Effective Processes

Effective processes are critical and can mean the difference between running a smooth, profitable organization and running a haphazard collection of departments.

Automation is a great way to improve processes across all divisions including….

• Technology
• Administrative
• Marketing
• Sales
• Customer Service

Man power is often the largest small business expense. Today’s hosted technology can offer incredible efficiencies without the hardware and licensing costs of previous solutions. Look for Software as a Service (Saas) companies that can help you interaction with your customers, employees and vendors without as much human interaction. New technology offerings are available everyday and many allow you to try before you buy.

Many small businesses mistakenly try to cut costs by doing everything themselves. The truth is, you’ll probably save a lot of time and money by implementing effective administrative processes such as:

• Use technology to manage administrative tasks such as billing, collections and data management.
• When human resources are necessary, consider interns, virtual assistants or shared resources.
• Make sure you have systems and processes in place. When your business grows you want to make sure your company can scale with the growth and not come unraveled.
• You can’t be an expert in everything.
• Don’t be afraid to outsource. For more great tips check out: http://www.insidecrm.com/features/78-ways-save-economy-101408
• Don’t be afraid to renegotiate your lease…now is the time
• Renegotiate with your vendors/suppliers
• Turn to your employees to ask for efficiency ideas
• Lease equipment instead of buying
• Consider bartering or exchanging product/services
• Hold off on new hires and consider contract labor
• Negotiate discounts based on volume or longer-term commitments
• Go green – turn off unused electricity and find ways to cut waste

There are efficiencies that can be made to your marketing processes.

• Use data and analysis to make sure you are cutting cost only on those programs that are the least productive.
• Don’t just turn off the faucet all together, cut marketing expenditures only when the analysis proves it is your least effective form of driving revenue.
• Maximize your time and resources.
• Learn how and when to delegate and outsource.

Nurture Your Leads!
How well do you keep in contact with your leads? Remember, being out of touch can quickly lead to being out of business.

Once a lead is created, the worst thing you can do is let it slip through the cracks. Are you guilty of this? Before you jump on Facebook, spend money on Pay-Per-Click, re-design your website to capture leads and kick your affiliate program into high gear, make sure you can properly manage your leads and lead conversion.

Make sure you have a lead management process:

• What happens to new leads
• How are you following-up
• How often are you following-up
• How are you tracking the lead source
• What is your average conversion rate
• How can you improve conversion rates
• Are valuable leads falling through the cracks

Put processes in place to manage leads and ensure you are doing everything possible to convert leads into sales (I am currently working on a series of blogs regarding Fixing Follow-up Failure so stay tuned as those will be posted in the very near future). In short, there are tools to help you manage your customer leads and help you follow-up effectively.

The process of tracking your marketing success is important too. Don’t spend money unless you can prove its value…

• Ask – where did they hear about you
• Use unique phone numbers for different ads
• Use trackable links for online ads
• Use promo codes to track the success of campaigns
• Split test email and website ocntent and design
• Track all referral programs with unique identifiers

Once a lead is passed from marketing to sales, you must be confident that there is a good process in place to convert leads and close deals. A good process will help you:

• Increase sales effectiveness
• Warm leads
• Shorten the sales cycle

Implementing better sales processes will pay off quickly. If you’re looking for a great book that describes how to put together a “bankable” forecast, then take a look at Sales Revenue System 2.0 by Carl Moe. (check it out here)

The average sale closes at 5 or more contacts but sales reps often give up after 3 attempts. What does this mean for you? It means you are losing deals because of follow-up failure. According to Marketing For Success – 80% of potential sales are lost due to lack of follow-up. What is follow-up? Follow-up is simply establishing a long-term relationship with prospects through a series of ongoing communications. Prospects will buy when they are ready to buy, not when you are ready to sell to them. Follow-up positions you to be in-front of the prospect when they are ready to buy. Proper follow-up can be time consuming if you don’t have the right tools to manage the process. Automated follow-up will allow you to easily and effectively manage the process.

Visiting your store or talking with a live sales rep should not be the only way a prospect can buy from you. Make it easy for a customer to purchase when they wish, how they wish by leveraging ecommerce. Ecommerce does not always mean a tangible product. Offer service packages, memberships, content downloads, etc via a shopping cart or online order form. Encourage ecommerce transactions with special incentives for online orders. Make sure your ecommerce tool has the ability to add upsells and cross-sell offers to an order. Use electronic transactional receipts to offer additional, relevant products/services. By implementing these ecommerce features, you may quickly discover that your website is your most effective sales rep.

Customer service is a critical factor in client satisfaction and retention. You must deliver excellent customer service to create and keep loyal customers. There are several ways to automate components of customer service in a way that will:

• Cut costs
• Increase the Quality of your Service
• Increase your ability to scale your Service Offerings

Some other thoughts on ways to leverage your customer service experience:

• Use the Internet to post FAQs and other self-help content.
• Use community software to encourage customers to help other customers or to post answers to questions that your general customer base might be looking for
• Create weekly webinars to assist customers in a one-to-many environment vs. one-to-one.

So far we have talked about  3 of the 4 tools in the ultimate THRIVAL kit:

• Loyal Customers
• Economical Marketing Strategies
• Effective Processes

Along with each of these tools, we have provided tips and tricks and specific things you can do implement them in your own business. The final tip is a bit difficult because it all hinges on you. It is a positive attitude combined with a little creativity. Next week, we will conclude our segment on marketing in a down economy, by discussing Positive Attitude and Creativity.

Enjoy your day!

Ken

Related posts:

1. Get Positive!
2. Make Your Business Thrive!
3. Economical Marketing Strategies
4. Thanksgiving thoughts.
5. Greetings from Arizona!