The Process of Process
May 15th, 2007 Uncategorized Landon Ray
If having a business that’s made up of defined systems is your goal, it’s worthwhile to have a clear idea of what reaching that goal would look like.
What systems do I need to create?
How shall those systems work together?
Where do I start?
We start simply. An overview of the main processes that make up most businesses might look like this:
This cycle is both a representation of the lifecycle of a typical client, as well as a sort of list of the processes that need to be managed.
Starting at the top, what is your process for generating inquiries? What marketing systems do you have in place? How well do they work? Could they be improved? Could they be added to? Should some be cut?
Measuring the effectiveness of your systems is important, and in marketing we measure things like ‘cost per lead’, ‘conversion rate’, and so on. Depending on the volume of inquiries you’re getting and how much you’re spending on marketing each month, it may also make sense to track inquiries by source so you know if your magazine ad, for example, is performing well enough to keep it in the mix.
Responding to inquiries is a critical area for most businesses, and where we make or break the success of our marketing efforts. Are we responding in a way that is similar to the way our competators do? Are we distinguishing ourselves from the pack? Are we demonstrating the caliber of service that we provide, or just promising what we will do (like everyone else does)? Are we articulating the tangible (money, time) value that our clients can expect from doing business with us?
I’m not going to go through the whole circle here, but I hope the idea is clear: Start with a customer life-cycle, and then look at how you plan to knock the sox off your clients every single step of the way.
Once you have an outline of your basic systems you have a distinct advantage over seat-of-the-pants-ers: you can go to work on improving each system bit-by-bit. When you’re just trying to juggle your business, it’s never really clear how to make progress. But when you have a map, you can see what areas of your business are most critical, most in need of improvement, and most likely to have an impact on your bottom line.
