Due to the comments and interest generated by the
previous blog “Do You Have a Primadonna Business?”, I'm starting a new series discussing
the 10 core business processes that you need to have in place -- and walking
through them individually.
First, why are the 10 core business processes
important? They're important because they speak volumes about the
sophistication and maturity that you've implemented in your business: not
necessarily maturity in terms of the number of years, but maturity with regard
to your fundamental understanding of what it takes to have sustained
performance, sustained growth, and sustained ability to deliver a consistent
product and service. The issue that you run into without these 10 core business
processes is that you are clearly operating at a high degree of risk for your
business, which means that for any corporation looking to do business with you,
you are also transferring that risk to them. And the first thing you have to
understand about large corporations is that their business model is a risk
averse model. To put that in perspective, what I mean by risk averse model is
that clearly being in business comes with risk, but when you observe
corporations with a lot of employees, one of the things they pride themselves
on is their ability to identify, mitigate and (to the extent that they cannot
mitigate it) manage the risk so that it becomes prudent risk taking.
When corporations pick suppliers, they try to
pick suppliers that fit into their systems and minimize the risk to operations
- the risk of loss. They see that you have actually implemented these processes,
which means you're more like them and less like people who haven't done the
work and are just hoping for the best. Big companies are well past hoping for
the best. They have a high degree of planning that ensures they can deliver at
a superior level on a consistent basis.
Now you might be saying, “do I have to have all
of these processes in place to make money”? No, you don't. You may not make as
much money; your contracts may not be in place for long, you may not get the
really big contracts, but you do not have to have the 10 core processes to make
money. I strongly advise, however, that you get them in place, and you get them
in place sooner than later. I understand you might actually be operating on a
shoestring budget and you just don't have a way to do this right now, and I
would challenge you on that thinking. I talked about financing your small
business a couple of episodes ago. You may be able to bring more resources into
your business if you find people that will work with you until you actually get the revenue in place. You may be able to
work with other partners who have resources you don't have and have processes
that you need already in place. There is a whole host of opportunities
available to you if you don't currently have these processes in place right
this minute, but implementing these processes is going to be imperative to your
business sooner rather than later to play in this game with the large
corporations.
The first of the 10 core business processes is
customer strategy and your marketing approach. A number of us take a broad view
of our business. We start out believing that we can sell to anybody. We just
really need a chance to get our foot in the door. That may be true, but it's a
terrible strategy from a marketing perspective. You really and truly want to be
extremely specific on whom your target customer is. You want to start with the
customer that is either going to be the most receptive to what you're selling
because that gets you speed to cash; or the customer that is going to benefit
the most from your service, i.e. which customer is currently having the most
pain around what it is you offer?
The issue is not does every customer have
pain around what you're offering -- but which specific customer
segments. I’ll give you an example. Tech is heavily male dominated and, in the
past, high tech had a host of issues with the “me-too” movement and men being
insensitive to how to really treat women in the workplace. So, if you're doing
any type of diversity and inclusion work and you have a program in place, then
tech would be your target demographic. There are other industries that are in
pain regarding diversity, but the tech industry primarily because the market has been calling
them out. That's an example of what it means to have a customer strategy and
what your marketing looks like. If you were to target the tech industry, you'd
probably approach them differently just because of what you know about their
workforce. With the automotive industry, oil and gas, or banking and finance or
any other industry you would have different conversations, so your customer
strategy and relationships become huge.
As this is a core process, what we begin to get
into is something that's referred to as your sales strategy or your pipeline
management. What I mean by that is you always want to have X number of
customers in the pipeline.
AT&T, for example, has an idea of how many
new customers they're going to get per month. They have an idea of what new
products, and how many customers they're going to get on each product. They
have an idea of how much money they're going to generate. Each week they have
daily sales goals and they have detailed processes and instructions around how
they manage their customer flow, their profitability, their new products, their
sales and everything else. And they probably, in some cases, will project out
certain portions of their business anywhere from six to 18 months because they
understand how long it takes to close a deal.
In your business, so that you don't get into
feast or famine situations (feasting is when you get more business than you can
handle, and famine is when no business is coming in), you want to have a robust
pipeline management system. Some people will say you also need a customer
relationship management system -- something like a salesforce.com or some other
things that are out there. At some point you are going to need that because
you're going to need your sales efforts coordinated and you're going to need to
be able to see at a glance what's going on and what you need to be doing, and
see if you have any drop-offs -- but you don't need that right off the bat. A
lot of this you can do with what we used to call a “Big Chief tablet” which is
nothing more than an eight-and-a-half-by-11 tablet of paper where you just ask,
“who are my customers? What's going on? What do I need to know about them?
Who's calling on them? And what opportunities do I see in their organization
where I think I can help or where it looks like they need our help?” As long as
you stay ahead of that, even if it's manual, that will work wonders for you.
But what I want you to take away from this is that the reason this is a core
business process is it speaks to your ability to make it rain. It’s your
ability to keep cash coming in the door; your ability to keep the doors open
because you have customers coming in, you've got opportunities coming in, you
have a process that just keeps going for you. And that's why the number one
capability is you must have continuous revenue coming in to fund the business, and
also be able to generate new customers or new revenue, which is deemed a
customer strategy -- or a sales and marketing program.
There are nine more core requirements after this
one, so stay tuned for the next one which is Employee Development Satisfaction.
Please go to www.blueprintpros.com and get on
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