By: Mark Phelps, Principal, Synchronous Solutions
Many businesses have had tremendous success using Synchronous Flow to improve their production: reducing lead times, helping first time quality, etc. But how can you apply Synchronous Flow to Marketing and Sales?
Synchronous Flow is the flow of information or material. If you’re familiar with Synchronous Flow as it applies to production, then we take the same concepts and apply them to marketing and sales.
In marketing, it’s information flow and people flow. So, people (or leads) are your raw material, and information is what must be flowing for people to move through the process from lead to happy customer.
When we run a marketing campaign, our goal is to go out there and generate leads. When a lead comes in, we want to make sure that they are given attention as quickly as possible. And we want to build a process and train our staff, and give them the tools needed to be effective. Maybe we have someone who answers the call promptly. Or we have an email inbox that gets responded to within a couple of hours. The marketing process is about getting in front of people who are in our target market and receiving them in a way that makes them want to move forward in working with us.
Synchronous Flow is about analyzing, what is the constraint of that process? How many people can say, “Hey, I’m interested,” before the process breaks down? If one person says I’m interested, OK, no problem. If 100 people say they’re interested in a single day, could you handle all those leads with your current process and staff?
What is the limiting resource? How much is too much for our receptionist to handle? How much is too much for our salespeople to handle? What is the constraint to being able to effectively process new leads and produce quotes? If you overload the production system, it will go into chaos; if you overload a marketing system, the same thing will happen.
What is the goal of the marketing system? To generate leads. How do we measure that? A quote is put into the system. Ok, then we notice the leads are coming at this specific rate. We must identify the constraint. Why are we only ever at a certain number of quotes? What allows us to do more? What causes us to do less? And we define the process from that point forward. The goal is to continuously improve that process.
Your marketing system should get better and better. Every dollar spent on marketing should result in more quotes. Every team member in marketing should be able to handle more demand from the market.
An important thing to understand is what’s constraining your ability to respond appropriately to incoming calls? If someone calls and they’re looking to get a quote and you don’t respond to them in an hour or two, they’ve already called someone else and you lost that lead. You need to be able to monitor your capacity and your incoming calls and make sure that you have sufficient capacity to answer the phone and respond in the timeframe that the customer expects.
Outside sales is about getting new B2B relationships. What constrains that resource is anything the outside salesperson is doing that’s not generating new relationships. For example, we’ve seen outside salespeople who are responsible for assembling and delivering the samples and maintaining the sample racks. That is not developing new relationships. You can get somebody who’s much better at that for less dollars than your top salespeople. From a Synchronous Flow standpoint, what is your outside salesperson doing that’s not directly related to developing new relationships? Apply the process to figure out how to offload those tasks to somebody else and let the outside salesperson focus solely on building relationships.
Another thing you don’t want your outside salesperson doing is creating the paperwork associated with those relationships. Somebody who’s really good at talking with people is not always good at the details of setting it up in your CRM. So, offload that work from them and let them focus on what they do well.
Whether they’re inside or outside sales, Synchronous Flow has a lot to offer in terms of how to focus and take your capacity and your business to the next level. Equally important, or maybe even more important, is what Synchronous Flow has to say about pricing strategies.
Most businesses run off margins and that thinking will get you in trouble. There is the perception that there is a certain margin that a business needs to earn. Understanding what profitability really means is a game-changer. Watch this four-part mini-series on “How Your Business Makes Money.”
Once you understand what it takes to be profitable, you can empower your salespeople to go out there and buy new customers. How you do this is through aggressive pricing strategies in new markets. Once you’ve built the relationship, over time, you can gradually work the pricing structure up to your normal pricing. Leverage your capacity during a down market or during slow times of the year.
It’s likely if you’re reading this article that you have not maxed out your marketplace. The market is still ample. There’s plenty of business out there. How will you innovate now?
If you’re interested in talking with one of our consultants, start by requesting a Free Business Review, only TWO available for the month of February 2025. This is only for business owners ready to grow their business. There is some homework required. First come, first served. CLICK HERE to get started.
