5 Ways to use your Proven Process To Drive Sales

by Bill Poole | Aug 5, 2024 | Sales

The Proven Process tool (aka Client Journey, or Client Experience) is an under-utilized tool. As many have said, the Proven Process is the “Front Stage.” These are the stages that your clients navigate with your business to maximize the value they will realize.

For differentiation, on the other side of the coin, the “Back Stage” is where you find your Core Processes, which are the internal processes in place to ensure your client seamlessly navigates their journey across your Proven Process. Especially for services-minded businesses, the Proven Process can be the most tangible tool to communicate how your clients will maximize the value delivered.

The Proven Process is a phenomenal sales tool. Here are 5 ways you can use your Proven Process to drive more sales:

Validate your Proven Process
Align around your Proven Process
Use your Proven Process
Measure your Proven Process
Improve your Proven Process.

Below is some insight on all 5 of these.

Validate Your Proven Process

When was the last time you asked your IDEAL prospects and clients how they felt as they navigated their experience with your business? Gathering external feedback ensures you are focused in the right areas when assessing needs and communicating value in your proposals. This improves close rates for Ideal Prospects.

Here are some ways to validate your Proven Process:

Engage a third party to talk with your clients. At worst, you will confirm what you think you now know. But you will likely be surprised by what you learn!
Send surveys to clients to gather their feedback on different stages of the proven process as appropriate.
For businesses with very high customer lifetime value, a focus group can provide a lot of collective insight that you can use to improve delivery of services

Align Around the Proven Process

Your business should be aligned around your Proven Process from your client’s perspective. If all team members have this foundation, then all understand their role in ensuring that prospects and clients have a great experience. When team members understand what prospects and clients have done and will be doing as their journey transitions from department to department, it is extremely helpful to prospects, clients, and your team.

Here are some ideas to align around your Proven Process:

Create a brand around it and launch it internally. Hang posters on the wall, including it in prospect/client-facing communications.
Use your proven process to add context to any prospect/client-facing processes (sales, marketing, client delivery).
Ensure the handoff from marketing is a seamless process, over-communicating and leveraging video so clients know where they are in your process and what is next.
Set the client delivery team up for success by getting them what they need to deliver excellent service.

Use Your Proven Process!

A lot of proven processes are created at the launch of EOS and then decay on the V/TO. Don’t let this happen to you!

Here’s how to use it:

Use it to communicate the path to value throughout the Sales Process. Prospects and clients enjoy clarity, and showing them where they are on a visual level can be extremely helpful.
Closing tool – map how your client’s compelling event aligns with your proven process to ensure they know what is involved in them getting where they need to go.
Qualifying tool – if a prospect doesn’t seem to fit with your proven process, then it may not be a good client.

Measure Your Proven Process

Most scorecards consist primarily of internal KPIs and metrics that do not measure how your clients navigate your business. Adding proven process KPIs to your scorecard helps you understand where to improve. These KPIs are not likely weekly scorecard metrics but are impactful to reflect back on a quarterly or monthly basis.

Here are some ideas to measure your Proven Process:

Lots of stages are cross-functional. Measure all stages on your Leadership Scorecard and carry down the metrics that each department affects.
Measure conversion rates. This is the percentage of prospects or clients who move to the next stage of the Proven Process. This idea might not apply to all stages, but it works for many of them.
Measure your clients’ satisfaction. Understanding your client’s perspective on how they felt provides immediate actionable insight. Stages like onboarding are great opportunities to send clients a short survey to rate their experience and gather subjective feedback.
Measure time in stages of the Proven Process where possible. This can have financial and client satisfaction implications. Measuring the time spent in a stage like onboarding allows you to improve internal processes to streamline the process and help your clients achieve results quicker.

Improve Your Proven Process

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” Winston Churchill

Once your Proven Process is implemented and you are measuring it, get it into a continuous improvement cycle!

Here are some ideas on improvement:

Put it on your quarterly agenda to reflect back on metrics, pick a stage that needs to be improved, and set a cross-functional rock to improve it.
Improve it in your normal Traction meeting cadence. Some insight gathered presents opportunities for immediate action and improvement. For example, a client survey might include a suggestion for something that can be improved with ease.

Download our Proven Process Checklist for more info.

Client Experience is more than a Vibe

by Bill Poole | Feb 8, 2021 | Strategy

When I say “client experience,” what comes to mind? Take 30 seconds to ponder that question before you read on.

Let’s get a bit more specific and go back in time 5+ years. What sort of experience do you recall having with a taxi cab?

Compare that to the experience that you get when you use Uber.

How are those two experiences different from your perspective? My guess is that taxi and Uber experience likely conjured up feelings on opposite ends of the spectrum. Both of them serve the same purpose of getting you from point A to B, but the vibe that Uber facilitates is significantly different from the taxi vibe.

From the client perspective, the “vibe” is the overall feeling that they have about their entire experience they have with a brand. So what can a brand do to ensure the vibe they are creating is a positive one?

Before we dive in any further, let’s get some clarity on a few things to ensure we are on the same page as to what a client experience is by looking at a few similar terms as noted in this Forbes article:

Customer service is the advice or assistance a company gives its customers.
Customer care means how well customers are taken care of while they interact with the brand.
Customer experience is the total journey of a customer’s interactions with a brand.

Customer Experience became a hot buzzword a few years ago. Consulting businesses sprung up everywhere to ensure that brands provide a positive customer experience targeting the many touch points that very large businesses had with its “customers ”(Face-to face, phone, web, printed invoices, etc).

We help entrepreneurs of small and medium-sized businesses accelerate revenue growth. Our clients refer to their “customers,” as “clients.” So, we help them optimize their “Client Experience” to ensure a positive vibe is associated with the business or brand.

This process starts with mapping out the experience that a client has with your business into the stages that they go through. Let’s turn back to the taxi/Uber analogy and look at the steps involved to go out for a nice dinner.

Stage	Taxi	Uber
Decision Point	Should we just drive? I would like to have a couple of glasses of wine, but I am not sure we can make our reservation on time because the taxi is not reliable.	Looks like an 8 minute wait for an Uber and a 14 minute drive to the restaurant. Perfect, we can relax at home a bit more and request the Uber so we arrive just in time.
Ride Request	Call the taxi dispatch and request a ride from the person that actually may indeed be the most miserable person on earth.	Push 2 or 3 buttons on my phone to select what kind of car I want (large, small, luxury).
The Wait	Will the taxi ever get here? We are not going to make our reservation.	See when the Uber will pull up at the house and go outside to get in the car.
The Ride	If it comes, you get in the car, the cabbie rivals the dispatch person from a misery standpoint, it is dirty, smells bad, and there is some really weird propaganda on radio.	Car is clean, I put my music on the radio, charge my phone, have a bottled water, and chit chat with the driver if I am so inclined (which I often am).
The Exit	Pay, get change and try to figure out the tip OR, give a credit card, listen to the cabbie groan about having to take a credit card, sign, and leave.	Get out of the car and I can tip the next day if I want. I can also split the charge easily with other riders.
Arrival	Miss your reservation or need to apologize for being late.	Walk in, sit down, and enjoy a great dinner.

We are client experience geeks here at Convergo and we feel as though the starting point for creating the Client Experience is to map it out in a similar way that you see above (Decision, Ride Request, The Wait, etc).

There are 2 high-level reasons why you would want to do this:

It provides a framework for differentiation and improvement.
It helps to align your team.

Framework for Differentiation and Improvement

It is harder and harder to differentiate the products and services that you sell to your clients BUT it is very difficult to copy a client experience.

Mapping out the Client Experience provides a framework for differentiation and improvement. Breaking down the stages and making improvements to all of the stages provides a better result than trying to differentiate from a macro standpoint. It gives you specific moments in time to zero in on to begin optimizing.

Align Your Team

Let’s turn back to what I would assume to be the structure of a taxi business. I can only assume that an owner of a taxi business thinks of the different departments needed to run the cab company:

Dispatch
Drivers
Vehicle maintenance
Back office

Given the touch points noted above, it is hard for me to believe that there is any consideration given to how the client feels in any of these functions.

Sales, Marketing, and Operations traditionally exist in silos in many organizations in a similar way that these departments run a taxi business.

The big shift to Client Experience actually through the lens of the client allows you to think about:

What the client needs to have a pleasant experience in each stage
THEN, what is the role of Operations, Sales, and Marketing to facilitate that pleasant experience.

The taxi vs Uber discussion is a great example of how this all comes together. In closing, a couple of questions:

How do you go about differentiating your products or services?
How do you align sales, marketing, and operations?