New Year's Resolution—set yourself up for success

When business picks back up for your industry, are you going to be ready? What can you do during slow times to maximize the inevitable better times that will come, someday.

This year we find ourselves in exceptionally uncertain times. For most of us, we always experience slow going in the last quarter, but 2001 was downright painful. Still, we can see hopeful signs. Jobless claims seem to leveling out, consumers are trying to spend money on new homes and holiday gifts, and travel is picking back up. In some cases, corporations are actually investing, but they’re investing in new places—such as network security and teleconferencing capabilities. Gas is inexpensive, money is cheap to borrow, and the stock market is presenting some good bargains. However long it takes to happen, we are poised for some good stuff.

What are you doing right now as an organizational leader? It’s fine to focus on strategy, but at some point strategy has to join up with tactics to make anything happen. Consider your business processes to make strategies and tactics connect. Right now is a good time to make sure that strategically you are working on the right things and that tactically you are doing those things effectively. For good measure you might even develop some plans for how your strategies and tactics will change depending on how our future develops. Shake off the shock; it’s time to get busy.

Here are just a few strategic areas to look at in your business, along with related tactical issues to consider. If you haven’t thought about these in a while, it’s time.

Management Processes

A lot of companies are managed from day-to-day. What is the fire we have to put out, what’s the big order, what’s the big crisis? In contrast, disciplined business put some tactical processes in place that set up scheduled, recurring activities to address things ahead of time. Are you, on a regular basis, working on the following with you teams?:

• Strategic planning
• Business planning
• Market planning
• Profit/loss review
• Project planning
  

For each of these strategic areas, do you have a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or semi-annual review and/or reporting process, including holding meetings and developing action items? Who have you assigned to drive each of these areas? Do you have a process in place to ensure that decisions are communicated throughout the company? Does the echelon below you know your business goals for the year? Have they developed goals to support you? Has the echelon below them established supporting goals? Does this chain of supporting goals extend all the way from the top to the bottom of the organization?

Sales Processes

People don’t often think of sales as process driven, but they are. We all know that transaction-based sales is a numbers game, utilizing the famous funnel: x number of calls = y number of appointments = z number of sales, or something like that. Here are a few comments on sales processes:

• Structured selling - How many calls does it take to generate a sale in your business? Are you tracking this? Do you know which sales reps are doing well and which need development? Processes combined with results tracking could help you figure it out.
• Opportunity review - Are you trying to land every opportunity, even when it isn’t good business? What is the review process that helps your staff know what kinds of opportunities you want to go after? Maybe the business isn’t even worth bidding on, but if the sales process doesn’t require any management review at predefined stages of the sales process, you won’t know.
• Opportunity tracking - Do you have anything in place to track hot opportunities? Is it centralized in any way? Can the sales manager put their hands on the information quickly? It could pay off handsomely to know when to put the push on a mature opportunity, if we knew it was a mature opportunity.
• Compensation - Don’t mess around with this, because it can backfire. As soon as possible in the year, your sales staff needs to know how they will be compensated for sales. Further, how do you compensate for “team sales” where two reps accidentally work on the same client? You better have this plan worked out ahead of time, because it’s a bear to come up with it on the fly when everyone is angry.
• Order processing - Is it an order for new business, an order to support something we already sold, the tip of an iceberg? When an order comes in, now does it get scrutinized, approved, assigned, and delivered (more about delivery later)?

Marketing Processes

Marketing? Isn’t that the same as sales? Not really. Marketing is more akin to advertising. It is putting your business in the place of being recognized in your field, so when people need services like yours they will naturally think of (or discover) you.

• Leads generation - Do you have anything in place to help feed warm leads to your sales reps? Have you identified trade shows, society conventions, promotional events, etc., to gather names of people and businesses that are interested in your services? Can you set up a team with a process to run such efforts like a well-oiled machine, or will you and your marketing team be constantly reinventing the wheel?
• Market positioning - Do you have any processes in place to constantly put yourself in front of your clients and prospective clients? This could include everything from expensive advertising on a weekly basis in newspaper, TV, and radio ads, to something as inexpensive as a regularly scheduled online newsletter broadcast to an email list. Whatever you use, make sure that your clients and prospects hear that you are the experts in your field, and that they hear it on a very regular basis. A steady, repetitive approach works better than catch-as-catch-can.
• Benchmarking - This can mean a lot of things, but what I want you to find out here is how you compare to your competitors. “We don’t have any competitors,” is not a good answer. You are in an industry with other organizations that provide solutions to the same customers that you do. What do they do? How much do they charge? What is their level of quality? Who are you up against and in what clients? How can this be a process? Assign someone on your team to read the trade press and report on a weekly or monthly basis. Have them join related professional societies and trades groups. Get plugged in. The alternative is to get surprised when a player in your field figures out how to do a better job than you do for a lower price. The key here is to get the information in digestible form on a very predictable basis. Occasionally you’ll feed some of this information into your strategic business planning processes.

People Processes

If your organization has grown or collapsed in size, it’s probably important to take a hard look at this area.

• Hiring/Firing - If you’ve grown much, your hiring and firing practices may now reach a new threshold of scrutiny. Larger businesses have to worry much more about discrimination, Americans with Disabilities Act, etc. If you crossed the line, make sure that your processes are in order and set up to mitigate risks. If you’ve gotten smaller and crossed the threshold the other way, you may want to streamline some of your processes—too much adherence to detail could be more expensive than you can afford, and simply not worth the effort. In either case, make sure the processes are fair—worthy of a review anytime.
• Career building - Can people advance in your company? Is there a formal approach to advancement? Processes that establish a career path for employees may very well keep them around longer.
• Complaint handling - How do you address grievances in your organization? A formalized and responsive grievance system can reduce the need for a union, alert you to time-bombs in the organization, and keep people more focused on work instead of anger.
  Idea gathering/development - Some of the best ideas for your company can be the thousands of incremental and inexpensive ideas that come from employees. A formal recognition program can get more of these great ideas on the table. Make sure it includes a way to gather ideas, review, assign and develop them.
• Organization building - Think of “team building,” but on a macro basis. I don’t mean a cheerleading effort. I am referring to a process that trains your people to work together more effectively. Standardized training that helps your people recognize diverse problem-solving and decision-making styles can redirect as much as 40% more energy to productivity. There are a number of effective psychometric tools that can be used for this purpose. One of the best I’ve seen is TimeTyping™ from TimeType Solutions. Their “Decision-making Wheel” does an amazing job of teaching people how to value and utilize each other’s talents.
• Re-defining the company after layoffs - If you have collapsed the number of employees, you may have more work to do than your realize. I know several companies that are ready for meltdown as I write this, and the upper echelon doesn’t even know it. Not to keep bringing up TimeType Solutions, but their Rebound program is a process for getting an organization back on track after the massive layoffs we’ve seen.
  

Delivery Processes

Are you delivering customized services to clients? Make sure you have a process for the usual phases of delivery.

• Needs assessment - How do you figure out what the client needs, or more importantly, what will meet their business needs?
• Solution design - This can’t be a cookie cutter approach, but you can have checklists and checkpoints to make sure you consistently design winning solutions.
• Solution development - Run this part according to Hoyle (“Hoyle” being the Project Management Body of Knowledge, or PMBOK). This is where you can actually schedule what you’re doing, keep the client in the loop, and manage the developers, engineers, programmers, etc., to a schedule. If you don’t have a good Project/Program Office and the Project Manager(s) to go with it, it is time to start looking around.
• Customer approval - Do you have standardized documents for customer sign-offs. C’mon, even the local car repair shop does this.
• Implementation - Do you have an implementation team that uses proven, repeatable processes in place? It’s time to develop them, or at least review them. Why set yourself up to trip right before the finish line?
  

It’s Quiet—Too Quiet

If you had been wondering what your team could be working on right now, I hope I’ve given you some ideas. Be keenly aware that we are in a calm, but it is a calm before a storm. We don’t know what kind of storm it will be, a “good” storm or a “bad” storm, but I can guarantee that at some point in the future you will be frantically busy again.

In case you’ve forgotten, you have a bazillion hatches to get battened down before it hits.

© 2002 M. A. “Ryan” Yuhas
InterDimension Strategies Inc.