Does every department in your company have set processes, except for your sales and marketing departments?
“Every part of a company has processes until you walk into marketing or sales. And when you walk into most sales bullpens, it's like the Wild West."
“If you go in the HR department, they've got an onboarding process. You go to the finance department, they have a billing process,” said growth expert and author Darrell Amy. “Every part of a company has processes until you walk into marketing or sales. And when you walk into most sales bullpens, it's like the Wild West. You can hear the eagle overhead and you can see the tumbleweed and there's a couple guys flipping some coins, and the sales manager is like, ‘Y'all need to go make some calls.’ Or, ‘Man, we're not making enough prospecting calls so let's have a blitz.’ It's just, there's no process, everyone's doing something different.”
He said the marketing department isn’t much different.
“Hey look, marketing, we're not much different,” he said. “What are we going to do? Ah, we need to run a campaign or let's do an event. Or let's do a promotion. Wait, back up. What's the process?”
Amy is author of the new book, Revenue Growth Engine: How To Align Sales & Marketing To Accelerate Growth. He joined Freedom Media Network founder Curt Mercadante for a wide-ranging interview.
He said that, in the absence of process, we usually just lean back on “what we’re really good at.”
“Usually in the absence of process, sales teams lean on, ‘let's go out and grab some net new business,’” he said. “And they neglect to manage the current client accounts and increase their revenue per client by cross selling. In marketing, we might lean on our strength of AdWords and getting found online, but not have a process in place to take that lead and take the data that's there and mine it and actually find the opportunities and pan the gold out and get it over to sales.”
Amy said that every business can be boiled down to two basic levels: People and processes.
“And so inside 'Revenue Growth Engine', the last half of the book is looking at the four core areas of process,” he explained. “On net new clients, we look at outbound marketing. We look at selling, outbound selling, which is your prospecting process and all the things around that. But then once someone becomes a client there's sets of processes. How are we going to manage those clients on the sales side? And how are we going to communicate with those clients on the marketing side? As you build those processes, now these are like the flywheels of an engine. Once that thing gets rolling now you've got something in motion and now you don't have the typical ‘up and down’ you've got systems in place to make sure you can do net new and you can do cross sell simultaneously.”
Amy said these processes are key to making the “magic” happen with your revenue growth, even if focusing on process can seem boring.
“It's not very sexy. It's not very exciting,” he said. But it’s critical. And this is where organizations can really benefit. If they take some time to build the process, they'll have a more productive growth engine.”
Watch Amy’s full discussion with Mercadante by clicking here.
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