The 5 Business Processes That Drive Small Business Success
You’ve heard that expression, “Work smarter, not harder”, haven’t you? Well your business processes are the key to working smarter and not harder, and they should therefore be the guide as to what is worth measuring and tracking to drive the success of your small business.
Business processes are the flows of activities that get things done in your business. When you know what they are, and when you measure how well they work, you can drive big-step improvements in business success through automating, streamlining and even redesigning your processes in the best possible ways for your business.
There are 5 main business processes for any small business, so let’s take a look at each of them here:
PROCESS 1: The Marketing Process
The Marketing Process is the series of steps that build your list of targeted leads. Basic steps in the Marketing Process are to create your marketing message to attract your target market, get your message out to your target market, and capture the leads that come. At the very least, you would measure the number of prospects, or leads, that your marketing activities generate for you, month to month.
PROCESS 2: The Selling Process
The Selling Process is the series of steps that convert targeted leads or prospects into profitable customers. The basic steps include offering your products and services to your leads, making it easy for them to say ‘yes’ and processing the sales! You want to, as a minimum, track the number of new customers, your sales revenue, and possibly your ‘lead to customer conversion’ rate.
PROCESS 3: The Delivering Process
The Delivering Process is the series of steps that meet your customers’ expectations and fulfil the promises of your products and services. The steps vary depending on the product or service, such as whether it’s a digital e-book, golf clubs or handbags, a personal fitness training service or business consulting services. Customer satisfaction is the most basic measure to track your Delivering Process.
PROCESS 4: The Developing Process
The Developing Process is the series of steps that create profitable and valuable information products and services that your business will sell. It starts with researching what your target market needs and wants from you, and then creating the means by which you can satisfy those needs and wants. This process is worth measuring too, to ensure your products have healthy profit margins, and that you’ve got quick product development cycle times to get your new products and services to a point where they’re adding positively to the bottom line.
PROCESS 5: The Managing Process
The Managing Process is the approach you take to use time and money wisely to grow your business. It’s not a linear process per se, but more like a discipline of regularly monitoring your business performance, scanning your business environment, and making decisions about the best actions to take. The measures that track how well you manage time and money include cash flow, expenses, and productivity.
So what’s success for the small business owner?
The ultimate indicators of success for your small business will depend on what you value. But among those success measures you’ll likely want to include net profit, ROTI (Return On Time Invested, which is the net profit per hour you invest in your business) and some measure of customer value, such as a survey-based customer rating of value for money.
TAKE ACTION:
Flowchart the steps in each of your business processes. Then decide what are the results that you want from each of your business processes? Use these results as the filter to decide what you should measure, and use these measures to decide where and how to improve your business processes, to ramp up your success the fastest.
Stacey Barr is a specialist in performance measurement, helping micro and small business owners to move their business results from where they are, to where they want them to be, using powerful, transformational measures. To grab your free copy of Stacey’s Special Report “7 Clues to Measure What Matters In Micro & Small Business”, visit www.staceybarr.com/smallbusiness. Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/management-articles/the-5-business-processes-that-drive-small-business-success-974219.html
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