“Do you know the most common location for a home fire to occur?” he asked. “Yes, behind the clothes dryer,” I answered. I could tell I had just messed up his entire sales pitch.
This was an exchange I had with two door-to-door home security salespeople. My question to you is, do you know the most common location for a fire to occur in your business? It’s one thing that new entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and side hustlers alike tend to overlook.
Your business systems.
As a business consultant and advisor (coach), I work with aspiring entrepreneurs and transitioning professions to manage their business like a B.O.S.S., where one ‘S’ stands for systems. Having systems will help you save time, energy, and delight customers.
Business Systems Save You Time
There is no better time in our history than right now for people to start businesses. The IoT (internet of things) allows anyone to conduct commerce anytime, anywhere, and with anyone. And as such, automation has become critical to lead generation, order management, and customer engagement.
Content is king, but distributing content is the pits. By utilizing services to automate your social media posts and content delivery, you save hours and hours pumping out content. Some services will crawl through social media posts to like, follow, and comment on your behalf. Webinars can be set to run on-demand while you sleep. Emails go out to your list or prospective new clients while you’re working on other things.
Take a look at three of your most time-consuming activities. Let’s say it’s researching content for your blog posts. You have to do a keyword search for good SEO results, and analytics to let you know when and where to post. Once you have a topic, you have to do more research if it requires any citations or data. That’s an extra one to two hours before you even start writing. You know what? There’s a service for that. It can tell you what people are searching for and pull together sources for you. #mindblown
Once you have your content written, you can schedule your content to post across your platforms automatically. Spending two to three hours on one day to schedule social media posts will save you days on an annual basis.
Business Systems Save You Energy
I worked with a company that had been in business for a few years but wasn’t generating much revenue. When I spent time with them, I realized they had no systems. They had tools but didn’t utilize them to create structures in their business. Though I strongly encouraged them to develop systems before they generated revenue, they didn’t heed. Their concern was making money.
Guess what? When the sales started rolling in, they quickly struggled with an order-fulfillment process, communicating with their vendors, and didn’t have a way to track critical strategic initiatives. There were no goals, KPIs, or ways to track progress. They called and wanted to learn more about process improvement because they were duplicating work, and things were falling through the cracks.
The time to build your system foundation is when you don’t have any sales. Of course, you need to hunt for customers to get paid. But having systems in place to help you do that will amplify your efforts. You should have a lead capture tool, customer relationship management (CRM) platform, and communication pathways to ensure nothing gets dropped in the building phase. For example, I use a tool that captures leads from my website. That lead goes to my email list builder and my CRM. When I receive a new inquiry, my CRM lets me know and automatically generates a workflow with emails, documents, contracts, and tasks. Everything I need for a prospective client is prepped and ready in one place. Typically, all I have to do is hit send.
Did setting up my systems take some time and focus away from selling? Yes, in the beginning. It’s well worth the effort to give up revenue-generating hours for system setup hours because your time only becomes more valuable as your business grows. That company I mentioned…they had to give up order-fulfillment time to do system setup they could have done a year before.
Business Systems Create A Delightful Customer Experience
When the company started getting sales, no one answered customer questions or engaged with them because they lacked systems. That’s no good.
Business systems can help you create an experience for your customers and clients that makes them feel cared for and heard. Questions are answered promptly, and their expectations are met and exceeded. My CRM tool provides a client portal where I can store contracts, important documents, send invoices, and collect payments. It creates transparency and allows them to access whatever they need when they want it. If someone wants to meet with me, the same system provides a scheduler supplying real-time options for my availability. My clients don’t have to go back and forth with me over email to choose a time.
It’s not only the client-facing tools that make it a great experience. I have dashboards and alerts to help me manage my work and stay connected to my customers. I receive notifications if they have trouble logging in so I can proactively reach out to make sure everything is okay. I can see if a client is accessing their online education materials to send a reminder or check-in.
Many of the tools I use are either free or require a small investment ($10-$20 per month) to utilize more or all of the features. That can add up quickly! Prioritize what’s essential for your business. My rule to upgrade to a paid service is if I needed the feature five times in 30 days for three consecutive months. This “algorithm” gives me time to find a workaround or do comparison shopping for the best price.
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