When to Cut Bait – By Rebecca Matchette
November 9, 2009Are You Leading a Paycheck Factory or a Company? – by Tom Caprel
November 9, 2009The Perfect Process – Guaranteed to work – Every time!
Dean R. DeLisle
Every week we work with many of you to develop the next most important process in your company.
Some of the common ones are:
- Lead Management Process
- Lead Distribution Process
- Sales Process
- Customer Service Process
- Service Delivery Process
Even after a process is designed, people trained and the necessary technology in place we are not finished. In fact the process actually begins at that point. Any process has to be managed.
A small company with only 5 employees or less probably won’t have many folks to help manage the processes you develop. If you are larger then you have key people to assist in this endeavor.
No matter what size your company is, don’t bother investing in the development of a process unless you have the commitment to manage it. That being said, the process should be designed so that management requires minimal effort. Whether it is your key people or yourself managing, the process only becomes effective if it is not unwieldy in its administration requirements.
For instance, if you develop a sales process that requires a specific volume of calls to generate a specific number of appointments, you should be able to access this information in one step. Countless times we walk into organizations that require people to enter data into a data system, compile that data into an excel worksheet, only to have the manager enter it into another worksheet for the weekly meeting!
This takes too much time and is redundant for all involved. Follow a couple of key basics when developing a process to be managed:
- Get agreement from both the people doing the work and the manager on how the success of the process will be measured.
- Define the necessary steps to gather the data required.
- Determine the most efficient way to capture the data around the process.
- Define when the results of the data related to the process will be needed.
- Define how the results will be retrieved or delivered.
- Get the manager of the process to agree that this will be the ONLY way data will be attained.
- Get the manager of the process to agree how they will use the data to motivate the team and engage them in perfecting the process.
- Revisit the process from time to time to make necessary improvements.
Have these basics in your sights before you outline your next process and you will be on your way to creating systems that will form great foundations in your organization.
