Scott Beebe serves small business owners and works to free them from the chaos of constantly working on the details of owning a business. He teaches them how to avoid having to put out fires and moves them toward the freedom of working on their business.
As sellers and entrepreneurs, many of us don’t have the kind of systems in place that will help us succeed.
Developing systems and processes
Zig Ziglar pointed out that we are all sellers. Even if you can’t immediately see how processes will help you in your own role, it’s likely that you’ll benefit from them.
Some sellers are in the Wild West style selling situation while others are in a more starched, blue-collar kind of setting. Those sellers with very well-defined roles may have a hard time expanding outside that role into less well-defined roles.
Vehicles are a great example of a series of systems. Within each system under the hood of your car, there are additional systems and processes: the cooling system, the combustion system, and thousands of others. Whether you’re in the gun-slinging or the starched side of sales, you still need systems.
In sales, your systems drive what you do.
Begin by thinking about the systems and processes that you’re haphazardly bandaging together, and how you might achieve more success if you could put a defined process in place.
Many sellers fail because they don’t know what to do next.
Ignoring processes
Whether you’re an owner, a seller, or a manager, the number one barrier to processes and systems is the pain of sitting down and doing it. Most people who invest the time to do it hate doing it.
What makes you great is taking the time to develop your back-end systems and processes so you can go out and do what you do best.
Delegating tasks
Rory Vaden, author of the book Take the Stairs: 7 Steps to Achieving True Success, outlines a concept he calls the 30x principle. If you identify a 5-minute task and 30x that task, that’s about the amount of time it will take you to train someone else to do that task.
We look at that and think, “I’m not going to invest two-and-a-half hours to teach someone to do a 5-minute task.” Now imagine that 5-minute task over the course of 250 working days, and then ask yourself if it’s worth the two-plus hours of your time to get back more than 20 hours time.
It’s the equivalent of about 70% return on your time investment.
Creating processes
Begin by articulating where you’re going. On Scott’s Business On Purpose podcast he refers to it as the “vision story.”
If we plan a trip, and I give you a destination, you might be inclined to go along. But if I give you specific details about where we’re headed and what we’ll see while we’re there, and what kinds of experiences we will have when we arrive, you’ll likely be much more excited about the trip, and more likely to want to go along.
Many salespeople just want to make more money without any ceilings, but everything comes with a cost.
- What will it cost for you to get to the point you’re trying to reach?
- What do I want this business to look like when I’m done with it?
We can build the fanciest systems and processes, but if you don’t have any idea where you’re going, you’ll end up in the middle of nowhere.
When you lay out your vision, you’ll give people the opportunity to decide whether they’ll get on board.
Mapping your processes
Use this template to create processes for your business:
- Articulate your vision story to determine where you’d like to go.
- Articulate your mission statement, which is just your vision story in miniature. It’s the distilled version of your vision story. Make it less than 15 words. It’s your motto.
- Create your unique core values which are unique to you. (These are not values like honesty which serve everyone well in business.) These are the key words from your mission statement which uniquely describe you.
- Identify the systems that you have. If you’re a small business owner, sales will likely be one of your systems.
- Take advantage of outsourcing. Train, train, train. Realize that if you don’t take time to train, you’ll likely fail in your efforts.
Find a place where you can document the process. Write out the individual steps in the process.
Once you’ve done that, you can review it with your employee. Then, you can use Screencast-O-Matic or ScreenFlow to record the process. Once you’ve presented it, you never have to do it again.
“Leveraging Systems and Processes to Grow Your Business” episode resources
Connect with Scott on www.fourstepstobusinessfreedom.com. Check out Screencast-O-Matic or ScreenFlow to learn how to capture processes for later use.
You can also listen to our conversation with Rory Vaden on TSE episode 109.
This episode is brought to you by the TSE Certified Sales Training Program. If you put in a lot of hard work in 2018 but weren’t able to close many of your deals, we can help you fix that. We have a new semester beginning in April and it would be an honor to have you join. Visit donaldk4.sg-host.com/CST.
If you haven’t already done so, subscribe to the podcast so you won’t miss a single episode. Share it with your friends who would benefit from learning more.
This episode is also brought to you in part by mailtag.io, a Chrome browser extension for Gmail that allows you to track and schedule your emails. It’s super easy, it’s helpful, and I recommend that you try it out. You’ll receive real-time alerts anyone opens an email or clicks a link.
Mailtag.io will give you half-off your subscription for life when you use the Promo Code: Donald at check out.
I hope you enjoyed the show today as much as I did. If so, please consider leaving us a rating on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or wherever you consume this content and share it with someone else who might benefit from our message. It helps others find our message and improves our visibility.
Audio provided by Free SFX and Bensound.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS