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.

Putting the Marketing Strategy from your V/TO to work

by Bill Poole | Sep 6, 2023 | EOS, Marketing, Strategy

The four elements of the Marketing Strategy component of the Vision/Traction Organizer™ of the Entrepreneurial Operating System® provide a fantastic framework for growing your business. If you don’t remember off the top of your head, the four elements are:

Your target market/The list
3 Uniques™
Your Proven Process
Your Guarantee

The first step in leveraging this framework is to ensure that you do a thorough job of documenting each one of the four elements. But that’s still just the beginning! As is the case with most of the EOS® tools, the power is in how you leverage these on an ongoing basis. How do you go about doing that? For starters, everyone in your organization should be able to recite each of the four elements at any given moment.

Below are some ideas as to how you can put the different elements in to work for you and your B2B business. A brief introduction for each is included, but I’m not going to spend much time talking about the elements themselves (your EOS Implementer® can help with that!).

Target Market/The List

The Target Market refers to the clients that are ideal fits for your business. This includes basic information like what industry they are in, what geography they are in, and other descriptive characteristics. In the B2B space, this should also include who the key players are inside of those businesses. Here’s some ideas around taking the next step in providing value to your Target Market and growing your business:

Your target market is identified and an ideal client profile is created that represents the businesses that are ideal fits for your products and services
Everyone in your business can communicate the profile of your ideal client and the desired outcomes that your organization delivers to those clients
Key functional contacts that work in businesses that fit your ideal client profile are identified and documented and the specific outcomes they desire are identified and documented
100% of the organizations that fit your ideal client profile are identified in your CRM
100% of key functional contacts within your ideal client organizations are identified in your CRM
A sales and marketing strategy is designed and documented with the goal of engaging with 100% of the key functional contacts within organizations that fit your ideal client profile
You are able to measure engagement levels with all of these functional contacts

3 Uniques™

Your 3 Uniques™ provide a high-level outline for what differentiates you from your competitors. While you may share a unique or two with other providers, your 3 Uniques™ should not be shared by any other business. Here are some thoughts around putting your 3 Uniques™ to work for you:

Your entire organization can articulate your 3 Uniques™ and why they matter to your ideal client
3 Uniques™ are clearly represented in some way on your website
3 Uniques™ come to life in all sales and marketing collateral
Your sales process is designed to leverage your 3 Uniques™
You have shareable case studies that show how your 3 Uniques™ are directly benefiting a client’s organization
Content that communicates the value of your 3 Uniques™ is regularly shared with your audience
Proposals are structured to clearly communicate how the 3 Uniques™ will benefit your prospects

Guarantee

Simply stated, your guarantee should remove the most significant barriers for your target market to do business with you and it should support your value proposition. Here are some things that you can do to ensure your guarantee is properly communicated to your target market:

Your guarantee clearly addresses and overcomes the most common challenge that prospects have in engaging with your business
Your guarantee clearly articulates the consequences of your company not fulfilling on your end of the guarantee
Your guarantee is communicated on the homepage of our website
Your guarantee is communicated on all sales proposals
You have referenceable examples where we a client leveraged your guarantee satisfactorily
Your guarantee is in the footer of your emails

Proven Process

Your Proven Process should provide context and clarity as to how your ideal clients will navigate their experience with your business. At Convergo, We see the Proven Process as a subset of the Ideal Client Experience. We feel strongly that the Ideal Client Experience is the foundation for aligning to your entire business to maximize the value that you provide to your clients. Here are some thoughts around the Proven Process in motion:

Your proven process has an internal brand and 100% of your team can recite your proven process and their role in the process
There is a external version of your proven process that shows prospects how they will engage with your business if they were to become a client
The sales and marketing arms of your organization are aligned around your proven process with the goal of creating an amazing client experience

We’d love to hear from all of you how you are bringing the marketing elements of your V/TO™ to life in your organization.