The traditional way to bring in business is to prospect. You call on a company, you leave many messages, and you hope they call you back. Months later, you arrange a meeting, you give away valuable ideas and information during the introductory meeting, and you wait. You go through this process over and over and eventually, someone signs up with you. If you’re lucky, about a year and a half later, you’re actually working on a project. Does this sound familiar?
The problem with this process is that you’re at a disadvantage for two reasons. First, you are pushing your services. Unless the prospect has an immediate need, you are in a position of having to convince them. Second, you often spend a great deal of time playing telephone tag. The continuous follow up is time consuming and a drain on your valuable resources.
The key to work less is to automate. Automation gives a small business owner leverage. It helps you to put your day-to-day operations on autopilot leaving you with plenty of time to focus on the growth strategies for your business. Automated processes are instrumental in helping me grow my business and helped hundreds of my clients fill their practice in record time.
Make sure you are prepared to receive more clients yet still work less by automating these areas of your business:
The Follow Up Process. Utilize autoresponders to follow up with prospects and communicate with customers. Autoresponders are automatic emails sent in response to inquiries you may have received. If you are answering the same questions over and over, using autoresponders can be a handy way to respond promptly. When your messages are personalized and written in an educational way, your prospect develops trust with you over time because you’re helping them, not pushing your services on them. When they are ready, they choose you because you helped them by your educational messages. With that approach, they are selecting you rather than you pushing your services on them.
Your Marketing. Do you find yourself in a feast and famine cycle? Perhaps you work with your clients, then market, then go back to your clients and never seem to have enough time for either of those activities. If that describes your situation, then it’s time to automate your marketing. Whether it is using Hootsuite to manage and program your social media marketing or creating a lead generation system that works 24 hours a day/7 days a week, these automated systems help you to focus on delivering consistent customer service while making sure your marketing is operating without fail.
Your Fulfillment Process. Offering products shouldn’t be burdensome. If you currently have physical products, like training programs, turn them into digital products. Once the customer has ordered your product and paid for it, you can direct them to download your digital product. Do you have a physical product? Simply connect with a fulfillment house that does the shipping for you. You would be amazed at how much less you work and how much you save on overhead expenses.
With a few tweaks in either systematizing your processes or automating your manual systems, you can grow your business, with less effort, and create more time to enjoy it all.
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Lisa Mininni is Best Selling Author and President of Excellerate Associates, home of the sought-after Entrepreneurial Edge SystemTM. If systematizing and automating your business is not a reality for you yet, and you want to change it ASAP, check out the step-by-step Entrepreneurial Edge SystemTM. This system is available to you in an easy-to-implement system showing you how to systematize and monetize your small business. Complete with marketing systems and scripts, resources, and business blueprint, you can learn this turnkey system no matter how long you have been in business.
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