I love to cook. I catered my sister-in-law’s first wedding and did all the cooking for a friend’s Christmas party of 40-50 people when I lived in Vancouver.
I love to cook because there’s typically no recipe. A little of this, a little of that and a delicious dish appears on the table.
Following a cooking model for scaling the revenue generating side of our organization is likely to end in heartache and tears because we’re not following a model. We’re bouncing from shiny object to shiny object.
Scaling is much more akin to baking, which I wasn’t a fan of for a long time because of the reliance on a recipe. What I learned after many cakes failed to rise and many muffins came out better suited as doorstops than food, was that following a recipe allowed me the freedom to innovate while still guiding me to success.
As we seek to scale successfully, the recipe for our revorg to grow can be broken down into ingredients of reliability, clarity and precision.
Reliability
A key factor in creating trust both internally and externally is a reliable revenue generating function that has processes created and followed. This gets us the best possible people on our team and gives our buyers the best possible experience with our company from first contact, through to implementation and ongoing support.
A reoccurring theme in our leadership sessions is that “all corporate pain is the result of a missing or broken process.” When growth is less than expected, examining the reliability of our processes is a great place to start for getting ourselves and our sellers back on track.
We can also use reliability as a metric when evaluating the performance of individual sellers on our team and for ourselves. For example, are our sellers reliably keeping their CRM hygiene clean and properly reporting on opportunities in their funnel and are we reliably modeling behavior in role play and consistently holding accountability meetings with each seller weekly?
Clarity
A leader’s number one job is to create clarity. A lack of clarity creates ambiguity, which eventually becomes anxiety, which then becomes fear. If our prospects, clients or sellers are anxious or fearful, our scaling efforts stall.
From recruiting to interviewing to onboarding to a prospect’s first contact with our website to their initial engagement with a seller to their experience with our client support team, there are points where the way forward is ambiguous and ripe for additional clarity.
When we are clear with our sellers from the time they are a candidate to join our team, we create a culture of clarity that extends to our sellers’ interactions with their prospects and clients. This tends to reduce sales cycles and promote long-term relationships.
Precision
When our sellers experience the precision with which we run a sales funnel review meeting, or their clients feel that their account rep has exactly what they need when they need it, the credibility of us and our sellers go up, creating motivation in our sellers and stickiness in our clients.
The sellers we train often hear, “prospects want to work with surgeons not interns.” The same is true for top-level sellers and their leaders. A quick way to end a relationship with a top-level seller, candidate or current team member is to be imprecise in our vision, coaching or meeting management.
To scale successfully, we can either rely on the people (us and our sellers) or the ReCiPe (reliability, clarity, precision). The first creates scar tissue and burnout. The second requires more effort up front but much less to maintain. You pick.
Until next time… go lead.
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