's this process of asking why. It's not just because I don't want to do something. I'm also asking why, to really help the executives of the clients the process.
Specs accomplish their real goal. so in this situation, I save time, I increase the percentage of time I get prospects turned into clients, but the clients are helped to, because I actually save them time. Give them expertise in a format that's much more valuable to them. Everybody wins and that's what productive people try to do. They try to make everyone they work with they deal with feel like a winner as well.