It’s true that systems can make any company run better and be more profitable in the good times. It also true it makes it possible to run your company successfully without you having to ride to the rescue to save the day or your having to depend on great staff to overcome a lack of known and practiced policies and procedures.
The real beauty of known and practiced systems is they help even more during slow times!
That’s true because now you can’t afford to blow the precious opportunities you get from your marketing. You can’t afford to squander the incoming calls with customer service reps [aka CSRs] that aren’t terrific. And you can’t afford to waste the sales opportunities of the calls your sales people go on the service call chances that your techs run.
Each misstep compounds the next.
It’s also true that every right step builds on the next.
That’s why this is the time to instill the discipline of proven systems that make sure you’re marketing in a way that obeys the systematic approach to marketing:
- A marketing budget that’s aggressive enough based on a percentage of sales to keep the phone ringing.
- A marketing allocation that is better weighted to what will cause potential customers to pick up the phone now and call you.
- A marketing calendar that has marketing reach all throughout the year but especially in the known slow times so you can turn a severe dip into a trough you can negotiate.
You need to have CSRs that can both handle the incoming call in a way that makes the caller feel confident they made the right call and that can also switch to an Outbound CSR that actively calls out to create work. This takes scripts that are known and it takes a load of phone role-playing.
Finally, you need sales people and techs who are disciplined at how to ask good questions, take a look around without wearing blinders so they can make appropriate suggestions and sales skills from a sales system to make them maximize every opportunity.
Put the systems in place now if you hope to weather this economic storm.