Systematic Growth

SYSTEMATIC GROWTH: A Simple Framework for Creating Reliable and Repeatable Revenue Growth Written & Engineered by Ray J. Green

Special thanks to Bob Perkins and the team at Beutler Ink for providing the careful readings and constructive feedback necessary to get this book across the f inish line.

Copyright Š 2020 Raymond Green.

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Second Release Designed by Gevorg Hayrapetian.

First Release Designed by Beutler Ink in the United States of America.

Second release 2020. www.rayjgreen.com

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

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What the Hell is a Growth System

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Instant Results: (Drag Strip) vs. Sustainable 14 Scalable Results (Le Mans) Justification: Value Proposition

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Attract: Marketing

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Convert: Sales

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Keep: Retention, Repeat Business, & Referrals

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Conclusion

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INTRODUCTION: If you’re reading this book, chances are high you’re a CEO, an entrepreneur, or a sales and marketing head looking for a sales breakthrough. Any number of scenarios could’ve led you here:

• Perhaps your sales are heading in the wrong direction and you need to get things turned around.

• Maybe your sales aren’t declining, but they aren’t increasing

either—they’re just stubbornly stagnant, despite all the effort and energy being invested in moving the needle.

• Maybe your sales are growing, just not at the rate you think they should be.

Whatever the case, you want to grow your business. You aren’t alone, and perhaps you’ve come to the right place.

I say perhaps because increasing sales in your business could be done in many ways. There are short-term solutions, long-term solutions, and an infinite number of options in between. This guide presents a framework for a very specific type of growth — sustainable and scalable growth. I’ll dive more into what that means later, but for now just know that if you are looking for shortcuts or cheap solutions, this is unlikely to be the guide for you.

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How This Book Can Help You (And How It Cannot) I created this book to provide other entrepreneurs and CEOs with an easy-to-follow framework to help think about growth. Those scenarios listed above? I’ve experienced all of them, and I wanted to create an asset that would have been invaluable to me when I was confronting those challenges.

What this book is not, however, is a step-by-step guide for long-run scaling. While it would be far better for my own business model if I could share a guide or a video offering you a paint-by-numbers template to grow your business, I have, alas, failed to discover that holy grail of sales. When I do, you can bet I’ll scream it from the rooftops and we’ll all swim in piles of money!

Because there are a near-infinite number of ways to assemble a company—accounting for variables such as people, structures, cultures, industries, business models, and operations—it would be impossible to create a single, one-size-fits-all sales growth manual.

Lastly, this book is not a comprehensive analysis of every subject we are going to cover. You can study sales and marketing for a lifetime without getting to everything. I sure as hell didn’t fit these subjects in a chapter.

That said, there are fundamentals of growth that are applicable to virtually every business or organization I’ve worked with, including nationally recognized brands and nonprofits, private-equity-backed companies, independent businesses, start-ups, and single-operator online stores. They were as applicable to my wife’s custom baby bedding business as they were a national advocacy organization.

These fundamentals of growth will no doubt apply in some way to expanding your business as well, and this book presents a simple framework to apply them.

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ABOUT ME: If you’re anything like me, you want to know who’s writing a guide like this before you commit to reading it. The source matters. (I take the counsel I receive on a daily basis from my kids differently than I do advice from my trusted mentors.)

My résumé is simple but, I hope, compelling: I’m an entrepreneur and executive with more than a decade of operating experience with full profit and loss responsibility, including as a CEO, and I’ve advised dozens of companies. All my experience has been in driving growth— meaning creating more of it, rekindling it, or discovering it.

I’ve started my own companies, one of which was a music promotions company that was acquired by another agency. Moreover, I co-led the turnaround of a family-owned business that required transitioning the business from a brick-and-mortar retail store to an online, national retailer with a fundamentally different business model. This small business was eventually acquired by an investor group.

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I transitioned from these ventures into sales, where I learned the tricks of the trade in a number of ways: one memorable instance occurred when I was asked to sell cologne and perfume in parking lots for 100 percent commission, only to show up on payday to find an empty office. I remain impressed by how efficient they were!

After that, I joined a national sales team with strong sales leadership and learned from some of the industry’s best inside sales talent about how to work with gatekeepers, deliver compelling presentations, leverage keywords, and close, close, close. I was a consistent President’s Club producer and am still proud that for several years, I never once missed a monthly sales target. (That was an early lesson on the importance of how to design effective compensation plans!)

I went on to lead this exceptional inside sales talent as their manager, and from there, I expanded the team and began doing what seemed natural to me: systematizing an operation that required finding sales unicorns to perform successfully.

This process involved deeply analyzing the value proposition, presentation, scripting, tonality, and work habits—along with virtually everything else—that went into generating results. These efforts to create systems and repeatable processes led to not one, not two, not three, but four people effectively duplicating the long-standing top performer’s results, which had been until then simply accepted as an outlier.

I carried this systems-based thinking into all my roles as I went on to lead additional sales channels and teams. I have had the opportunity

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to put my thinking into practice at the manager, director, vice president, and CEO level with strikingly similar results.

Most surprising to me was how applicable this approach was across very diverse sales channels and equally diverse product offerings.

This included phone-based political fundraising, door-to-door ad sales, nonprofit memberships, strategic partnerships between small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), Fortune 100 companies, faceto-face sales offering highly exclusive products to Fortune 1000 CEOs, online sales for fully customized baby bedding, and many, many more examples.

Some of these operations had been performing at an acceptable level, but leadership simply wanted better results. Others were startups, enterprises, or business units that had become stagnant or were in desperate need of a turnaround after several failed initiatives to get them unstuck. Across the board, the framework I’m sharing with you right now was the key to getting on track, and I had the opportunity to implement it firsthand.

The Premise: This framework has an underlying premise: the process of driving sales in your business should be treated like the process of getting more speed out of your car.

Both sales and speed are results of what a broader system is doing.

The system comprises both components (e.g., fluids, fuels, and parts) and processes (e.g., maintenance and know-how). The entire system

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works together to create results, and if all the elements of that system are running properly and have been optimized and maintained, you’ll reach top speeds. If not, no matter how well you drive, you’ll never hit maximum velocity.

The system you have in place is thus responsible for the capacity—or lack thereof—to get more results, which is why the maximum speed of every car is different. And the system is also the source of problems, which explains why two used cars can be so drastically different, despite being the same make, model, year, and color.

Now, you may be saying, “Wait, can’t I get more speed in my car by just stepping on the gas? And if speed is like sales, isn’t there a gas pedal that I can stomp on to get more sales?”

Maybe.

With both sales and speed, sometimes a quick fix can give you the boost you are looking for. Maybe stepping on the gas, changing gears, or adopting better driving habits will help you get more out of what you already have. Sometimes these simple solutions are sufficient to get you the desired output. This guide will help you identify areas where simple fixes can be employed to get better results immediately.

Simple fixes, though, shouldn’t be confused with shortcuts:

• Simple f ixes, like stepping on the gas, are relatively easy steps you can take to get more output f rom the system’s potential.

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• Shortcuts are steps you take to create more output than the system can reasonably sustain, with the intention of avoiding the heavy lifting that goes into actually creating more capacity.

A great example of this may be dropping nitrous oxide in your car. It’s something that can get you a quick boost, but it could also blow up your car. Either way, it won’t work for very long.

If your goal is to build a high-performance machine, sales and speed can be great indicators of how the machine is performing relative to its capability. And the primary objective of all the changes, engineering, and modifications is to create more output. But looking at outputs can be misleading if there’s no systemic diagnosis of what’s driving them. It’s critical that you understand the relationship between each and every variable that is impacting those outputs—lest you end up investing a lot of resources in modifying the wrong thing.

This guide is going to help you get that systemic diagnosis correct (and hopefully keep you from accidentally blowing something up).

For now, just know this: a Honda Civic can’t be expected to compete with a Formula One race car without a complete engine overhaul.

When it comes to sales, that engine is what we call a growth system, which brings us to our next chapter.

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WHAT THE HELL IS A GROWTH SYSTEM?

I’m so glad you asked! When I say growth system, I’m talking about: A system through which the core operational components of a business can be optimized to convert effort into growth via increased sales.

That’s a simple enough defi-

When I say growth system, I’m talking about: A system through which the core operational components of a business can be optimized to convert effort into growth via increased sales.”

nition, but let’s break it down further:

• Oxford def ines growth as, “the process of increasing in physical size.” The primary output we’re looking to boost is sales, both in volume and value. There are, of course, ways to increase revenue without increasing sales, but when we’re talking about business growth we’re effectively talking about business sales in one form or another. And the assorted processes and personnel involved in sales are the “core operational components” we’re focused on optimizing.

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• Oxford def ines a system as “a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done; an organized scheme or method.” For our purposes, what’s important is that a system represents a repeatable and widely applicable f ramework for doing something. Which is to say, it’s general enough to work for many different types of businesses, although certain elements will certainly need to be adjusted and customized.

So, this growth system definition seems to work on paper, but how does it play out in practice? In my experience, any business with an

JUSTIFY

ATTRACT

Successful businesses have

Successful businesses attract

a clear and direct value

qualified prospects through

proposition that effectively

smart marketing and brand

justifies (or explains) what

awareness.

they’re selling to customers and why it is beneficial.

CONVERT

KEEP

Successful businesses convert

Successful businesses keep

those prospects into sales.

customers happy, which means high retention, repeat business, and increased referrals.

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effective growth system—which is to say, any successful business—is going to do four things exceptionally well: Dear reader, if you suspect I went with Keep instead of Retain to ensure an easy-to-remember acronym (JACK), give yourself a pat on the back.

Each one of these elements is, in some respects, its own system. For the purposes of this framework, though, we’ll look at the growth system as a whole and consider how the components work together to deliver sales.

But first, a quick caveat about building your business for long-term

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INSTANT RESULTS (DRAG STRIP) VS. SUSTAINABLE & SCALABLE RESULTS (LE MANS) In the sections ahead, I’m going to cover each of the four components of the growth systems in detail. But as you’re reading, it’s important you think about something: What kind of engine am I trying to build?

That’s right, we’re going back to car racing analogies. But stay with me, because this is important.

The fundamental mechanics of a powertrain are fairly similar, but there is a big difference between what you find in a Ferrari and what you find in a homemade go-kart. Some engines are designed for short sprints, others for sustained high speeds. Some are known to be reliable, and some are, well, pieces of shit. For all intents and purposes, let’s assume we are building a growth engine (i.e, a fully powered growth system) that is practical, safe, reliable over time, and capable of sustaining high speeds for the long haul. Think Le Mans more than drag strip.

The most common questions I receive from entrepreneurs and CEOs tend to be focused on how to build a phenomenal growth system capable of winning Le Mans tomorrow. This focus on instant results isn’t really surprising. After all, I know firsthand that driven entrepreneurs and CEOs are oftentimes biased toward action and want results

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quickly. Because of this, I am going to take just a moment to address the “instant results” thought pattern with something that is not related to business but is most certainly related to money: lotteries.

Fun fact: nearly a third of all lottery winners eventually declare bankruptcy. This is exponentially higher than the population at large. But why is that?

One of the reasons this occurs is that wealth (or the lack of it) is like sales (or the lack of them). It is very often a symptom of other behaviors, good or bad. Many people play the lottery under the belief that if they merely had more money, they’d be set. But as the numbers show, the problem is not necessarily a lack of money. It is the lack of a system to properly manage money. If you have terrible financial systems in place to begin with, or none at all, a massive windfall is unlikely to solve the underlying problem. Hell, it can actually exacerbate it.

Of course, addressing symptoms rather than root causes is not a fallacy limited to lottery winners. How many health symptoms do we treat with a Band-Aid solution (metaphorical or literal) rather than addressing the issues lying beneath the surface? How many cracked walls have been painted over because those responsible hope to never address the foundation problems that may be causing them?

And how many CEOs and entrepreneurs are looking to create lasting growth by trying to just “sell more” or “sell harder”?

The best way to determine if you are falling into the trap of looking for short-term and symptom-oriented solutions is to ask yourself two questions:

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1. Am I looking for a solution that is sustainable? When I say sustainable, I mean reliable growth you can reasonably count on in the future. Think, “eating better and exercising more,” not “crash diet to fit into your favorite dress or suit next weekend.”

Or better yet, think, “Will this solution help me hit the next mile marker or the two-hundred-thousand-mile mark on my odometer?”

2. Am I looking for a solution that is scalable? When I say scalable, I mean growth that doesn’t get more difficult as time goes on. Think, “Do I really want to build a business that requires me personally driving from Milwaukee to Chicago to close this one small sale?” Not at all. Another way to think about this may be asking, “Is this something that only works because there is a unicorn-like driver behind the wheel, or is this something that creates more opportunity for anyone driving?”

This is usually when entrepreneurs and CEOs say some version of, “I don’t disagree with all that, but I just want to increase sales today.

We can worry about that sustainable and scalable stuff later.” This mentality is completely understandable. If you are going to take the necessary time to build a growth system that creates lasting and exponential growth opportunities, it may actually come at the expense of small shots in the arm today. The investments today of time and money may come at the expense of getting sales up this week or this month. But would you rather increase sales by 10% today or 10 times tomorrow?

Okay, back to your regularly scheduled growth system lesson.

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JUSTIFICATION: VALUE PROPOSITION A good friend of mine provides growth capital to businesses ready to scale, so he sees a respectable share of businesses to sample from.

He once asked an entrepreneur: DO YOU DESERVE TO BE IN BUSINESS?

I love this question and think about it all of the time! Here’s why: there is no shortage of clever tactics and techniques to extract money from customers without providing much (if any) value in return.

The entrepreneurs behind these companies might make a lot of money (at least over the short term)—but they don’t deserve to be in business.

If that appeal to morality doesn’t move you, how about this: a sustainable and scalable sales system begins with providing something of value to customers. And the more value you create, the more capacity your engine has to create the desired output—sales.

But this wisdom, unfortunately, is not always applied.

There are some unscrupulous businesses that know damn well they don’t offer value, yet they continue to take customers’ money. There’s a special place in hell for them. But the vast majority of CEOs and entrepreneurs at least believe they have a strong value proposition that reflects a genuine benefit for customers.

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Every business falls somewhere along two spectrums in this aspect.

1. One spectrum reflects the value proposition’s offer of utility (especially as perceived by the customer) 2. The other spectrum is the value proposition’s actual utility (as known by the seller) You can see how these two spectrums line up in the following table:

Actual value is

LOW

Seller’s

You’re basically You’re basically offering nothing of offering nothing value, but you aren’t of value, awarebut of it.you aren’t aware of it.

Actual value is

HIGH

You’re offering You’re offering a lot of value to acustomers, lot of value to but customers, you have very but little you have very little knowledge of what knowledge that value is of or what how that is orit. how tovalue articulate

to articulate it.

Seller’s

You’re offering offering You’re nothing of of value. value. nothing The difference is The difference is you know it, which you know it, which basically makes you basically makes a crook. you a crook.

The promised promised land!

The land!

Every business’s value proposition falls somewhere on this diagram.

As you move toward the right, you are offering more value to your customers. Kudos. Conversely, as you move over to the left, you fall into the offering-whales-some-water category.

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Likewise, as you move toward the bottom, you have more knowledge of the value you are offering, which means as you move toward the top, you have no clue of the underlying value prop.

Diagnosing where your value proposition falls in this quadrant is critical, so let’s look closer at each cell:

• In the top left, you’re basically offering nothing of value, but you aren’t aware of it. You’re like a snake oil salesman who genuinely believes you’ve got a magical elixir.

• In the bottom left, you are also offering nothing of value. The difference is you know it, which basically makes you a crook.

Perhaps a Bernie Madoff or Enron executive can be wedged right in that corner.

• In the top right, you are offering a lot of value to customers, but you have very little knowledge of what that value is or how to articulate it. A great example of this would be a company I recently worked with that experienced a huge spike in sales but had no understanding of what caused it. There are certainly worse places to be; however, there is always the risk that someone else will tap into the buyer’s motivation more effectively or that you won’t be able to repeat this success.

• The promised land is over in the bottom right. Here you’re providing exceptional value, and you know exactly what it is and how to articulate it.

How do you know where you fall in this diagram? You can start by asking yourself a few questions:

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• Can I clearly articulate the benefits customers receive by purchasing my product or service in three sentences or less?

These are not the benefits you receive nor the features of your product or service but the benefits from the customer’s perspective.

• What does your sales team tell you about the perception of the value prop? Do you have trouble f inding salespeople? Do you have trouble keeping salespeople? Do you have trouble keeping the right kinds of salespeople? Remember, you may be able to sell a shitty product, but those sales will require you to hire shitty people who don’t care about what they’re peddling.

• Do sales get easier with time? Sales are a great sign of perceived benef it, but if they don’t get easier with time, it is likely that the value proposition is deteriorating for some reason.

These questions may be sufficient to get you in the right ballpark.

The more accurate the diagnosis, the more effectively you can tinker with the components. Unfortunately, this is one of those areas that often requires a third party’s help, as it’s very difficult to be objective about a business that you live and breathe every day. (And, spoiler alert, optimizing value propositions is exactly the kind of thing I help clients with, so consider this a shameless plug for your humble author.)

Once you’re certain you are offering real value to customers or prospective customers, the next step in building a great sales system that paves the way for long-term growth is attracting them to your business.

FAQ

FAQs

We are building a list of FAQs to share with others.

Wesend areme building a list of FAQs Please any questions you have to andshare I’ll addwith themothers. to the list (andPlease try to get you an answer). send me any questions you have and I’ll add

them to the list (and try to get you an answer).

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ATTRACT: MARKETING If you build a great product in the proverbial forest and no one is there to buy it, does it make a sound? It does. And it sounds like the click of trying to start a car without any fuel in it.

You certainly need to have a strong value proposition to have a sustainable and scalable growth system, and the better the value proposition, the more speed you’re going to be able to create. But a strong value proposition is not enough to build a strong business. The business graveyard contains the caskets of many great products and services!

While the value proposition represents the capacity of your engine, the marketing system you have in place reflects gas fueling the potential power.

If prospective customers don’t know who you are or what you do, it’s difficult for them to give you their money. You have to FIRST create awareness of your product or service with prospective customers and THEN attract them to your business if you want a chance at selling them. But if this were easy, you’d already have a surplus of customers lining up to give you their money.

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What’s more, merely attracting customers is not enough to create lasting growth. If you want to create sustainable and scalable growth, you have to have a measurable and repeatable approach to attracting customers.

So how exactly do you go about developing that approach?

First and foremost, you have to truly understand who you are trying to attract and define that target audience in as much detail as possible. Once this audience is qualitatively assessed (Who are they? Why would they want your product?) and quantitatively measured (How many of them are there? Where can they be found?), you can develop a data-backed strategy to make them aware of your business, your brand, and your value proposition.

I’ve had clients tell me they’ve done this research, and then say their target audience is “small business owners” or “women.” These kinds of broad categories are a good start, but we need to further refine them. After all, small business owners are as diverse as the population at large. And despite the tendency of some marketers to lazily market to women with a pink-it-and-shrink-it approach, women (this should go without saying) are a diverse demographic.

To focus your audience, consider using an exercise my college English teacher introduced me to. He had us write a paper and turn it in.

Then he had us take that same paper and cut the number of words in half and turn it in, and then we repeated the exercise one more time.

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Our essays, of course, became tighter and sharper with every round of edits.

The same approach works in defining your target audience. For example, rather than trying to reach “small businesses,” consider segmenting based on questions like these:

• Do you serve small businesses with $100K per year in sales or $75 million? Is there a minimum threshold or a maximum? What is your sweet spot?

• Do you serve small businesses that are starting up, growing, mature, or in need of a turnaround?

• Do you serve small businesses in a particular industry?

• Do you serve small businesses that have an online presence, brickand-mortar location, both, or neither?

• Do you serve small businesses with local and regional focus, a national focus, an international emphasis?

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Answering all of these questions would get you closer to a truly target-sized audience—but I bet you could cut that audience in half to refine it further. And when you’ve done all that, ask yourself why do you serve those markets and not others?

See, the process isn’t easy! But the effort you put into marketing strategically now will pay off when you’re selling efficiently later.

Alas, many clients I work with are (understandably) reluctant to scale back the size of their target audiences. What if one of those audiences represents even a few sales?

As an entrepreneur myself, I know this feeling all too well. Rest assured, you are not ignoring other audiences … forever. You are just focusing your immediate attention (a limited resource) on your initial and thus most valuable audiences. (Geoffrey A. Moore’s classic book Crossing the Chasm, explains this concept in much more detail and is honestly one of the most impactful books I’ve ever read.)

Almost all broadly defined audiences have dozens of characteristics that make them very different from one another. What you are trying to do is hone in on those differences and make it easier to figure out how to reach these audiences and what to say to create interest (i.e., attraction).

For example, if you are targeting all small businesses, that means you are targeting Etsy shop owners AND third-generation family farmers. Even if you offer a product or service that appeals to both of these groups, you would ideally try to reach them through different

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channels with customized messaging that speaks to their unique motivations for buying.

Now, can you have more than one audience? Absolutely. If you are going to grow substantially over time, chances are you’ll need more than one very narrow audience to get there. But these different audiences are still generally defined and segmented based on their personalities, or personas, with different campaigns targeting each persona through unique messaging. Doing this allows you to optimize your marketing budget.

A word of caution here: don’t bite off more than you can chew. Unless you have infinite resources, you should stick to one or two target audiences in your initial strategy and bring others into the fold later.

Treat winning an audience like a race team would treat winning a highly competitive race. You need to analyze the intricacies associated with that track (or audience), and build a machine optimized to win the race (or your audience’s business). Once you win one race, you’ll be in a better position to win others with additional customized cars.

Narrowing down your audiences will help you optimize your marketing strategy, including channels, messaging, and budget, which couldn’t possibly all be covered in this ebook. When done well, though, this process will lead to audiences making their way to your business as leads. Now, how best to convert them into customers?

FAQ

We are building a list of FAQs to share with others.

Please send me any questions you have and I’ll add them to the list (and try to get you an answer).

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CONVERT: SALES So how does a souped-up engine with high-octane fuel transfer that power to the wheels to create speed?

In most motor vehicles, the powertrain converts power into movement. The more efficient the powertrain, the more torque is being transferred from engine to wheels—and the faster you go. If, on the other hand, your powertrain is failing, then your engine is producing power that’s being wasted—and your vehicle will be sputtering all the way to the shop.

The same holds true in your business. The potential created by an incredible value proposition and flawless marketing can be lost if the sales processes in place aren’t sufficient to capitalize on them.

Converting leads into customers is a hell of a lot easier if you’ve invested resources into the Justify and Attract components of the sales system. But easier isn’t easy.

The actual process of converting leads into customers obviously differs pretty significantly from business to business. Best practices for selling airliners won’t quite match up with those for selling registrations to a webinar. But there are sales and conversion practices that nearly every business should employ as part of a sustainable and scalable growth strategy.

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Process-Driven, Not Results-Driven.

Across the board, a sustainable and scalable growth system requires sales practices that are based on processes, not results.

As someone who proudly wore the “results-driven” badge in my taglines for years, anything other than focusing on results felt unnatural.

Converting into a process-person was, well, a process, because focusing on results seemed so logical. After all, with business, it’s easy to look at any change that produces more sales (and effectively grows your business) as being fundamentally a good change.

But that kind of thinking can, in fact, lead to logical fallacies.

If you are looking to make your car faster, you may consider lightening the load and ditching passenger seats and those golf clubs in the back. But you wouldn’t toss the steering wheel, would you? Just because you’re pushing new top speeds doesn’t mean the engine is in great condition, and concluding that it is running well based exclusively on the results you are getting today can actually lead you down the wrong road (assuming you kept the steering wheel and can still navigate).

Across the board, a sustainable and scalable growth system requires sales practices that are based on processes, not results.

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Annie Duke, a World Series of Poker champion and one of the highest female earners in WSP history, explains in her book Thinking in Bets how a results-based thought process creates problems. Drunk drivers that make it home without hurting themselves or others got the results they were looking for, says Duke, but does that make it a good decision or a great process to repeat? As Duke demonstrates, the best poker players are process-driven. The results of a particular hand, or even a particular winning streak, are not as important as the long-term results of their process. And the value professional poker players extract from adhering to a good process, or system, usually comes at the expense of the shortsighted amateurs.

A good process for competitive poker playing is identical to any other good process. It is repeatable, predictable, and in the long run, much more lucrative.

However, having a process is only half of the battle. You have to document it in the same way every vehicle on the planet has a detailed manual associated with it. Processes don’t retain much value and are virtually impossible to improve in any consistent fashion when they are stored in the mind of one key person.

In the sales world, if your entire team can’t explain in simple terms how to sell your product or service successfully, then you either don’t have a process in place or haven’t effectively documented it.

While documenting processes can be a bit of a headache, I have typically experienced two benefits when I help companies do this.

First, when done correctly, you will almost inevitably find immediate

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efficiencies you can implement and realize benefits from. And by correctly I mean objectively. A key component of any process worth its salt is rigorous self-critique. Never be afraid to kill your darlings.

Second, the mere documentation of the process creates value by reducing risk. Freeing a process f rom being held hostage—even when you are the captor—creates immediate value because it allows the process to continue in the absence of the person with the keys. This may not be great news if the person holding those keys is doing so to preserve their own individual value within the company, but this is about creating a sustainable and scalable growth system, not a make-yourself-unf ireable system.

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Messaging Messaging may be the most fundamental factor in determining the effectiveness of sales and conversion processes. No matter what you’re selling, you need to ask the prospect to take action, at the right time, with an impactful message.

Let’s take those considerations in order.

1. You need to ask the prospect to take action. Common sense, right? It is for those of us who have been in sales our entire career. For many people who haven’t been trained in converting prospects and closing, though, there is trepidation about asking someone to take action and close. Maybe the messaging implies what you want your prospective customer to do or makes the value prop case so strongly you expect them to just be moved to action without directly asking. Usually, that’s not going to happen. An effective sales process requires a clear path and a clear call to action, regardless of whether you have an e-commerce company or a retail store.

2. Ensuring you have a call to action is only part of the battle.

It also needs to be properly timed. You aren’t going to win Le Mans if you floor it throughout the course, and you aren’t going to maximize sales at a retail store by standing out front with a credit card swiper. When you present your call to action (and effectively close) is among the most important parts of the entire sales process.

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A great many resources have been written on this, including Mathew Dixon and Brent Adamson’s The Challenger Sale, which is worth a read in full. Challenger model or not, the right time for a call to action is after you have established rapport, understood the prospect’s pain point, provided an alternative to feeling that pain, and presented your alternative as the solution. Then and only then are you closing. This is true of presentations that are three minutes long and pitches that are three hours long.

Like inexperienced drivers who think pedal to the metal is the surefire way to win every race, many inexperienced entrepreneurs and CEOs want to jump straight into the benefits of their products and services when selling. This works about as well as talking only about yourself on a first date.

3. Last, and certainly not least, the message has to be impactful. A clear, well-timed ask isn’t very helpful if you use all the wrong words or they’re delivered the wrong way. This means the messaging of your call to action probably requires more thought than “Hey, I have cool stuff. Give me your money.” Here again, there are hundreds of great books out there that can help you get the message on point, and I work with many of my clients on fine-tuning and testing messages tailored specifically for their companies.

One of the books I recommend to people on messaging is The Way of the Wolf, written by Jordan Belfort, who is portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in The Wolf of Wall Street. (If a hilarious quaalude scene

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immediately comes to mind when I say that, I don’t blame you.) But you’ll have to trust me when I say that The Way of the Wolf is loaded with points on how to create and deliver a badass sales pitch. Regardless of whether you bring someone like me in to help or DIY, there are three very important factors in crafting a clear and impactful message to improve conversion: More emotion, fewer features. It’s tempting to highlight all the technical characteristics and features of your product or service to win over customers. If you are a technical-minded executive or entrepreneur, you may be especially prone to this. Features are important, particularly for the customer experience when people start using whatever it is they bought. But features don’t contribute to a customer’s decision to buy nearly as much as we think. Diamonds and cars exemplify this point. What is the functional value of a diamond ring or the feature that makes the sale? What are the specific features that lead someone to buy an Infiniti QX80 instead of a Nissan Armada? The sale is less about the specific features of these products and more about the way the purchase or possession of that product or service makes customers feel.

A great example of the difference between features-based selling and emotion-based selling is this old video mocking what the iPod’s packaging would be like if Microsoft had designed it. Apple became one of the most valuable brands in the world while advertising very few features (and some may argue while lagging in features relative to competitors). So why have they been effective? They ignore the features and sell straight to the heart.

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Every product or service offers the customer some feeling. Simon Sinek speaks to this concept in his best-selling book, Start With Why. Most companies can tell you what they do, and some can tell you how they do it, but as Sinek says, inspired organizations understand why they do business. This, at its core, is about speaking beyond the features and specs of your product or service and understanding why you are doing what you are doing and why customers will buy it. (You can see Sinek’s five-minute summary video articulating this here.)

But don’t forget about features altogether. Just remember that features are not benefits, and between the two, benefits are more important. You’re better off speaking to the heart than the head.

Understand what is really motivating the customer to buy. The late Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt famously said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”

Customers are usually buying a product or service to address a symptom of something else, and Levitt nailed it with his explanation.

Clayton Christensen articulates this concept particularly well in his book Competing Against Luck. In this work, Christensen calls the underlying solution customers are purchasing the “job to be done.” In a nutshell, the theory is that customers are hiring whatever product or service they are buying to complete a job. Understanding that job (even when the customer can’t entirely articulate it) allows you to speak to that job and develop messaging that more effectively converts leads into customers.

Not appreciating this concept can be catastrophic for businesses, particularly those either in start-up phase or developing new

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products to grow sales. Investing substantial resources into product development and marketing can still lead to whiffing sales if you don’t understand what customers are hiring you to do. Getting to the core motivations isn’t easy, but the dividends of doing so will pay handsomely down the road.

Beware the curse of knowledge. The curse of knowledge is widely understood as a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual unknowingly assumes that other people he or she is speaking with have the background to understand particular terminology or concepts.

This happens in all communications, but I notice it in sales messaging again and again.

My advice: make a special effort to put yourself in your customer’s shoes and frame the message as they would hear it, not how you would hear it.

In the book Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath present research on this bias quite well with an exercise you can try yourself: tap “Happy Birthday” out on a table to people without telling them what melody you are tapping. The tune will be clear to you, but they’ll have absolutely no idea what song you are tapping out. This exercise highlights the delta between your perspective and the customer’s, and it’s an excellent example of how businesses think they are telling their story well while it falls on deaf ears. You may not be able to unsee, unhear, or unlearn what you already know, but you can audit your activity and messaging to find out if it resonates.

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Creating A Sales Card Set You have a process for making sales and you have compelling messaging that seems to resonate with customers. Congrats! But how can you measure how effectively you’re actually selling? No discussion of creating speed or sales through conversion—particularly results that are measurable and process-based—would be complete without exploring reporting and analytics.

For many entrepreneurs and sales managers, sales performance is assessed through intuitive indicators. But relying exclusively on intuition lends itself to biases you may not be aware of and, almost by definition, isn’t scalable. That’s why a reporting structure that allows you to objectively and quantitatively assess sales and growth is critical. I call this creating a sales card.

Sales and business reports go by many names, all of which are perfectly fine. It doesn’t matter much what you call them. I refer to such a report as a sales card, drawing on the sports cards I collected as a kid (and still cart around in every family move).

These cards feature a small, limited amount of real estate to use in summarizing a player’s performance, which means the publishers

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have to be selective about the data presented to ensure it has the most impact.

That limited real estate appeals to me. With access to as much data as we have today, and the infinite ways in which it can be stored and presented with spreadsheets, there is a strong bias toward using too many numbers to create reports that should be, by nature, simple.

Thinking about reporting as a sports card helps force more selectivity in the K of KPIs (key performance indicators).

The fundamental rules for an effective sales card are as follows:

• Gone in sixty seconds. You should have the data and information you need to monitor the critical components of your sales system quickly and consistently in sixty seconds or less. If more time is required, chances are there’s too much information. To keep this relevant to everyone, you may consider different sales cards for different people rather than continuing to add what everyone wants to see onto a universal sales card.

• Measure productive activity, not activity itself. You may find that you want to jump straight to the common KPIs used by others in your industry. I’ve worked with many businesses that want to measure calls in their outbound phone efforts, meetings in their field sales efforts, or subscribers in their newsletters. While these metrics may be good leading indicators, they also may be misleading or simply vanity stats. I worked with one business to double revenue per sale while cutting the number of calls made by 40%. We focused on the metrics that mattered more than calls, which included presentations and talk time. Take time to

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really assess what you are measuring and whether it is the right metric or you. Alfred Armand Montapert may have put it best in The Supreme Philosophy of Man: The Laws of Life when he wrote, “Don’t confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but doesn’t make any progress.”

• It should democratize data, not be a tool for tyrants. A sales card creates data that can help foster accountability. Some people may want to hold this data close to the vest and use it to throw in people’s faces when results are poor. But that means the data is being used in the wrong way and far too late. The key purpose of the sales card is to allow nearly real-time self-correction as people see KPIs lagging. They can’t do that when they don’t have access to it, and they won’t want to do that when the data is only being used against them.

Every report can be different, and reports can be built on a wide range of platforms. I’ve seen some incredible sales cards created using nothing more than Google Sheets that put dense analytic programs to shame (you know who you are, General Patton). What matters more than the platform you are using is its accessibility and the ease with which the information is interpreted. So now you’ve built this fantastic product or service, you’ve managed to get your target audience to your door, they’ve given you money, and you’re tracking it effectively. Woo-hoo! The job is complete!

Just kidding, of course. If you’re planning on creating a lasting business, the job is just getting started. So let’s turn to longevity, keeping customers, and allowing them to help us find more customers.

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KEEP: RETENTION, REPEAT BUSINESS, AND REFERRALS Any customer you keep is a customer you don’t have to replace. That means your process for obtaining new customers should never take precedence over your process for keeping existing customers.

When I talk about keeping customers, I’m usually looking at three things:

Retention

Repeat Business

Referrals

Up till now, most parts of your growth system have required a substantial investment of resources. This is the part where you start to really reap dividends on all that hard work. And it’s where your shortsighted competitors will falter because they haven’t built a strong system.

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The easiest, most profitable sale you can make is to a customer you already have. You’ve already done the legwork to bring them into the fold, and it’s hard to identify a target audience with a more qualifying detail than “I’ve already given you my money.”

If you’ve delivered on your value proposition, you should be in much better shape with this prospective sale than you were before this person knew about your business. If, on the other hand, you failed to deliver value and left the customer disappointed, then you’re actually better off talking to strangers.

With existing customers, or referrals, you aren’t investing the same level of resources that you did the first time around to identify them, attract them to your door, and convert them. So your profit margins should be doing quite well when you are keeping customers. And strong margins in the long term justify the investments you are making in your growth system in the short term.

This is the ROI of doing things the right way from the get-go. If you’ve built your growth system based on the guidelines offered here, you’ll begin to see more growth and profitability, which is no easy task.

More often than not you see one or the other. (If, on the other hand, you threw some nitrous oxide into your sedan, you are probably going to need to start all over to prepare for the next race.)

Just as important, you now have a base of prospects to introduce new products, services, upgrades, and extensions to. While you are growing your top and bottom line, your more shortsighted competitors will need to go full circle back to the beginning to find and sell new customers, which as you know by now isn’t cheap or easy.

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Now, let’s not get it twisted. While we are basking in growth and swimming in $100 bills driven by fat margins, we are not implying this part of the growth system is free of any investment at all. You don’t want to let complacency set in after your initial success any more than you want to ignore basic maintenance on your souped-up street machine. A growth system capable of keeping—and multiplying—customers through retention and referrals shares the same principles through and through: clear and documented processes for predictability, measurability, and repeatability.

Here are some of the basic components that drive a growth system that keeps and multiplies your customer base.

More Satisfied Customers The first and perhaps most important component of a growth system that can go the full Le Mans distance in keeping customers is whether you justified getting their business in the first place with a strong value proposition.

It’s easy to say you provide value, make promises, and do whatever you need to for the sake of closing a sale. But if you want to retain customers or turn them into evangelists on your behalf, you have to meet the expectations you set. (If you fail to do so, then I hope you at least have a customer replacement strategy.)

Delivering on promises is a good indicator of corporate culture. Just ask yourself, who sticks around a place that doesn’t deliver on promises?

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And if you had the opportunity to sell for either a company that created raving fans or a company that made them raging mad, which one would you work for? And what type of person would choose to work for the latter? The best people want to work for the best companies, and companies that have trouble keeping customers oftentimes have trouble keeping good employees too. (But more on culture to come.)

How do you assess whether you’re delivering on your value proposition? Measuring churn rates and retention rates is a good place to start, but you may need to look to qualitative feedback as well. The customer’s decision to give you money may be binary—either they do or don’t—but the customer’s mindset is not. The delta between a customer that is partially unsatisfied and one that isn’t satisfied at all can be incredibly small, which is why so many companies slap a survey on their receipts. Objective customer feedback provides a literal blueprint for what you need to improve or change in order to create more satisfied customers and thus create repeat business and word-of-mouth marketing.

Consider using these three tips to get objective customer feedback you can use to build lasting growth for your business: 1. Don’t get overly scientific. Listen, I love analytics as much as the next quant nerd, and a lot of work has been done to create scientific survey questions and formats to minimize biases and get scientifically valid results. This is great when you expect ten thousand people to respond and need a manageable and accurate process to interpret the data. But it’s easy to get bogged down in this process. Here’s one process that doesn’t

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require a scientist and software to put together: picking up the phone and talking to customers. Very few things compare to a ten-minute call with a customer who gives you insights you probably couldn’t get from a spreadsheet. And bonus: the mere practice of doing this outreach will consistently create loyal customers. People like being heard and like being listened to even more. As Steve Blank says about marketing research, sometimes you just have to get the hell out of the building!

Remember, any feedback you disregard may be the ammo a competitor or entrepreneur needs to create space between you and your customers.

2. Embrace, nay, appreciate criticism. Getting objective feedback from customers isn’t for the faint of heart. It can be tough to hear criticism of something you created or labored over. It’s important to remain agnostic on what the outcome should be and simply take the criticism for what it is: a clear directive on how to improve. The feedback you are receiving is valuable, and someone is taking time from their day to provide it. This should be embraced and appreciated.

3. Listen. A lot of companies appear to be getting objective customer feedback in order to boost repeat sales and retention.

Sadly, a great many of these companies don’t do anything with the information provided. Over time this creates customer

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feedback fatigue, which actually has an adverse effect on the business. If you take the time to get the feedback, and customers take the time to provide it, then do yourself a favor and give it real consideration. That doesn’t mean you have to incorporate every request, but it does mean you should hear them out.

Remember, any feedback you disregard may be the ammo a competitor or entrepreneur needs to create space between you and your customers.

By following the steps above, you’ll be creating more satisfied customers in both senses, meaning more customers who are increasingly (“more”) satisfied and—as a result over time—more total customers overall.

Establish a Sales Cycle to Automate Retention Think of a sales cycle that incorporates good retention practices as a communications action plan. You need to sketch out various decision tree alternatives for the customer as they engage with your business.

This way you can ensure that customers don’t find themselves branching back to the beginning of the cycle (alongside brand new customers) after they give you their money.

Understandably, not every business can methodically create if-then statements for every point of engagement with customers. That said, every business I have worked with has had the opportunity to put in a framework to define the key engagement points and a basic

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communication cadence. This way, every customer has the same experience, and when the opportunity to sell them again comes up, they aren’t getting reacquainted for the first time.

The key stages of most sales cycles are onboarding, or the process of bringing your customers into the fold at your company, and ongoing, or the touchpoints after onboarding throughout the customer’s lifecycle, including after the value proposition has been fully delivered.

Onboarding Onboarding customers with a consistent process allows you to define the first impression you want to make with new customers every time. It allows you to design the customer experience rather than react to it and makes it possible to iterate the process based on your results. Articulating what you want this experience to be and documenting it is the first step to ensuring every single one of your new customers receives the treatment you want them to receive. It also helps minimize buyer’s remorse and improves the likelihood that customers will use the product or service they just purchased, which, unless you are a funeral home, probably improves the likelihood that you keep this customer for the long haul.

Whether you are onboarding a customer for a million-dollar product or a free webinar, the following three things are helpful to take into account: 1. A welcome series of communications: This can range from one email to a series of emails over the course of weeks or

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months. The primary goal here is to make sure the new customer feels welcomed even after they’ve given you money.

Most businesses have at least a welcome email, and some have a more comprehensive approach including phone calls, introductions to staff, and so on. You have to decide the appropriate level of support for your approach to welcoming customers.

2. A prompt to use or educate users on their first engagement: Getting customers engaged may require a prompt or some tutorials on how to use it. You want to remove all the potential barriers that may stand in the way of the customer using the goods they just purchased. For many companies, this process is automated with a video or a series of videos, access to a user or customer group, or a database or FAQs document.

3. A cadence with which you want to communicate: There is no one cadence for communication with your customers during the onboarding phase. There are two wrong cadences, however, and they are “never” and “it’s different for everyone.”

Establish the cadence with which you want to communicate, and implement it with automated messages and workflows.

Wherever possible, do not leave this to someone within your company unless that person has no other job. The last thing you want is some customers getting bombarded, while others are forgotten.

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Ongoing Some businesses stop communicating with customers once they’ve purchased and been onboarded. At that point they are using the product, or done using it, and it’s time to look towards the next prospective customer, right? Wrong. After a customer has been onboarded, there are countless reasons you want to have a structured communication and engagement cycle to remain top of mind, even if the transaction is complete and the customer has moved on. Just some examples of the benefits continued engagement can provide:

• What is, or was, the experience of buying and using your product or service?

• Did your product or service meet expectations?

• Is the customer planning on buying again?

• What improvements would the customer make if he or she could?

• Would the customer refer a friend or write a review on social?

The ongoing communications with existing and prior customers establishes a channel for you to receive feedback.This feedback sets the stage for continuous improvement, repeat business, and referrals.

Just like any other part of the growth system, you need ongoing communication to be reliable, and the basis of reliability is eliminating the opportunity for human error. This is best done by automating communications or the prompt for the communication.

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I’ve worked with many companies that believe they have these processes in place, but don’t actually have them documented or automated. For instance, you may have a welcome process that one of your best account managers uses—most of the time. You may have a series of communications you developed to share with customers after they purchase that is usually incorporated. But if this process is not automated, it is not being done consistently.

The overwhelming majority of small businesses are run by people who wear more than one hat and are thus too busy to create an automated system. That’s understandable, but the result is inevitably an inconsistent customer experience. This is not the road to optimizing retention, securing the most repeat business, or maxing out the number of referrals—and that’s exactly why I work with companies to create standardized processes and playbooks.

Automating these processes is as important as automating your car’s exhaust system. It can be done in a number of ways, the most reliable of which is adoption of a customer relations management tool. A properly installed CRM serves as the operating system of your growth engine and is a great way to not just diagnose whether you are keeping customers but virtually any misfirings throughout the entire business.

FAQ

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Please send me any questions you have and I’ll add them to the list (and try to get you an answer).

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CONCLUSION So now you have the framework to implement a growth system that will increase sales in a sustainable and scalable way. There are certainly other ways to get numbers that look good on paper, and that maybe (if you’re lucky) won’t blow anything up right away. But if you are looking for reliability with those numbers, then the approach I’ve outlined here is your best bet.

Now, I want to reiterate that this wasn’t intended to be a paint-bynumbers template. This is the framework I use with clients, but we always end up with a unique approach to this framework because every engine may use the same laws of physics, but the configurations and parts make a dramatic impact. Every car is different.

Likewise, every company, industry, and phase in the growth curve requires fine-tuning to have maximum impact.

Several variables can have a big impact on how well a growth system operates, namely the Environment in which you are operating (which I refer to as culture) and the Direction in which you are headed (which I refer to as strategy). These two elements are also part of the framework I use with clients (and conveniently make the full system’s acronym JACKED), but given the importance and scope of each, they will get their own books subsequent to launching this one. Suffice it to say, even a growth system with perfectly designed components

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can present problems if the basic elements necessary to guide it in the right direction and keep it churning aren’t in place.

But after accounting for these considerations, these are still the guidelines you want to follow (with some customization) when you are building or repairing your systems. Many people will take this framework and run with it on their own. I hope it serves as a directional guide to do just that. If the only thing I’ve done is influence just a couple of businesses to get back to basics and offer real value to their customers, we will have done good here.

If you need more than a directional guide and want to implement some of the principles I’ve outlined, as luck would have it, that’s what I specialize in. With the help of my team, we can help provide a diagnosis, make repairs, rebuild your engine, or custom build one according to your goals.

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We aren’t just sales mechanics; we are growth engineers.

Please visit www.rayjgreen.com to find out more about me, my team, and how I work with businesses. You can book a free consultation to begin diagnosing your growth system and sign up for our free newsletter, BVOYB - Best Version of Your Business, which covers the latest growth system tools and technology. You can also follow me on LinkedIn for more advice about sales, marketing, and building better businesses.

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