No. It’s not a Tesla!
As business coaches, we often refer to a business as a machine. Like a machine, a business is a tool to serve a purpose in your life. A business exists to serve you, the business owner. Clay talks about this often. But before this is possible and you achieve time and financial freedom, you must create a duplicable system. You have to scale if you want to create a “cash producing and value-added machine” (Start Here, pg. 154) It’s interesting, because this week during the business coaches meeting, we discussed how to create a sales system for one of my coworkers and his client’s situation. I am in the process of helping build a sales system for a number of my clients.
I always love it when I’m able to apply some of what I learn in our meetings during the same week or even the same day in some cases. I didn’t even realize I had questions about this process until other coaches starting talking about it. I also realized that certain aspects of this discussion also applied to some projects I’ve been working on with some of my various clients, all at the same time. It helped that Aaron Antis attended one of our business coaching meetings this week to talk about… what do you know? The effect that a perfected sales system had on the business and further success for Shaw Homes.
Why a Sales System?
Because sales is an integral part of your business, your sales system must be perfected. Aaron Antis is a great example. He created a sales system by using a recording device during a sales presentation so he could duplicate the system. Aaron, the best sales guy in the entire company, created the system in order to duplicate his skill level. Once they were able to record his presentation, it was then easy to script it out and provide training to duplicate exactly what Aaron did. Additionally, they were able to watch a sales interaction with employees and determine what was great and what could be improved upon, thus creating a system to constantly improve the sales process.
Chet Holmes talks about this in The Ultimate Sales Machine. Clay even talks about the systems between everything that belongs to your business. You have accounting systems, sales systems, a hiring process, and anything you duplicate, must have a system. You have to make sure your system is always running as efficiently as possible.
So if creating systems and scaling your business is monumental, why don’t more people create systems? It’s hard work! Really hard work! This is not a quick and easy process. As my business coach clients know, from day one we begin working on a sales system in some capacity. This week alone, consisted of a series of projects creating sales, marketing, and accounting systems and putting them in place!
*Pssssttt…. Don’t let this list scare you off — The work was somewhat dispersed between a number of clients. Don’t worry, I didn’t put all of this on one person.
“Creating a Sales Machine” Projects Happening This Week
- Call Scripts – You just have to HAMMER it out. Sit down, find a template or start from scratch and make it perfect. Get it to where you are satisfied. Role play. Call yourself. Record yourself. In some cases, video yourself. Make your rules for the script (i.e. “Smile on the phone.”) and what do you need to know about the customer and what does the customer need to know from you before making a decision to buy your product or service, or whatever call to action you are asking. Consider staying up late or waking up extremely early to knock this out. Creating a call script requires focus!
- Lead System Creation – Are we tracking when leads come in? Do we know where and how they heard about us? When leads come in, who’s calling? How fast are we calling? Do we have a system to text leads, email leads, call leads?
- Sales Training With Your Staff – One of my clients started implementing a daily (soon to be a weekly) sales training meeting with one of his employees. The employee is very eager to learn a new skill and she is very diligent and competent in her existing daily duties. They are taking a quick 15 minutes every morning (or a one-hour meeting every week) to connect on appointments set, burning fires, training from Soft Selling in a Hard World by Jerry Vass, isolating the objections, common objections presented. He is purchasing a call recording feature from Clarity Voice to enhance the sales training even more and perfect his sales system.
Marketing System Projects This Week
- SEO Strategy – Search Engine Optimization is one of the legs used in the three-legged-marketing stool for most, or all of my clients. This week, I took a deep dive into some of my client’s competitive position in the world of search engines. Once I knew the position we were in and exactly what it would take, we were able to tweak the strategy a bit. We decided to start doing a podcast for additional content for the website. So, we began the podcast journey.
Accounting and Financial Management Systems
- Track your income and expenses – I have clients, husband, and wife, and I’ve texted them every morning with “Good Morning! Financials. Google Reviews. Financials. Google Reviews. Financials. Google Reviews!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”, we’. We had our weekly huddle meeting and decided we were going to hit it hard in one area – finances. You may say, but your text said Google Reviews and financials, but you should know by now the weekly obsession with Google Reviews is an every week thing so that doesn’t count. They are literally typing in all of their expenses, line by line and all of their income line by line. It’s a simple, yet very effective process in the accounting and financial management systems. Do this over a 90 day period (30 days will suffice if you settle for mediocrity – ha).
Kinks in the System
That’s why you define, act, measure and refine. Your machine is perfect most of the time. But kinks in the system happen. When every week, you are defining the problem, acting on the problem, measuring the problem, refining the problem, kinks happen less and less, and when they do it is less detrimental when it does.
Our business coach system here at the Thrivetime Show is a battleship. We aren’t able to turn the battleship very easily which is why all of the pieces of the puzzle fit together 97% of the time. Why not 100% of the time? You have to allow for a 3% error at the absolute least because humans make mistakes and good humans like you and me, only 3% of the time (insert comedy punch line).
This week, as a business coach, I learned so much about different systems involved in each of my client’s business. This week was full of intention and immersion into various parts of their business and it wasn’t until reflecting on it this evening as I type that I realize how much I have learned from clients, coworkers, Clay Clark and Jonathan Kelly just in the last 7 days.
DO THIS FOR FUN: Google M.C. Escher Tessellation NOW. That… is what you should think of your business as every single day, day-in-and-day-out. You should learn to love the same, daily, stupid, repetitive tasks that keep your beautifully created systems operating like the M.C. Escher Tessellation visual you just googled and said to yourself “Oh I remember those paintings”.
