When I come across service businesses, especially agencies, that are struggling to grow it’s usually because processes are not in place to allow them to scale.

Whether it’s a marketing process, a payroll process, or a sales process, getting these squared away in your business will only make it more sane, more profitable, and incredibly better to run.

In this episode I talk about an agency I spoke with where I helped them rework their sales process to great effect. I’ve done it for many, and it’s always super fun to watch.

In this episode I talk about:

  1. Why you need to think about who can do a thing, not just how to do it yourself
  2. Why letting the prospect drive the process puts you on the defensive instead of being the expert
  3. A few processes I have in place that help me deliver great results every time

Transcript

John:
Hey there everybody, and welcome to this episode of the Credo Podcast. I’m John Doherty, the founder of getcredo.com. On this show I interview smart marketers and entrepreneurs who can help you grow and scale your business through great digital marketing. Every now and then I do a shorter me only episode teaching you something that is on my mind specifically. This episode is of course sponsored by getcredo.com, my company, where we have a highly curated network of vetted digital marketing professionals who are best in class at what they do. We’ve interviewed them. We’ve seen their client metrics and we’ve accepted them into the network only after they’ve checked the necessary boxes. At Credo we specialize in helping companies find and hire the best digital marketing firm or consultant for their specific needs, so if that’s you get in touch with us at getcredo.com that’s G-E-T-C-R-E-D-O.com and click the find a marketer button in the top right navigation.

John:
Hey there, what’s going on? John Doherty, founder and CEO of Credo here. Man, it’s good to be back on the microphone. It’s been a little while since I’ve done a new podcast episode, and I’ve recently gotten this itch to get back to creating, to get back to blogging, to get back to putting out new content and to put out content like this on the podcast because this is a great place for me to share just some lessons that I’m learning, quick lessons that I’m learning. This episode isn’t going to be super long. Future episodes probably aren’t going to be super long, but I want to start sharing, just getting out in audio format. This episode is around something that I’ve recently been thinking about a lot. I talked about it with some agencies yesterday, talked about with an agency owner today and something I’ve really become convinced about is the need for processes within a business. Your business straight up cannot be scalable if you do not have documented processes that you can hand off to other people for them to take care of so that you can go and solve other problems.

John:
So yesterday I was talking with an agency on Credo about their sales process. This agency, this customer has been with us for four-ish months now, four maybe five months now. Honestly, they’ve been struggling to close work. We’ve got some great deals onto their calendars and other agencies are winning them. I think something like 25% of the projects that we have matched them up with that we have scheduled them to speak with were won by another agency that looks very similar to their profile. And so what I try to do is I try to hop on phone calls with agencies that are struggling to close so that I can try to help them get back on track. Point out some things in their process that they need to fix, things to add in, things to take away, things to start doing, things to stop doing, because I’ve seen a lot of work get closed and I’ve seen a lot more work fail to get closed and found the process that works really, really well.

John:
And basically this agency’s process boiled down to we had an initial call, and then we let the prospect tell us what they want us to do next. Send a proposal, have a follow-up call, that sort of thing. That’s not a process right there, you all. That is an abdication of responsibility, especially when it comes to sales. You need to have a process that you go through, and of course there’s a little bit of… There can be some flexibility in there if they need a third call, that’s fine, but letting the client drive or letting the prospect drive it, that’s not the way to actually win work. Of course, we’re talking about sales specifically here. In my opinion, any process is better than none. I wouldn’t even call that a process of course, but there are also better and worse processes that work well, and it’s really, really useful to learn from others.

John:
I’ve recently been reading Dan Sullivan’s book, Who Not How, which was recommended to me by my coach, Dan, who I’ll be talking about here in just a second. But basically Dan Sullivan talks about at some point it’s not about how do I do this thing, it’s about who do I get to do this thing for me, or who has done this before that I can learn from so I can go and do it if I don’t have the revenue to hire them to do it. And talking about hiring, I’ve been hiring here at Credo recently. And honestly, I’ve been struggling with it. I’ve been trying to hire an executive assistant sales support role going back and forth. Is it full-time, is it part-time that sort of thing. Recently decided that it’s actually two separate roles I was trying to collapse into one and make it part-time, and it just wasn’t working.

John:
It’s actually a full-time role and a very part-time role, but I’ve been struggling with this, right? And hiring, it turns out is really its own skillset. And because I’m tired of not succeeding at it, I need to get these two roles hired so that we can continue to scale. Today, I actually got on the call with the COO of a friend’s company. They offered it and we hopped on the call. This person does all of the hiring. I think they’re like 60 people now or something like that, and he’s really, really good at it. Has a set process, so I was like, “Hey, let’s go ahead and hop on this call.” He offered it, as I said, and in 30 minutes he took me from blocked and frustrated to clear on the process that I need to follow to hire successfully.

John:
Of course, there’s going to be hiccups along the way. He pointed out some areas I’m going to need to tweak things. I might need to move around in order to get the right applicants, right number of applicants, that kind of thing. But I have a process to run with. I didn’t even have the foundation of it and he gave me that. So this is very similar to actually another process that I love that I have R&D, robbed and duplicated, as Dan who I’m about to talk about here, talks about, so I’m giving Dan totally the credit for R&Ding this. Dan’s a coach for software businesses, and he does onboarding calls for new clients or his team now does onboarding calls for new clients. When I joined a year and a half ago, he was still doing them, but he has a specific process and a worksheet that he works through.

John:
He pulls it up on his iPad, shares the iPad, goes through the questions, kind of goes on down through it, gets the metrics that he needs and then backs into the things that you need to do and trainings that you need to watch and questions you need to ask and people you need to talk to, and that sort of thing in order to hit your goals, right? Full process that now he’s been able to hand off to three or four other people in order to do it well. I’ve even taken personally this framework and I’ve applied this, created my own very similar framework for the coaching calls I do through Credo. So hiring calls, marketing, [inaudible 00:06:03] calls. I have a process that I take them through. A lot of it that I learned from Dan and from some of the things that he does, but it’s a very set process so that then we ultimately get to the goal, get to the thing that the person that I’m speaking with that is paying me for my time is looking to accomplish.

John:
And we also do this on the full company side, right? We have gotten into a process. I have a process for creating playbooks for documenting everything that we do, how we do it, and then a central place for storing it. In our case, that’s Trello. I have a Trello board and then I have marketing, finance, development, customer success, all the various things that we do within the company, and this makes it super easy. When we hire someone, I can hand it to them. I can say, “Hey, here are the videos that you need to watch within SAS Academy, let’s say. Here are the playbooks that you need to look at. These are the things that you’re going to reference, because these are the things that you do.”

John:
And we don’t hire until we have these things playbooked, right? Basically all the training they need is playbooked there. And of course, there’s going to be one-on-ones, there’s going to be questions needed. We’re going to have to show them some new things. Maybe there’s some documentation that’s a little bit out of date in which case we update it as we talk through it, as we realize that it’s not updated. But this eliminates a ton of the manual work, a ton of the… You know, if I was hiring someone every week, I don’t have time to be training someone every week. Even hiring someone every couple of months, it’s still a lot of work. If you’ve hired before, it’s a lot of work to get somebody up to speed. And so this shortcuts a lot of that, and I can create it in a scalable way.

John:
And by the way, one of the things that I love doing here, of course you can write it out, you can take screenshots and whatever. Those do get out of date. I was actually trained as a documentation writer, technical writer. I don’t know if many of you know that, but I was actually trained as a documentation writer, so I’m totally fine writing documentation, but I’ve also been using a tool called Loom, L-O-O-M.com, which is basically it can put you down in the bottom corner here, if you’re watching the video, down here in the bottom corner and share your screen and click around and they can see where you’re clicking. It’s really, really useful for shooting a quick three to five minute video showing someone how to do something. My team even uses it day-to-day. My CTO and I communicate that way giving feedback on specific things, which is really cool.

John:
So to wrap all of this up, I am firmly convinced that the only way to really scale a business in a sane way is through having processes that are repeatable. Either you learn them through trial and error, right? Which a lot of us do, or if you can find the person that’s done it, then you can shortcut the process and you can learn quicker, right? They might do it for free as this COO I spoke with today did. You might need to pay them for their time or buy their book. That might be the best place to go, highly recommend doing that. But you can shortcut to getting to the right process by learning from people that have done it before, and the sooner you create processes in your business, I’m telling you, the sooner you create processes in your business, the sooner your business is going to become more sane.

John:
Because if everything is custom, everything is bespoke, then nothing is scalable and your company is going to suffer for it. If someone great leaves, the work might not be up to quality. I think a lot of times people are scared of creating processes because they’re afraid that the quality is going to suffer. Actually processes let you do better work because you know that the process works, and so it also doesn’t shortcut the creative process, honestly. I think it frees you up more to be more creative because you don’t have to go back and remember, “Oh, how do we do this thing? How do we log in here?” That sort of thing. It’s all there within the playbook, read the playbook and follow the playbook, and then you can go and do the creative work. Do the research, do the writing, whatever it is that you’re doing, you can do that better because you’ve gotten all of the base things taken care of.

John:
I’ve seen this and I’ve been part of it at agencies before. I see it a lot with our customers, Credo’s agencies that are struggling to scale because they don’t have a good process for doing things. And of course, when you’re early on, you miss any time to the business. You go from, 50K to 500K a year in revenue, everything breaks. You go from 500K to 5 million, so I hear, we’re obviously nowhere close to there, but you go from 500K to 5 million, everything breaks. You go from one to two people, everything breaks. You go from two to five, everything breaks. Five to 20, everything breaks. 20 to 50, everything breaks. 50 to 100, everything breaks, right? Stuff is constantly breaking but by keeping on updating this, it’s going to make your life a lot more sane.

John:
So consider this a kick in the butt. Some tough love, if you will, to go work on creating processes for your business. At the start, I actually dedicated like half a day every week to go and create some processes, and I created a Trello board, created those lists and said that these are the things that we need to create documentation about. I went and I created a doc for each one in a Google Drive folder, and then once that playbook is completed, then I put it into the description of the Trello card on that list, and then I move on to the next one. And so it’s going to be a bit of a process to get it there for your business, especially if you have a lot going on, but of course if you have people, you can also delegate this as well. Create the framework, do a couple of them yourself, shoot a Loom, show them how it works, hold them accountable to getting it done, because this is extremely high leverage for your business.

John:
Hope that’s helpful. I’m John Doherty, founder and CEO here at Credo, and I’ll talk to you later. Peace.