And now you know and knowing is half the battle
Take a bow. Not just for sticking with me through my previous two blogs, ‘Good systems make business sense’ and 'I love it when a plan comes together' but for looking at ways to establish or improve good systems and processes within your organization. If you’ve come this far, you deserve a medal. However, the journey isn't over just yet. As you move further along the process and see what progress you’ve made, it’s easy to think that the job is done, but please don’t give up!
Whilst reminiscing over my beloved 1980’s memories – did Indiana Jones ever give up on his quest to find the Holy Grail whilst dodging bullets or did He-Man throw in the towel when it got too tough defending Eternia from Skeletor? The answer is no and it is no different or less monumental to what you are doing right now.
Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones (Source: Hollywood.com)
So this brings me to my final installment in the trilogy. What happens now? Design and implementation are just the first of many challenges. Now you have a system, you need to keep it tight and continue to work on ensuring its success.
Keep the momentum
Don’t let the system slip and reinforce it at every opportunity. Grey areas will exist and you will get push-back. However, if you stick to your fundamental set of rules you will work through any obstacle. We now have only two things sales can do with a lead, accept and convert with an opportunity or reject for nurturing. Any rule breaking appears on a delinquency report in real-time and is instantly followed up by our global marketing operations team. If you bend the system for anyone then the system breaks with you.
Keep talking
You should always keep talking to every part of the organization to ensure the process flows seamlessly and doesn't cause problems for others further along the chain. There will always be something that doesn’t quite fit, but as long as you keep talking about it with others and stick to your basic rules and guidelines, you will overcome any problems. Do be flexible though. If you keep working with different teams to educate them you will continue to see better tracking and smoother day-today operations.
Continue to react in real-time
Yes, everyone should know what they are doing by now, but it doesn’t mean that you should stop reminding people of the process or chasing people who have broken the rules. You have invested a lot of time and effort into the training programmes, however, it takes constant attention to maintain what you have carefully put in place. It is important at this stage to keep up real-time reporting. If you talk to people as and when things happen, it stays fresh in their mind and reinforces the fact that you are still watching.
Share your success
Once our system was in place, one of things I found most exciting was watching our marketing sourced pipeline grow month by month, then we started projections built around of End-Of Year marketing sourced pipeline actuals. The great thing is that people will get excited with you. I remember the first time I shared with our team how much pipeline they had contributed. From that moment on, no-one had any doubts or wanted to by-pass the system and worked with me to reinforce the process with others in the organization.
Roll with it
The last piece of advice I could offer anyone is to just roll with it. You will have good days and bad days but if you take a moment to re-focus, perhaps talk through it then you will get back on track and you can keep going.