Change Your Income and Your Outcomes
For years I’ve enjoyed working with entrepreneurs in figuring out how their strategy affects various systems in their companies. It’s fun and a challenge to figure out how strategy and systems come together for improved business income and outcomes.
When you adopt a systems mindset, you begin to look at how your decision in one area affects the other areas simultaneously. So what’s this systems mindset? When you adopt a systems mindset, you look at your whole business. According to the INCOSE Systems Engineering Handbook, a systems thinker “knows how systems fit into the larger contents of day-to-day life, how they behave, and how to manage them.” “Systems thinking is a unique perspective on reality – a perspective that sharpens our awareness of wholes and how the parts within those wholes interrelate.”
One of those parts of a whole includes the systems you create that helps to close a sale or, as I refer to it, Seal the Deal. The Seal the Deal SystemTM looks at how you use both systems and how you educate your prospects as well as authentically offer resources. Part of that system is about offering choices to your prospects. One major mistake that business owners and solopreneurs make when structuring their business model is offering only one high priced service or one option. This leaves the prospect with a “yes I’ll work with you” OR “no I won’t work with you and they go; otherwise known as the “yes” OR “no-and-go” scenario. When you develop choices, it changes the focus from yes OR no-and-go to “which option.”
A good example of how a system’s mindset can help change your whole business comes from a participant who attended my Entrepreneurial Edge System 3-Day Intensive.
In less than two weeks after attending, I received a call from this participant on his success in changing his system of converting prospects to clients. After being inspired by a system and conversion process, he implemented the conversion part of the process at a recent workshop he hosted. He looked at the options and resources he was providing his prospects and made adjustments to his overall process. He ended up not only providing high content and high value in his workshop, but he also created options for his prospects to work with him afterward resulting in a 100% conversion rate. What that means is that 100% of prospects to his workshop chose one of the products or services he offered.
What’s more is that union nebraska alliance he also created a metric for himself. He now uses his conversion rate as a gauge. Metrics are good ways to measure how the various systems are or aren’t working so that you can continuously improve them. Afterall, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
In a recent episode of CBS’s Undercover Boss, the CEO of 7-Eleven explored his company from the inside when he went undercover as an employee and got a wakeup call about one of his response call times for replacing burned out lights in his franchises. When he went through his own process, he realized it would be over a week to get lights replaced in a back room causing potential safety issues. His experience allowed him to see things from his franchise owner’s perspective giving him a new view on field operations and his company’s metrics.
When reviewing your business systems, remember to look at how each part of the process affects your whole business. If you’re looking at just the strategy portion of your business, take time to also review the processes from your customer’s perspective. You will also want to review your systems as they may have elements that have different life cycles or parts of the system may become outdated and need to be changed.
When you can keep in mind how all of the parts and systems interrelate and monitor them to see if they are still relevant, you can get the edge in building a sustainable business that remains agile and relevant to today’s marketplace.
Do you have a system that works for you? If so, let’s hear about it on my blog at http://excellerateassociates.wordpress.com or get my free Excellerator Ezine at http://www.excellerateassociates.com