Aaron Hoos

Your sales funnel is the most important asset in your business (and yet, it’s one of the most overlooked aspects in many businesses, too!).

With a fast flowing, well-connected sales funnel, you’ll sell more products or services in less time and at less cost, resulting in higher revenue and higher profit. No other part of your business has as much significance on the survival of your business than your sales funnel.

When you understand and master your sales funnel, you create new opportunities to:

• Focus your various marketing and social media efforts on the most promising areas (without wasting time or money on marketing that delivers zero business benefit).
• Reduce your lead generation effort while increasing the quality and quantity of leads.
• Qualify your prospects faster and more accurately and send through the best prospects (while making money even on the ones who don’t qualify).
• Sell more — and more often — to customers who turn into eager evangelists; increase cash flow and profit.
• Reduce your expenses by focusing on only the most effective marketing and selling efforts.
• Automate your business to save effort and to allow you to put your focus elsewhere on your business.

And that’s not all. A sales funnel should be the backbone of your business, from which all other aspects of your business spring forth. Your sales should be tied into your sales funnel (which might sound like a funny statement, but many businesses aren’t set up that way). Your marketing should be tied into your sales funnel. Your customer service efforts should b tied into your sales funnel. Your accounting should be tied into your sales funnel. Everything your business does should be done with the sales funnel in mind.

When that happens — when you start with a sales funnel and move outward — you create a tightly integrated, low-cost, high profit business model that is focused on results.

At Henry Alzamora’s blog, writer Robert Simons offers up seven questions that businesses need to ask themselves to focus their efforts and execute more effectively.

I’ll list the questions here, but go over to Alzamora’s blog for more details:

1. Who is your primary customer?
2. How Do Your Core Values Prioritize Shareholders, Employees, and Customers?
3. What Critical Performance Variables Are You Tracking?
4. What Strategic Boundaries Have You Set?
5. How Are You Generating Creative Tension?
6. How Committed Are Your Employees to Helping Each Other?
7. What Strategic Uncertainties Keep You Awake at Night?

Read the questions and further explanations at: Seven Strategy Questions: A Simple Approach for Better Execution.

Lists like these are extremely valuable to help you focus and cut through the clutter of the things that vie for your attention. Take the time today to start answering these questions in your own business.

Have you ever started researching something only to discover you already had the information in a really convenient place? Have you ever started on a project only to discover that you already had a good portion of it completed but tucked away in a dusty file? Have you ever stared blankly at a folder of ebooks and downloaded resources and wondered when you’d find the time to review this information?

This happens to me all the time and I’ve decided to do something about it, and I thought I’d share it with you.

HERE’S THE PROBLEM
Although I only noticed the problem recently, I’ve been amassing valuable information over time. I’ve got textbooks from my stockbroker days and from my MBA; I’ve got tons of downloaded materials (ebooks and podcasts mostly) that have been purchased or given to me; and I am an avid book collector with shelves of business books.

Amassing all of this information is good — in theory — except that I have reached the point where I simply have too many resources to manage. Where can I find information on this topic or on that topic? There are potential resources everywhere.

HERE’S WHAT I’VE BEEN DOING ABOUT IT
So I’ve started creating a taxonomy of resources. A taxonomy is the classification and ordering of a group of things. And I’ve decided to classify my resources according to where in the life of a business they can be most helpful.

So first I developed some life-of-a-business classifications. (Actually, I had these classifications hanging around for another purpose and I used them here).

• Find a customer problem
• Find a creative solution
• Create a business model
• Create a sales funnel
• Build a compelling brand
• Implement the business model and sales funnel
• Grow the business
• Exit the business

Next, I’ve started reviewing my resources and plugging them into the appropriate places. Sometimes an entire book fits in one category, sometimes an entire book fits into more than one category. Sometimes a single chapter from one book fits in one category and another chapter fits somewhere else.

As my list has grown, I’ve had to create sub-categories to make it even more useful. So the “Grow the business” category might include sub-categories like “Leading and Managing”, “Productivity and Efficiency”, “Tipping points”, etc.

JUST IN CASE YOU THINK I’M CRAZY
On the (hopefully) slim chance that you think I’m crazy, let me tell you why I’m doing this. It’s not because I have a ton of time on my hands I’m looking to burn it by sorting a big pile of resources. The real reasons I’m creating this taxonomy are:

• To make my business more agile: I’ll be able to respond to the changing market by quickly finding the right resources to guide me.
• To make my customers happier and my business more profitable: I spend a fair amount of time chasing down information that will help my clients. This will help me to speed up that process.
• To make better use of my investments: Like most entrepreneurs I’ve met, I have invested in a fair amount of resources and have only scratched the surface in terms of using them. I want to change that. I want to open them up and mine them for the gold that’s inside.
• To identify gaps: I’m going to find sooner or later that I’m missing something important. The categories listed above are the areas where I tend to help clients a lot, and if I find that I’m missing resources there, I can easily see it and correct it.

I’m going to keep it really easy to do and easy to access. I’m not here to create something ponderous and academic — I want it to be insanely usable.

IT DOESN’T STOP THERE
My short-term plan is to add my books, textbooks, ebooks, and podcasts to my taxonomy. Later, I might consider adding research notes, web bookmarks, and network contacts to this process… but that’s down the road.

WHAT YOU CAN DO
Give it a try. You don’t have to use the taxonomy categories I’ve used; create a list of categories that’s useful for you. (I chose my categories because they applied to my business but would also apply to my client’s businesses, so I could easily find the right resource regardless of whether I was working in my own business or a client’s business).

Start small: If you have a ton material, break it up to keep it manageable. Just do one shelf of books at time. Or plan to do one ebook per week. Don’t plan to do it all because it could become overwhelming. I’m not reading all of my resources as I “taxonomize” them, but I am finding it to be a useful exercise to be reminded what each resource contains.

Make it useful: Use the type of system that works for you: I’m using Microsoft Excel, only because I’m comfortable in spreadsheet. I was tempted to use a database but I wanted to start really fast and with no barriers, and a spreadsheet fit the bill.

Purge a little: It doesn’t hurt to discard resources as you go. I found an ebook I downloaded from 2002 about using search engines. I found it tucked into a forgotten folder within a forgotten folder within a forgotten folder… and it belonged in a museum.

Think long-term: Stick with this project. It may not be done next week or next month; in fact, it might not be done for a year. But you will finish and you will start reaping the benefits faster than you realize.

Do it because it’s profitable: This will be a profitable exercise for you: You’ll run a better business and you’ll make more effective use of existing investments.

In this third of 5 videos, Janice Roberts talks about how businesses should lose control, and give that control to their customers. This is insanely difficult for businesses to do!

Growth is good, for the most part. As entrepreneurs we want our businesses to grow. And although we want our businesses to grow all the time, the result of the growth isn’t always ideal.

When I say “result”, I don’t mean bigger orders or bigger bills. These are the result, of course, but I’m talking about a different result: I’m talking about the challenges that come from organic growth.

Most growth happens organically, even when we try to strategize and systematize it. Organic growth is represented by a series of short, “effective-for-now” solutions that may work for a season but may not necessarily work over the long term.

Think of a building. It may have been built in one decade and be adequate for that time, but over the decades new additions are added onto it as the needs of the occupants change. I went to a grade school like this: The original building was a small, brick two-storey edifice. A large brick extension was added on. And when I attended, there was a ridiculously long corridor of metal portable structures that had been added on year after year. By the time I got there, the school was quite large and it was also an aesthetic eyesore.

Your growing business is the same: It starts out with a series of “structures” — processes, offerings, procedures, software, roles, etc. — and over time it develops; organically growing to meet the changing demands of your business.

The result? It isn’t always pleasant, although it happens so slowly that you might not even realize the patches and workarounds that develop.

A great example comes from a part time job I held in college. It was a pretty mindless data entry job at a large medical center. Each day I would work through a stack of information slips that the various medical practitioners had filled out for their patients that day. The problem was, the system may have started out as an efficient color-coded system with a handful of sensible colors for various purposes, and as it grew, it would have made sense to the person in the role before me (because they had adapted to the changes over the years). But when I showed up — as a complete outsider — I saw workaround after workaround for these slips: The yellow ones meant on thing and the blue ones meant something else… UNLESS the blue ones had a code on them that ended in the letter A. And the green ones meant one thing if they were stapled to a blue sheet of paper and something else if stapled to a pink sheet of paper. I quit within a couple of days, only because I was worried that I couldn’t keep it all straight and would endanger the patients.

Although you might not realize it, your business is full of workarounds exactly like this. Maybe you have to copy-and-paste a contact name from and old CRM into a newer contact management system. Maybe your website has been retooled so often that links go nowhere or take customers on bizarre paths. Maybe your invoice system used to pull data from the shipping software, until you outgrew the shipping software and now you have to input your invoices manually.

These workarounds may have been patches to keep your processes going, but they can be time consuming and can lead to errors… and if you ever bring on another employee, they can cause confusion and waste your money by making your staff inefficient.

Finding and fixing your workarounds and patches isn’t easy: You’re so familiar with your business that you just don’t see them. And fixing them is just as hard because it can require you to break and rebuild processes and systems that generally work (and seem efficient to you, even though they aren’t).

TWO FAST WAYS TO FIND YOUR WORKAROUNDS
The first way you can find your workarounds is by shopping for new software that will automate parts of your business. Yes, it’s rare that the simple act of shopping for something can help, but it’s true: Look for software that connects multiple aspects of your business together (i.e., marketing, sales, and customer service or shipping, invoicing, and bookkeeping). Seeing how things operate in one system can highlight the fact that your efforts to move information from one system to another is a simple workaround you developed years ago that you now perform out of habit.

The second way you can find your workarounds is by writing out your procedures. It’s a good idea to do this anyway, in order to build an operations manual to use when you add staff to your business. Just go through your day with your favorite notetaking device nearby and record every step you take in every business procedure. It sounds like a lot of work but it goes fast and it helps you to create a really useful operations manual while making you more efficient. That’s a good investment of your time!

HOW TO FIX YOUR WORKAROUNDS
It’s harder to make recommendations about fixing workarounds since there are so many ways that workarounds can happen and each person will create different workarounds for different reasons. (I used to ghostwrite ebooks all the time and had some standard snippets of legal disclaimers and copyright text I used over and over. I just kept these in a .txt file, which isn’t bad but there are more efficient places to keep that text).

Ultimately, if you can identify where your patches and workarounds are, you need to focus on smoothing them out: Automate them; invest in more robust software to handle them for you; delegate that part of your business; try eliminating the step altogether.

Business growth is good, but organic business growth leads to workarounds and patches that can end up costing you a lot of time (and money). Get rid of them to streamline your business!