No BS Strategy

Let’s get right down to it.  The best strategy in the world doesn’t mean anything if it just sits on a shelf and collects dust.  Strategy isn’t an event, it’s a process.  That means that it’s not something you set and forget.  It’s something that guides you and your company, but its also a living thing that needs to be updated and changed as new information comes in.

Similarly, the best systems in the world are useless if they’re not put into practice. It does you no good to have identified a set of ‘best practices’ if they’re not followed.

But they’re actively harmful if they’re meticulously scripted and require your people to follow them blindly, forcing everything to fit into the system framework.

Here’s an easy example – I’ve worked with a lot of companies on scripting their incoming and outgoing calls.  And every single time I bring up the topic, I get the same response:

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There’s probably no better place to talk about the importance of the sales process than during our week-long focus on systems and their role in business.

This is, bar none, the most important system for your company.  If you’re looking for a place to start with systems, start with your sales process.  If you’re looking for a system to tweak, or to refine, or to improve, look to your sales process.  I really cannot overstate the importance of a well-understood sales process for any company.

In an early post on strategy, I noted that every company has at least one strategy, even if it’s “Keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best.”  It’s really disheartening to me how many companies use this as their default strategy when it comes to sales.

What’s the sales process in your business?

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Before we move on to look at how to generate and document systems in your company, and examples of successful systems, let’s take a post and talk about yet one more of the benefits you reap when you have a documented set of systems in place – The ease of training new staff.

Without formal systems, training new staff takes on at least three challenges that don’t need to be there.

1. Increasing expectations of current staff (without corresponding increase in pay)
2. Creates uncertainty in new hires and existing staff
3. Impedes flow of new ideas

1.  Increasing expectations of current staff (without corresponding increase in pay)

Small companies generally don’t have training departments or big HR budgets to make sure that every new employee gets optimal training & orientation.  Instead, when possible they plug new employees in with existing employees, and hope that the talents of the new hire and the knowledge of the existing employee will merge together and lead to productivity relatively quickly.

Without systems, you’re dramatically increasing the expectations on your current staff, and likely not increasing their compensation.  After all, most businesses don’t include “Head of training and development” in the job titles of their staff, but that’s exactly what they become if you have them handle the orientation and training of new staff members.

Having more systems that give guidelines on expected performance, key deliverables, and best practices make it much easier to integrate new employees.

2.  Creates uncertainty in new hires and existing staff

With no definite instructions or policies on how to do things, people are left to figure out the best response to any situation using their best judgment.  Now, that’s not to say that their best judgment is always wrong.  To the contrary, the results are often wonderful.  After all, there are some tremendously talented people out there.

The problem is that the results are also unpredictable, and you have no way of figuring out what works best.

For example, let’s suppose you ask a staff member to take care of follow-up calls to new clients.  An implicit system here, with vague instructions like “Call them up and see if they have any questions, and try to get them to commit to a follow-up meeting ” might result in 10 different interpretations over 10 calls.

This would be fine, except for the simple fact that very minor changes in language and wording can have very different results, even in short phone calls.  What you want for your business is to give everybody access to the information that’s most likely to let them succeed – Not forcing them have to re-invent the wheel every time.

By having solid and explicit systems, instructions and policies in place, you also let your staff free up their attention and focus, so that they can find more effective ways to help your business run as smoothly as possible.

3. Impedes flow of new ideas

The third problem a lack of formal systems can create is that it makes it much harder for great ideas to spread.  Sticking with the ‘calling system’, if one of your staff has 80% of the people who call in for information book and show up for an appointment, and another has only 50%, then there’s certainly something different between the 2 approaches.  In a corporate culture that’s committed to documenting and systemizing excellent performance, the spread of tactics and good ideas is much faster than without, and this will improve the performance of your entire business.

In his fantastic Tribes, Seth Godin takes the idea of systems & systemization to task, specifically targeting and refuting the ideas of Michael Gerber (The E-Myth).

One of the ideas that Gerber promotes is to make your business ‘franchise-able’; in other words, creating a complete list of processes and procedures that allow even the least talented (but still qualified) people to work within it.  Gerbers idea is that if you have strong enough systems, you don’t need to rely on superstars to be successful.

Godin is (rightly, in my mind) quite offended at the notion that you should try to remove as much autonomy as possible from businesses, and asserts instead that by leading well, you can tap into the inner genius of your team.

Me?  I’m going to argue that there’s a lot of middle ground between those two positions, and I tend to favor more systemization rather than less.  I also think that it’s absolutely critical that you try to bring out the best in every member of your organization, and that you create an environment where people can experiment, personalize, and shine.  Reconciling those two positions isn’t as outlandish as it might seem.

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Systemization is one of the topics that’s nearest and dearest to my heart.  Unfortunately, it’s also an area that’s often overlooked by business owners, mainly because it does require some effort up front.  But once they’re up and running, a good set of systems helps everything in your business run much more smoothly.

I’ll be using the words system and systemization a lot, so I suppose I should define them – a system is simply a fixed and documented set of actions designed to reach a specific goal.  Systemization is simply the process of creating and applying systems in your business.

By creating and following systems yourself, and having your staff follow them, you ensure that everybody has the best chance of success – You take out the guessing and the last minute improvisation, and instead give your staff (and yourself) the tools that have been shown to work.

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