Synchronize Your Sales and Marketing System for Controlled Growth

By Mark Phelps, Synchronous Solutions

Many fabricators in the surfacing industry have had tremendous success using Synchronous Flow to improve their businesses from a production standpoint: reducing lead times, improving first-time quality and more. But can you apply Synchronous Flow to the marketing and sales side of your business? The answer is yes!

Synchronous Flow is the science of improving flow as it relates to information or material. Flow problems exist in all areas of your life. You experience these problems whether you are dealing with rush hour traffic, waiting in queue at your local DMV, or trying to pay your bills and needing a check to clear. The big challenge is trying to accomplish all you set out to get done with limited time and availability. Synchronous Flow brings an array of procedures, policies, tools and techniques to transform the business process from a chaotic, reactive, out-ofcontrol process into a disciplined, proactive and fully-in-control business system. If you’re familiar with Synchronous Flow as it applies to production, then you will see the same concepts applied to sales and marketing.

Perfecting Flow in Sales and Marketing

In sales and marketing, the focus is on the flow of information and people — customers. In this case, leads, prospects, and customers are your raw materials and the communication that occurs between them and your company representatives is the information.

When you run a marketing campaign, your goal is to generate leads. When a lead comes in, you want to ensure they are nurtured as quickly as possible. It’s essential to build a process and train your staff to be effective at it. Maybe you have someone who answers the call promptly, or you have an email inbox that gets monitored. The marketing process is about getting in front of people in your target market and engaging with them in a way that makes them want to do business with you.

Synchronous Flow is about designing the sales and marketing process that allows you to regulate the flow of leads and manage how effective the process is at achieving the company goals. The first step is to know the limits of the process. How many people can say, “Hey, I’m interested,” before the process breaks down? If one person says they’re interested, OK, no problem. If 100 people say they’re interested in a single day, could you handle all those leads with your current process and staff?

It’s crucial to understand: What is the limiting resource? How much is too much for our receptionist to handle? How much is too much for our sales team to handle? What is the constraint to processing new leads and producing quotes effectively? If you overload the production system, it will go into chaos; the same thing will happen if you overload a sales and marketing system.

How do you measure success? One way is to look at quotes. You can see how many leads are coming in, so you should be able to track those quotes and follow-ups. If you see a bottleneck, identify the constraint:

• What is the capacity of the team?

• What would enable the team to do more?

• What are some limits in the process?

With these insights, you can start to (re)define the process from that point forward. The goal is to improve your process continuously.

Your marketing system should get better and better. Every dollar spent on marketing should result in more quotes. Every team member in marketing should be able to handle more demand from the market.

An important thing to understand is what’s constraining your ability to respond appropriately to incoming calls. If someone inquires about a quote on a countertop project and you don’t respond to them in an hour or two, chances are they’ve already called someone else, and you may have lost that lead. You need to be able to monitor your capacity and your incoming calls and make sure that you have sufficient capacity to answer the phone and respond in the timeframe that the customer expects — as soon as possible, on demand.

The Right Tasks in the Right Roles

Outside sales is about getting new B2B relationships. One of the biggest constraints I see is that an employee is preoccupied with tasks that are not generating new relationships — the crux of their role. For example, I’ve seen outside salespeople responsible for assembling and delivering the samples and maintaining the sample racks. That is not developing new relationships. From a Synchronous Flow standpoint, what is your outside salesperson doing that’s not directly related to developing new relationships? Once you have identified those tasks, apply the process to figure out how to offload them to someone else so that your salesperson can focus solely on building relationships.

Another thing you don’t want your outside salesperson to do is create the paperwork associated with those relationships. Someone really good at talking with people is not always good at documenting the details in your CRM. So, you might need to consider offloading that work so they can focus on what they do well.

Pricing Strategies and Profitability

Whether they’re inside or outside sales, Synchronous Flow has a lot to offer in terms of how to focus and take your capacity and your business to the next level. Equally important, or maybe even more important, is what Synchronous Flow has to say about pricing strategies.

Most businesses run off margins, but that thinking can get you in trouble. There is a perception that there is a certain margin a business needs to earn. Understanding what profitability really means and what relative profitability of jobs means is a game-changer.

Once you understand the relative profitability of jobs and what it takes to be profitable, you can empower your salespeople to go out there and buy new customers. How you do this is through aggressive pricing strategies in new markets. Once you’ve built the relationship, over time, you can gradually work the pricing structure up to your regular pricing. Leverage your capacity during a down market or slow times of the year.

The Ebb and Flow of the Marketplace

One thing that I keep hearing from fabricators is that their constraints are moving from internal to the marketplace. Lots of you went out and hired people and bought new equipment during the pandemic boom, and you’re noticing it’s getting harder and harder to close deals. Yes, there is less demand in the marketplace than there was, but there is still way more demand than any of our clients can serve on their own. If you’re reading this article, you likely have not maxed out your marketplace. The market is still ample. Fabricators are still making money. There’s plenty of business out there. Success depends on how you innovate your processes to make room for opportunities for growth — no matter what the market is doing.

Mark Phelps is an owner of Synchronous Solutions, a firm dedicated to helping fabricators maximize their bottom line while on the continuous pursuit of excellence. Synchronous Solutions has helped over 100 fabricators build competitive advantages in their marketplace and grow to break new records, achieving financial control and life balance for their ownership and teams. To learn how Synchronous Solutions can help your business, visit www.synchronoussolutions.com.