In my next few entries I am going post some excerpts from my soon to be published e-boon on Systemizing your business. The first is from Part II…
Why Systemize Your Business?
Why should you systemize your business? What’s the point? What’s in it for you, the business owner?

Stability
First of all it brings stability to your business. So what you ask? Well, would you stand on the top of a rickety ladder? Of course not! Wouldn’t you want that ladder to have a sturdy and stable base?

Would you rather cross an unsafe and poorly made bridge or a stable and well made bridge?

Stability in your business offers the same benefits as stability anywhere else in life, do you really want every decision, event or issue to be an exception? Or would you like stability in your business where most, if not all events are handled routinely, as a matter of course. Without you having to deal with them. Or would you like that they be dealt with by subordinates in the course of business.

Only those items that are truly exceptions would necessitate managerial involvement. Even if you could only bring 80% of your decisions, transactions, client interactions, etc. into the realm of stability and still had to deal with 20% of these, wouldn’t that be light years ahead of where you are now?
 

Geez, what is with me and analogies lately? I want to talk about GPS units and Business Plans – what? Bear with me now…

My wife and I decided to go shopping and take the back way (which we had never been on), so we plugged in the destination and took off, after all we had our trusty GPS. Well as my Frank would say trusting a GPS in the Back Country is like trusting a used cal salesman, it’s something you may have to do, but you don’t want to make a habit of it.

We were soon lost – what the GPS views as a road and what we view as a road are two entirely different things, even with All Wheel Drive. We didn’t care, we enjoyed the ride (and this is so unlike me – “Mr.-Point-a-to-Point-b”), the scenery was nice and it was a beautiful day. We could have whined about the trip taking an hour and a half versus the normal 20-25 minutes and so on, but we just rolled with it and had a good time.

This reminded me of Business Plans – by definition once a Business Plan is written, it is increasingly obsolete. Yes the Business Plan is your roadmap but you had better be prepared for some detours and u-turns along the way, because they are going to happen.

You should be reviewing and revising your Business Plan – at the very least quarterly – frequently to see how you are progressing towards your goals and objectives. Do not wait until the end of the year to see where you’ve been versus where you wanted to go. This is self-defeating.

While you should always keep your original version of the Business Plan so you can learn from reviewing it. But don’t be dogmatic and say this is plan and we’re going to stick to it no matter what. Stuff happens, stuff changes, roll with it. Revise your plan and move on.
 

The weather here in San Diego lately has been either 15 below normal or 30 above normal, nothing close to our usual norms. It has been a very strange spring so far. But I am not here to talk about the weather.

I find this weather pattern similar to small businesses business cycle – there is no “normal”. Small Business is not about the steady state. It is about swings in revenue, ups, downs, ins, outs, stops and go’s.

The issue is how you react to them. You can cry “woe is me, life is so unfair” or you can deal with it. I recommend you learn to deal with it. You can learn to mitigate the wild ride of your business cycle through personal and business positive actions.

You personally can stay out of your funk. You can stop making excuses for the difficult ride you’re on at a particular time. Learn to get positive and stay positive. If I can learn this mindset you can, trust me I am (er, was) the proverbial glass is half empty guy. Then my wife and decided to banish all negative aspects and influences from our lives.

The change (even through my car accident and back surgery) has had remarkable results. In addition to a new outlook on life, our children are happier and more productive; we have new and exciting business friends, new and exciting business projects and products.

While I am still a skeptic, I believe that this positive outlook has led to all of these things!

In your business you can work to mitigate the wild swings in your business, first brainstorm what is causing them. Don’t look anywhere else but inside your business (no blaming the economy, the government, etc.) and only inside your business.

Then brainstorm the actions you need to take on the root cause of your swings. For instance, if you have wild swings in revenue – is this because you have way too much concentration of revenue in one customer or client? Can you diversify your sales, can you come up with new channels to exploit, and can you down sell, cross sell or up sell? Are you prospecting enough, in the right place, at the right time to the right suspect? Can you systemize these solutions?

Have you tapped into your peers and advisors for advice and counsel (another one of my favorite subjects)? The answers are there – you have to find them and only you can.
 

I just read the Vista Chamber’s newsletter and a truly nice man – Jim Baumann - is leaving the chamber.  When I started my business some years ago Jim was one of the first to welcome me to the local business community.

The Vista Chamber is one of my favorite chambers.  They are warm, welcoming, empathic to small businesses and above all inclusive.  Jim, in my opinion had a lot to do with that.  Under Jim’s stewardship the chamber has grown to its highest membership ever.  A nice way for Jim to go out – on top.

I wish Jim well – he will be missed.

Sales and selling is the next logical step after Marketing, you have generated the leads, now what are you going to do with them? Convert them of course!

To me Sales and selling are much more tactically oriented that marketing, while there are subtle steps to can take to become a much more effective salesperson, sales is very tactical.

Remember, Tactics are defined as actions, methods or techniques used to implement a specific mission and achieve a specific objective (converting the prospect), or to advance toward a specific goal.

Strategies are differentiated from tactics (or immediate actions with resources at hand) by its nature of being extensively premeditated, orchestrated and often practically rehearsed. Strategies are used to make the problem easier to understand and solve.

So that if you have honed your company’s sales skills and the methods and manners in which you sell are consistent and orchestrated – then they can be considered strategic.

What are the steps in selling? Do know them? Well, there are seven steps in the sales process and they are:
Building Rapport
Qualifying the Buyer (Finding the Need)
Building Value
Creating Desire
Overcoming Objections
Closing
Follow Up

Now, most business owners believe that they should concentrate more on the back end of the process (Building Value to Closing) and spend the majority of their time and effort there. And they often ignore the follow up step.

But sales experts will tell you that Rapport (at 40%) and Qualifying the Buyer (at 25%) is where the majority of your time should be spent. If you can become masterful at these two steps the other four – follow up is so critical that it is a whole other subject for another day – steps are much easier.

If you can build significant rapport with your prospects, qualifying them is much more simple. They’ll open up and tell you just about anything – about their buying criteria, how you can change it, what they value and so on.

Once you have qualified them (deciding whether they are the buyer your looking for), again assuming your were masterful at building rapport, they have already told you how to build value and create desire in them. From there, overcoming objections is very simple – isolate the objection and annihilate it with your logical conclusions.

Closing is now simple – if they don’t ask you, just ask them – “So, lets write that up right now”.
 

Okay, in the last entry we defined Sales, Marketing, Strategies and Tactics. Let us now delve into these a bit deeper.

Marketing tactics are such things as
Direct Mail
Cold Calls
Warm Calls
Brochures
Flyers
Advertisements
Referrals
Presentations
Promotion Pieces
Etc.

These all fit into the seven general components of marketing – Advertising, Direct Mail, Corporate Literature (Flyers, Brochures, etc.), Public Relations, Personal Contact, Market Education and the Internet.

These tactics are the specific action steps or techniques that you would employ to generate interest in your company, your product or your service. Where most small business owners fall down is that they just throw these out there and if they don’t work immediately, they stop.

The first thing I see that is constraining them is that (I believe) they are not sitting down and thinking strategically – on many different levels. First of all, are of their tactics done in a unified, cohesive and coherent manner? Do they have the same look, feel and texture? Are they sending the same message to the same specific target audience? Have they thought about, quite simply, what the point is? What is their overall strategic objective of marketing? Is it to generate leads; is it to get Top of Mind Awareness (TOMA) or what? If they haven’t clearly thought this through, what is the point of doing any marketing at all? After all you need to have an end or a purpose in mind before you set out.

Second, even if they have done the above, they have not gone through this exercise on a tactic by tactic basis. For instance what do I want this direct mail piece to accomplish? What are its objectives? (Notice I used the plural here). Every tactic should have more than one strategic objective. Most tactics should have at least three objectives and a truly powerful tactic will have as many as ten.

In my next entry I will discuss Sales – the process, tactics and strategies.
 

As a follow on to my last entry. I have been thinking a lot lately about small business owners and how most are so deficient in Sales and Marketing. First of all most small business owners treat sales and marketing as one and the same thing. What?

Marketing at it most basic level is simply Marketing Strategy, Advertising and Lead Generation. Sales at it most basic level is simply Lead Conversion and Client Re-conversion. The two disciplines do not overlap, they are distinctly different. Yet most small business owners treat them as the same process.

Sales and Marketing must be considered and dealt with as entirely separate activities that intermingle but are not one and the same. I doubt that one out of ten owners can define the seven steps in the sales process or the seven components of marketing. If they could they would certainly see the difference between sales and marketing.

To make things even worse most business owners concentrate way too much of their time and effort on selling or marketing tactics while virtually ignoring strategies. So what is the difference between the two?

Strategies are defined as:
A Strategy is a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, most often "winning".

Tactics are defined as:
A tactic is an action, method or technique used to implement a specific mission and achieve a specific objective, or to advance toward a specific goal.

Strategies are differentiated from tactics (or immediate actions with resources at hand) by its nature of being extensively premeditated, and often practically rehearsed. Strategies are used to make the problem easier to understand and solve.

I hope you understand the marked difference in the two.

In my next entry I will delve deeper into sales, marketing, strategies and tactics, in the meantime give some thought as to how you spend your time (are you tactically or strategically oriented) and do you look at sales and marketing as separate disciplines?
 

I went to the Oceanside Chamber’s Business Success Series’ opening presentation by Ursula Mentjes on “Selling with Intention”. It was very good. Ursula showed the audience that they need to not only reset their Goals and Objectives but also they need to figure out what was stopping them from achieving them.

It was an interesting presentation and dealt with some of the issues I am interested in…

“Just what is your (strategic) objective of your sales (and marketing) efforts?”
“Have you really identified your target market, your target client?”
“Have you defined the attributes of your target market and your target clients?”
“Have you clearly set your ultimate objectives for your business?”

I watched the audience as much as possible and it was very interesting. As I observed, some of them had an “aha” moment. That dawning of understanding, that time when someone presents them with something that should have been so obvious but was so hidden.

I hope the audience members will follow up on the exercises in the workshops and build their businesses on a stronger platform.
 

Wow, I just got back from an International Conference of Business Advisors and it was amazing.  My surgically repaired back did not cooperate at all, so physically I was less than at an optimum level of performance.  But the conference itself was great.

It was amazing that so many associates took time out from their busy schedule to prepare presentations that would share their knowledge with the rest of their peers.  They did this with no compensation, just the desire to share their information with others.

I came away with at least four things I could implement immediately.  These will have a positive and valuable impact on my business.  I am a life long learner so it was great to be exposed to new ideas, differing perspectives and valuable tools.

What was profoundly disappointing was that many of our brethren did not come to the conference. And I am at loss as to why – I hope that the reason was they were so busy improving their clients businesses that there just wasn’t time. But in my heart of hearts I don’t think this is the reason.

I would like to emphasize that you as a business owner should take every opportunity to learn, discover and make new contacts. If you’re not your competition is…