Taking a “Success Inventory” To Discover Hidden Profits in Your Business
Today I am going to share with you the first step in dramatically improving the results of everything you ALREADY do well - marketing campaigns, sales processes, lead generation techniques, upsells, referrals, collections, inventory management and so on.
I am talking about adding 5%, 10% or even 20% improvements to things like increasing your sales conversion rates by 20% or shaving 10% off the time it takes to perform key tasks.
Perhaps the best part is that none of these incredible added streams of profit will cost you a dime to implement, and you will meet little or no resistance from your staff, and only praise from your customers.
Often I see businesses get so focused on fixing things or scrambling for new business that they make the painful mistake of ignoring the procedures and systems that are the key to their success. But the fact is that these very systems are the easiest to improve and see instantaneous, measurable results.
Finding EASY Profits
The first step of the four part series we call “Leveraging Your Success” is to take a “Success Inventory”. This involves taking an inventory of everything that is working well in your company — marketing campaigns, sales processes, lead generation techniques, upsells, referrals, collections, inventory management and so on. Then evaluating your current procedures (whether in writing or not) to spot opportunities for improvement:
WOW! Scott that is a real revelation &.well, yes. It is. And you will be amazed what simple breakthroughs you will make by spending just a few minutes on this process. In working with thousands of companies, less than 2% have done this process (and only 4 have done all four steps of the Leverage Your Success System).
Let me use a real-life example to illustrate the power of this simple process. A Physical Therapy client produces thousands of dollars in profit every month by cross-selling a medical device to their patients. Basically the process involved asking the patient, at the conclusion of treatment, if they wanted to purchase the piece of equipment that required a medical necessity and prescription from the patient’s attending physician, and a pre-approval from the insurance company.
We revisited the undocumented “success best practice” and broke down the process. As we did this, we identified several simple ways to dramatically improved results — pre-approval was done day one. We streamlined the process and increased conversion rates by 27%. The important distinction here is that there was tons of improvement potential on something that was all ready super successful.
There are two areas to quickly spot improvements:
1) Systemization
This is where you have a process that works well but it is not being done consistently - essentially because you do not have written procedures to follow or a mechanism to measure and monitor outcomes.
Systemization also includes techniques or procedures that are being left to individuals to do “their own way” instead of modeling the best way. In these cases, you will experience tremendous variance in performance — as was the case between Negotiator A and B.
2) Process Improvement
Process improvements include procedures that are relatively systematic but where there is clearly an opportunity to improve certain elements or steps in the process that will make a measurable difference. This is often the fastest way to increase profits. After all, you have a documented procedure. Your staff follows the procedure and is getting results. Therefore, you can easily make changes (test) that often produce profound results.
What are some successful procedures where you can improve one or more elements that will incrementally improve results? Write down 2-3 tasks and then evaluate the process to spot easy improvements.
