You might be throwing away critical cash on Sales & Marketing efforts. Many business activities are focused on the wrong end of the customer cycle and invariably lose the customers they have just acquired. Are your processes properly focused?

 

Business owners spend an inordinate amount of time evaluating their sales and marketing initiatives trying to figure out the best way to reach more and more customers. They incorrectly believe that all they need to do is add volume to their business to succeed.

Every time they place an ad in media or implement awareness campaigns, they incur a cost to acquire customers. Perhaps it's as low as $0.35 if you convert a qualified customer through direct mail on the first contact. This is rarely the case as it takes as many as 7 contact incidents to effect a conversion and the costs to acquire a customer are typically much higher. Depending on your business model, the costs to acquire a single customer may be in the hundreds or thousands of dollars. Whatever the cost, your business pays money on every new customer and the total customer acquisition costs can be significant over time.

Where most businesses fail is in the creation of properly designed processes that move customers through several buying and service cycles during the life of the business relationship. Putting a qualified customer through a poorly performing process insures that the customer will not return. The money spent on acquiring that customer has been lost and has to be incurred again to replace this customer. Keeping a customer satisfied is the best way to achieve a return on sales and marketing investments, but this can only occur if the processes that run the business are focused on the customer's satisfaction.

Properly designed processes don't stop at the customer focused operations. Too many times we see business owners and managers stressed out over the way their employees perform their functions and blame the employee when something goes wrong. The crazy part is when they replace an employee blamed for poor performance with a new one that makes the same mistakes. It is through examples like these that we illustrate that failure is attributed to bad processes, not bad employees.

Have you taken the time to properly define and implement the processes your business needs...

• to grow?
• to achieve a return on marketing?
• to reduce stress and make your business enjoyable again?