Overhauling a Sales Process

Hey there entrepreneurs,

Welcome to the Better Business Brief, where I share takeaways from:

running a business I’m building to sell for millions
my consulting with business owners building to sell for millions
tips and tricks you can use to do the same

My partner and I are doing a deep and intensive sales-process overhaul for a local commercial services business.

We’re a few days in, enjoying ourselves, and making some big changes…

So today, in less than 5 minutes, I’ll give you:

🔎 What changes we’re making

🧠 Why we’re making them

🗺️ How this can apply to your business

This business did around $2M/year in sales last year, but had some concerns about their growth and how to best move forward.

Here are the things we immediately realized needed some changing:

1. Switching from a cash-suck business to a cash-flow business.

Almost all of their clients were getting net 30 payment terms with absolutely no deposit required up front for the work to get started. We saw this and immediately realized this could get very dangerous very quickly.

Pulling in a really big job with a lot of labor required could put them into debt or sink them fast while waiting to get paid. Because they still have to pay their people to work in the meantime.

Our fix: we suggested that they simply start collecting anywhere from 25 - 50% down as a down payment and transparently tell the client that it is because of their need to cover labor. With this change made, they can actually breathe a little easier knowing payroll will always be covered first, and even collect some profits potentially to reinvest into other ventures and growth initiatives while finishing the job.

2. Setter/closer framework.

We realized pretty quickly that their sales process involved both simple lead generation activity and also in-depth technical analysis via doing assessments and estimates. The issue is that they only have a few people capable of doing that deeply technical analysis, but have a couple more who can just do lead generating activities.

Everyone was wearing the hat of doing lead generating activities before, and this was spreading the technical guys thin, and also decreasing the amount of assessments they could perform and estimates they could generate.

Our fix: we agreed on funneling all lead generating activities to the couple of business development people that aren’t technically trained. That way they could focus on “top of funnel activity” while the other guys just focus on the end of the sales process. We expect this to help everyone hone their own craft more and make it more of a machine where everyone plays their individual part rather than trying to be a jack of all trades.

3. Customizing CRM to specific sales-process.

They were already utilizing a CRM or customer relationship manager, but they didn’t have it refined to their own system.

Our fix: The first thing we did is break down their whole process from beginning to end. Brand new lead to finished job, fully paid. This gave us about 12 steps of the whole process, including warm vs. cold lead, getting an assessment and estimate, the job being performed, all payment being collected, and more. They previously had 4 “sections” in their pipeline manager, so we increased it to 12 - one for each individual step of the process.

Now the team members who “own” different parts of the process can visually focus on just a few of those sections each and focus on moving all leads/clients to the next part of the process rather than trying to track down what is going on all the time, or just not capturing all data of what is happening.

We also added email and text message automation to different stages of the “customer journey” so that their leads and clients could stay updates and be more likely to take the actions that moved them forward in the pipeline.

Finally, we created a custom form within the CRM which we embedded on their website to replace one that just sent emails to the team when new leads came in. This way, every time a new lead fills out a website form through organic or paid traffic, they get captured into the “machine” and nothing falls through the cracks.

There are more changes to come with this one, so expect to possibly get updates, but this was all about creating a “machine” so that the team can all operate from a shared brain and smoothly work leads all the way through it as often and easily as possible, all while feeding more into it.

If you think your business could benefit from making changes like this, find a time here to let me know what’s going on and see if it’s something we can help with.

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Happy value-building to you!

See you next time for Better Business Brief,

-Brody