In the business world, there is no time to wait. And if you feel like orders are coming in irregularly and the business cycle is getting longer, it's time to take control.
In today's episode, we'll look at how to become the true master of your orders and how to shorten your sales cycle. Most entrepreneurs and marketers today face the same challenge - trying to solve the problem of irregular order intake and the resulting constant pressure. On themselves, on the team, on the company. But a successful business strategy should not depend on chance or external circumstances.
How do we get out of this? How do you take control of your business process while maintaining quality and profitability?
So today we're going to take a look together...
Whether you have a small business or a large one, these tips will not only help you overcome your current business challenges, but more importantly, show you the way to long-term sustainable growth.
"Look at your business as a factory for signed contracts. That's the only way you'll control what happens in your shop. In a factory, too, if you don't have the material, you don't have anything to poke at. "
Martin Hurych | Founder @ Business Accelerator s.r.o.
Become the master of your orders ( transcript)
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is another Ignition, this time in another solo episode. Before we get to today's business topic, I'd like to ask you one thing. If you like anything from
of what I do, consider joining the list of more than 1,300 emails I've already from owners and CEOs of engineering, technology and manufacturing companies. In return for that trust, I always send them news from the world of strategy, business, innovation and working with people every Tuesday.
Introduction of the topic
Today I would like to discuss a here that was brought up a few months ago by my own client, said he had to wait to see if he would be awarded the contract. I have to admit that it shook me up a lot because I don't have that mentality and I have always tried to be the master of my own contracts, to be the master of my own success. So I want to do my best to get that success. So it occurred to me to reflect on this topic here.
What connects companies in business distress?
Business owners and CEOs often call me and tell me to go see them because they're not very good at it, or they are good at it but could do better. I see three or four moments that connect the companies. Very often it's irregular intake. A lot of people come in not knowing if they should hire people first or if they should get orders first. Then people come in asking what to do if they have an erratic schedule. I came up with a pretty nice analogy for that relatively recently.
A commercial funnel is also a funnel, and when you pour irregularly into that ordinary funnel you have in your kitchen at home, the water comes out irregularly at the beginning and very likely at the end. At the same time, if you pour a little into that funnel, you're very unlikely to get any constant flow at the end. So it's good to remember that the irregular order intake is somewhere in the beginning in your company.
Another thing that customers often say is that they have a damn low margin on some jobs and they are not happy with that, they need to ideally choose jobs that they enjoy and are profitable for them. A lot of times that stems from the fact that as I have irregular contracts and as I get pressured to get my own people out and not burn money, I have to take contracts that are supposed to keep that company alive. All of this very often leads to burnout of the owner or the director, to frustration, to annoyance of the whole team that works in that company, because of course nobody enjoys it in the long run.
I see these situations very often when a company grows out of a reference or an existing market and needs to look outside. I say it here a lot, the time of plenty that ended a few years before Covid, when there was a glut of demand in the market and all you had to do was supply, is long gone.
References and connections, although legitimately a major sales channel in the Czech Republic, are no longer enough for many companies. I often see that companies lack a strategic approach, both at the business and at the commercial . I even often hear that they are flexible, that they don't need a strategy or they are
so small they don't have or need a strategy yet. It needs to be openly acknowledged here that this approach is quite noticeably damaging to these companies.
The three pillars of success
Today I would like to look at three basic pillars of how to work with this so that you can eliminate the three or four most frequently mentioned problems as much as possible. I will not forgive myself here, however, one small trip to the Czech specifics. For example, in my international corporate career a few years ago, I have never heard such pressure on connections and references. I hear a lot from a lot of entrepreneurs that they don't need anyone and that they can do it on their own. I understand and admire anyone who has built any business because I always tell my clients and the entrepreneurial bubble that they are the elite of the company because they had the courage to take the plunge into the marketplace at their own risk and on their own responsibility. This part of the bubble used to have and has this idea that if I can build a company, I can break strategy or business approaches.
To cut into my own bubble of coaches, counselors, trainers, and coaches, we have often not done a perfect job on our side. So there's a pretty significant reticence among you entrepreneurs to anyone who has coach, consultant, etc. on their business card. On the other hand, I see that for all the clients that have wanted to work on themselves in some way and have brought in somebody else, some mentoring perspective, that business has run dramatically faster. There's a ton of us trainers, coaches, consultants and coaches out there, I leave it entirely up to you who you choose, I just give you to consider if you need to be on your own in the firm. Personally, I can see that if you're at the where there aren't a lot of those contracts, it's a good idea to consult someone and figure out how.
I have spoken here about three strategic pillars, which I would like to discuss quickly today. The first pillar is strategic focus, what customers are ideal for me, where the company is going, what it's going to do. The second is the notorious value proposition creation, where I tell that market and that ideal customer why they should do business with me. The third one is systemic, how to put it all into some comprehensive system. Because I'm more and more pushing the idea that a business should operate like a factory for orders or signed contracts. I'm a firm believer that if you start looking at your sales team or your sales process through that lens, you start to see the business in a whole new way and you start to build it in a whole new way. I guarantee you that you will get that business up and running very quickly.
How to work with your strategy?
To the first pillar, how to work with strategic focus if you don't feel like you're the second Elon Musk or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs right now and you don't feel like you necessarily have something in your hand right now that will differentiate you. Any of you or any of you listening to me have very likely built a business that's been in the market for a while and you have some customers. That answer is often
specifically for those smaller companies just among whoever is listening to you, those customers that you've already acquired. Look at those carefully, analyze them, find out where they're from, what they're interested in, how big they are, I'm not going to go into detail here. Very often we neglect this analysis because we feel we don't have time for it and we're chasing a blind acquisition in the market. If we knew who to actually approach in that acquisition, our salespeople wouldn't have to fly so frantically and so inefficiently around the market and could target just the ones we're comfortable with.
I saw a video recently that spoke to me, 2025 and beyond will mean a focus for a lot of companies on something called the super niche. That means an even narrower focus on the people you bring value to that often only they can see. There may be several of those groups in that database of yours, so it's definitely a good idea to categorize them in some way and realize what clients A, B, C are interested in. I may have small business clients from big cities and freelancers from big at the same time. Marketing-wise, I'm probably not going to approach them in exactly the same way, I need to read each of those groups separately and approach each of those categories separately because at the same time, if 2025 is going to characterize anything, it's the next level of superpersonalization. Once I have these groups, I can crystallize something we call the ideal customer profile.
Business owners often remain at the company level. I would make an appeal here, go down to the level of the individual person, the individual decision maker, and try to find out their motivations down to the personal level. Don't just think about what you're going to deliver to him in his professional life. Try to describe that person to a level where you know where they study, what they study, how they study, if they prefer to read blog articles or videos or podcasts and then you can serve them your content accordingly. If you do that, then you're going to specify out of a bunch of potential customers the ones that it already makes sense objectively based your own data to both them and you.
What do you really deliver to your customers?
If I already have a clear idea of who I want to deliver to, I should have a clear idea what I'm delivering to them. Very likely, what I see as delivery, whether 's a service or a physical product, I see very differently than my customer sees it. It's a good idea to go to that group of customers that I've already delivered to and ask them what they see as my value-add.
Don't be fooled, the first wave of answers will be a bit cliché. They'll say quality, price, service, support, we're happy with that, but go one, two, three levels deeper. What is support, what does it look like, did it help you, how did it help you personally, what did you gain from it? That's the level you need to get to, because then that will also help you in value-added communication.
If you know what your competitors are doing, which I assume you do, very often you add something to your company's value proposition that you just see your competitors doing and without much thought you just adopt it into your offering. This is where I give one of the tools of the blue ocean strategy, the ERRC matrix, for consideration. This can give you a clear indication of what that customer really requires from you and where you are spending money unnecessarily in delivering something that that customer doesn't about. If this
matrix is interesting, check out some of the previous episodes or my blog where I specifically talk about the ERRC matrix.
If you know both, it's a good idea to think about how you're going to communicate your added value. I hear very often, we sell software, we supply line automation, we supply some red boxes. That appeals to fewer and fewer customers, because some companies are responding to software offers several times a day. Software is supplied by every other company. It's not what you deliver, software is just a means of delivering your added value. Your value-add might be that we reduce scrap rates by 15% by using some information system that monitors the causes of scrap rates and because you have that information you can do something further. In the vast majority of businesses my bubble we communicate this value poorly. We should be selling not the product itself, but rather the results of the transformation that occurs in the company the moment you get your good or service up and running for the customer.
How to build a modern business process well?
The third pillar is to put it all together into some kind of meaningful system. We've already talked about the importance of business systems here on the podcast, and I'll mention them today as well. The first prerequisite is to set up the business process well. Try to think about what the buying process looks like on your prospective customer's side, try to think about what your prospective customer is going to experience with you during the buying process, and piece that sales process together accordingly. Build it as a linear process, even though roughly 60% of customers today will not follow that linear process, but they will come back in different ways, they will skip around and go through different phases. As a modern entrepreneur or marketer, don't let that discourage you. I personally take the business process more and more as a checklist to tell me if I have enough information, if I have taken this customer through all the stages, if I have told them all the information, where I am at this point in time. I don't care anymore, even based on recent surveys from, say, Google, if that customer is going from phase to phase. I'm adapting to the phase that the customer is in right now. I myself recommend somewhere around 9-13 phases for that customer, sometimes less, sometimes more, depending on how complex the process is, what we're selling right now, and how we've constructed our internal team.
It's good to remember that it's not just the salespeople who are responsible for the business process. Increasingly, the business process is built from several specialisations, with each specialisation having responsibility for one or more phases of the business process. Typically, traders are at the beginning and the end in the trading and negotiation process. At the beginning there may be someone who is responsible for analysis, in the middle there may be someone who is responsible for preparing the documents and calculations, for data analysis. Somewhere in that process there may be someone I call sales operations support who may be sort of the project manager for that sales team.
It's good to remember that salespeople are often one of the more expensive assets you in your company, but at the same time, they are often 70% dedicated to non-business activities. So if I'm building business processes, I try to make sure that the salesperson is fully engaged in what they should do best. Sami
you feel that the business is complex not only externally, at the customer, where you're addressing 7-12, even more co-decision makers, but it's complex internally, so you can't do without CRM. I still hear sometimes a small company of a few people just needs Excel. I really don't think so, because there are so many tools on the market for a few dollars a month or even free that I wouldn't trust Excel with something as complex as a modern business process.
A business process that is very well mapped and very well monitored is important in another important respect. If I really want to become the master of my contracts, I need to know which contract is at which stage, but I also need to know where I have internal bottlenecks in the business process, where things are slipping. I would definitely start measuring a few things for that. Among other things, I would mention conversions between phases, length of the sales cycle, sales prediction, and phases in each month scheduled for closing and profitability on each contract. This isn't necessarily just a CRM issue, but could be some additional insight into maybe internal business intelligence or some ERP system. To me, those are important things that can make that funnel more manageable for you as an owner.
Why look at business as a contract factory?
As I say, look at the shop as a factory, I think it may somehow give a lot of you another insight into what goes on in the shop, perhaps a much clearer one. Because you are the owners of the manufactures, you are the owners of the code manufactures, even though the IT guys may not quite like it, but more and more IT business owners are thinking of their people as code manufactures. This perspective might show you that it's worth looking at it really holistically and that it's worth understanding the business.
Here's the unpleasant news at the end, it makes sense to try to pour just as much activity into that business funnel as I like, with just the kind of customers I like. That's the only way I can get a constant flow of orders at the end of that very well described and formulated sales funnel at the quality I would want myself. Returning in a big arc to the end to my customer and his belief that contracts are allocated, I guess we can say that contracts are allocated at the individual level. Almost every contract today, for example in larger companies, is allocated on the basis of the results of a tender process. But it's good to remember that if I'm relying on four contracts in my sales funnel and I have to land four, I'm not really the master of my contracts. Think about it in the sense that if I want to produce consistently in the factory, I also don't put material into the machines in a haphazard way at the beginning, and I hope this insight shows you a little bit of the way forward.
If that is indeed what happened, I'm glad I motivated you, maybe made you think a little. In that case, lick this episode, give subscriptions, or send it on somewhere else where it might be useful to someone. To reiterate my request, consider signing up for my My Notebook subscriber list, which at this point already has more than 1,300 email addresses of owners and CEOs of engineering, technology, and manufacturing companies. If you feel like sharing your business or
with your company and its strategy, you can always pick up the phone and call. Until that , I'll keep my fingers crossed and wish you success with both strategies and trading, thanks.