Why you need to standardize your business processes to manage a successful business
Once your marketing efforts have generated leads and you’ve reviewed them, what do you do with that information? It’s all a combination of paper notes, spreadsheets, documents, emails, texts, calls, iPhone notes, and social media DMs. You probably contact them at some point if you got the lead’s info at an event. Or email them back if they submit a form on your website. Or reply to their DMs.
It’s all manageable at first, until sales starts to pick up and it’s just not feasible for one person to do it all. You have to work to get clients, and then complete the client work. Scheduling calls, sending questionnaires and contracts, and completing client deliverables can get overwhelming!
Growing Pains
As your business grows, all these little activities will multiply per client, and bad things start to happen.
- You won’t follow up with every lead, and they’ll move on to a competitor.
- Double book clients, or miss client calls. It’s hard to keep your calendar up to date manually
- Not sure who paid you and what their balance is. You don’t have time to ruffle through payment statements and files to figure these numbers out.
Once you hire people to help you with the workload, your internal processes become the focus. You will have to train and explain to them how you handle your clients. This will free up your time, but you still need to manage their work. And remember, since you aren’t touching every aspect of your business anymore, you won’t have those mental notes you relied on. You need a central location for all client information. Yes, I am talking about a CRM!
Business Insights
By standardizing your business operations with a CRM system, you teach your team to work efficiently by leveraging automation. You are also setting up a system that collects the data you need to determine the status of your business!
It’s as simple as noting down someone’s else name, phone, and email. All these are data points, and we all store them somewhere. Phone contacts, address book, spreadsheet, and even notebooks and scrap paper. Scattered info.
To be a successful leader, you should know the following:
- Lead Count – How many people were interested in your services this month?
- Client Count – How many people signed up for your services?
- Conversion Rate % – What percentage of leads become clients?
- Churn Rate % – How many clients canceled services?
By entering all client info on a cloud-based system, you can create reports and dashboards that generate these business insights. Better yet, you can pull them up on an app and have real-time stats.
Whether you are a business owner or sales department leader, this is exciting yet overwhelming as well. You are already busy and you need to find more time on your calendar to teach yourself about this and then also implement it. Rule of thumb, if you are starting to lose business due to manual processes, it’s time to book a consultation.