Mindful B2B Marketing | Business Growth and Social Impact (Former: Forward Launch Your SaaS)

S2E2: Building Collaboration Between Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success ft. Mark Osborne, founder of Modern Revenue Strategies

• Season 2 • Episode 2

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In this episode, Mark Osborne emphasizes scalable relationships in marketing, stressing efficient systems for growth. He offers B2B marketers guidance on KPIs and revenue optimization.

Chapters

0:31

Introduction

4:04

The Power of Systems

14:10

Improving Systems Through Meetings

25:19

Implementing an Effective Referral System

27:50

Impact of Systematizing on Teams

31:43

Steps to Implement Systems Within a Team

36:16

Overcoming Challenges in System Implementation

39:28

Smooth System Implementation Tips

41:24

Promoting the Book and Offer


Long Summary

Mark Osborne, the founder of Modern Revenue Strategies, shares his journey into founding his company and his background in marketing. He discusses the importance of building one-to-one relationships at scale using data and technology. Mark highlights the challenges of keeping up with the ever-growing marketing technology landscape and explains the fundamental approach his company takes to drive scalable and reliable growth in marketing.

Mark emphasizes the significance of systems in setting teams free from friction and uncertainty, enabling collaboration, and providing peace of mind. He delves into the process of creating and implementing effective systems within organizations to attract prospects, accelerate opportunities, and activate clients for renewals, upsells, and referrals. Mark stresses the importance of establishing clear KPIs and benchmarks to measure success in customer acquisition, revenue growth, and referrals.

He outlines practical steps for B2B marketers to systematize their processes, focusing on identifying areas for improvement, documenting critical client flows, and fostering collaboration among team members. Mark shares insights into overcoming challenges in implementing systems, such as resistance to change and concerns about job security. He emphasizes the role of leadership in supporting and adhering to systems to drive organizational success.

Mark introduces a special offer for the audience, providing a free download of his book, "Are Your Leads Killing Your Business?" along with templates, calculators, and training resources to help businesses enhance their revenue systems. He invites viewers to access these resources and offers personalized guidance in diagnosing revenue systems and identifying growth opportunities. Mark concludes by expressing his pleasure in sharing insights and engaging in the conversation.

Brief Summary

Mark Osborne, the founder of Modern Revenue Strategies, discusses the importance of building one-to-one relationships at scale using data and technology in marketing. He emphasizes the significance of systems in setting teams free from friction, enabling collaboration, and providing peace of mind. Mark outlines the process of creating and implementing effective systems to attract prospects, accelerate opportunities, and drive growth in marketing. He highlights the role of clear KPIs and benchmarks in measuring success and offers practical steps for B2B marketers to systematize their processes. Mark introduces a free download of his book and resources to help businesses enhance their revenue systems, concluding with an invitation for viewers to access these resources for personalized guidance.

Give feedback on this episode by sending the host a text message.

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[0:31] Today, I am sitting down with Mark Osborne.
He's the founder of Modern Revenue Strategies.
So Mark, I'm super excited to chat with you today and learn a little bit about your background and all the things that you have to share.
Absolutely, Kira. It's a real pleasure to be here. Yeah. So as we start hopping into this, yeah, I just wanted to learn a little bit about how how you got into founding your company and how you got into like this space in general.
Yeah, for sure. So it's actually, so it's a funny story about how I got started in marketing and it kind of leads to the genesis of this company as well.
So back in college, this was the nineties.
So in the early days of the internet, people didn't have access to the internet all the time. You might have access like once a week when you went to like a college campus or you got to log on to a computer that had access to the internet.
And so there was such a thing as like billboards where people would go like post a note on the internet and then wait for people to respond to that note because they came back every week or so.
So in college, I was managing bands and playing in bands and touring around the Southeast. East.
And I noticed that on these BBS Usenet groups, these billboard services.

[1:52] People would post, well, I have the bootleg tape of Dave Matthews Band playing in Atlanta.
Well, and there was no such thing as spam at the time. So your email address was your username.
So people wanted you to know how to get in touch with them.
So I started building databases of people that were fans of Dave Matthews Band and lived in Atlanta.
And I had their email address. So when one of my bands that sounded like Dave Matthews Band went to Atlanta, I sent an email to all these folks and that would sell out the concert.
So these tiny little unknown bands, I was selling out concerts for them, which led to a job at a record label, led to a job at a radio station, led to a job in marketing and advertising.
And my career there sort of progressed. And I was really always really passionate about sort of building these one-to-one relationships at scale.
So sort of serving consumers with what they wanted, using data and technology to sort of facilitate that relationship. And I got more and more into using data and using technology.
And in fact, worked for a company that was one of the first ones to put ads on Facebook and Instagram.
And they had like the fire hose of all of the data of people's likes and activities on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.
And they built an artificial intelligence and machine learning model to predict who would respond to an ad based on what they had liked in the past.
So really technical utilization of all this data.

[3:18] And I got so into it that actually Advertising Age magazine named me Marketing Technology Trailblazer back in 2017.
I was one of 25 people in the world. They said we're the best in the world at using data and technology for marketing.
But what I realized was that there was so much new data and so much new technology, it was really impossible to keep up.
The Marketing Technology Conference started publishing a list in 2014 of all of the data and technology vendors in the MarTech space.
And when the list started, there were about 150.
There are now over 10,000, actually over 11,000 different companies in that

[4:00] space. So it's really just impossible to keep up with that.
And so rather than trying to keep up with all of the little growth hacks and all the little ways to game an algorithm that a lot of sort of gurus or consultants will talk about, I realized that the best marketers were the ones that were really focused on fundamentals of marketing and building.

[4:23] Music.

[4:29] And reliable success. And that's really the nexus of this business is using systems to build scalable and reliable growth in marketing, and then layering in data and technology to sort of empower that and make it all the better.
And the real sort of vision and sort of our calling is to help entrepreneurs and founders who have great ideas on products and solutions that make the world a better place that can grow businesses and bring more good to the world, a lot of those people really don't want to focus on the marketing sales and customer success aspects of their business.
They want to focus on building world-class solutions.
And so that's what we do is we build the systems that attract the right prospects for them, accelerate the right opportunities through the sales pipeline, and then activate their existing clients for renewals, upsells and referrals so that they can focus on building world-class products and solutions.
And that's really sort of the good we try to bring through the world. Okay. That makes sense.

[5:34] That's a lot to kind of take in, but if you had to condense that down to like a single piece of advice or like a tactic or something that you'd give to other marketers in the B2B space, then what would you say that that is?
It's really that systems set you free.
And one of the things that I love about your conversations around this sort of being mindful, because one of the things that we see is that systems really enable your company to move away from a lot of the friction that exists between marketing and sales or marketing.
We created the leads and sales says, well, they're all terrible leads.
But if you have a system that people are sort of aligned on, they can work together and collaborate in a much more meaningful way.
So systems will set you free from that strife.
They also set you free from sort of the uncertainty of knowing if your marketing is going to pay off.
Because when you have a system that has leading indicators built into it, you can forecast much more reliably and much more predictably.
To have a lot more peace of mind.
And it also sets you free from reliance on gurus that are chasing growth hacks or consultants that keep you waiting on them, or even free from ad agencies that are always telling you to spend more money on ads.
Having these systems in place really brings a lot more freedom to your business.

[6:59] Yeah, I could see that. And I feel like it's pretty common for like marketing teams, sales teams, customer success teams to all just kind of live in their own bubbles.
I mean, you could tell me whether that's common or not, but at least that's how it was when I worked on a marketing team.
That's right. And so like when you're talking about systems that help to...

[7:24] Reduce that friction and enable collaboration then what do you what do you mean like dive into like the technical specifications or what what is a system does that mean like the the tools that you're using does that mean like the like particular cadence or structure of meetings as between these teams or is it like some third thing sure so at its simplest form a system is just a set of instructions that when followed consistently delivers a high quality output or an output.
And so it can be as simple as a checklist.
But we also see that companies really benefit from using a project management technology that accesses checklists that might live in sort of like a systems hub where you have all of your systems in one place so that you can can say, well, we're trying to bring in new prospects, new leads in the business. What is our system for that?
And someone can look up, well, we do advertising on this platform and this is what we do to set up a new campaign.
This is what we do to measure the effectiveness of that campaign.
This is what we do to optimize that campaign. And that might be your system for capturing leads.

[8:41] And then once a lead is captured, well, what's your system for qualifying that lead or nurturing it or moving it through the sales site.
Again, a collection of instructions that might be documented and live in technology or might just be written down on paper.
We've actually seen really successful companies that just document it and have things up on walls that they look at and reference.
But having a system creates a sort of central objective source of truth so that then you can look at the system and say, are we getting the outcome that we want or expect?
Expect, and if not, you can work together to hypothesize ways to improve the system and then sort of improve it and realize the benefits rather than just sort of pointing your finger at one person on the team and saying, well, you did a bad job because we didn't get the right amount of leads.
Instead, you can say, well, our system let us down. We didn't get the right amount of leads. What can we do to improve the system?

[9:38] Or if it's a function of someone not following the system, then it becomes more clearly, well, do they need more training or do they need more motivation or more oversight?
All of those things make it a lot more clear on really how to improve the business in a way that's much more harmonious and can be much more mindful.
And the other thing that we see is when you have a system like this in place, bringing marketing and sales and customer success together to collaborate on one revenue system.

[10:10] You get really great ideas from customer success that they see what the customers really love and are excited about what leads to renewals and referrals.
And so they can bring that into the messaging up front on what attracts the right prospects to you and even the right things to emphasize as part of the sales process that's ultimately going to close the deal.
So having a system sort of creates a place for collaboration across these teams.
So okay so before you work with these companies like do they i'm assuming they're just kind of like scattered or like they're they're just in their own little bubbles right and then you're you're having them create a system by like putting everything down either on paper or like some kind of digital checklist hub and so like what is kind of the before and after because i'm trying to get like a really clear sense of like what you help them incorporate and like what it'll look like for a company.

[11:10] Yeah. So for many companies, it sort of looks like one or a few people carrying all the load themselves.
And oftentimes with founder led companies or, you know, sort of early stage companies, the founder or some early stage people, they have learned how to do all of the the things that sort of lead to the successful outcomes, but they oftentimes haven't documented it.
And so they're sort of, everyone is relying on them and they are sort of the bottleneck in the business things done, or at least to get them done right.

[11:43] And so oftentimes companies are, you know, we really relying on a few people that are just carrying all the weight themselves.
There are lots of other smart people in the company who want to help.
There's just no way for them to plug in.

[11:57] The other sort of myth around building systems is you don't have to create another job for that person that's carrying all the load.
In fact, and what we often do with companies that we work with is we'll come in and be that systemologist or someone to document what they're already doing so that they can then sort of look over our notes and be like, yeah, that is what I do. do.
And now you've got something that you can train, use to train other people so that you can start to distribute their workload within the organization.
The beauty of that is when you have a system that sort of documents our current best practice, other people bring in their creative insights and they bring in their benefit of their experience at working at other companies or seeing other ways to do it so that you can work together to improve those systems over time.
And so it it typically starts with a few people doing all of the work and they wind up being bottlenecks in their business and other people sort of they're waiting to help, but not really knowing how to plug in.
But through the process of creating this documentation, you can now start to distribute the work, ensuring that you're still getting those optimal outcomes that you were getting when the one person that figured out how to do it was doing it.
Now you've got other people following the instructions and in fact, improving the outcomes that you get.
Because they have an opportunity to sort of improve that system as it goes.

[13:22] Okay. And when you say people are all coming together and improving the system, you know, as they go along, do you have some kind of regular check-in meeting or is it just kind of like, you know, everybody's just kind of adding to this and because they're collaborating so much, it just kind of like ad hoc gets added in?
Sure. Well, as you can imagine, we have a system for improving the system.

[13:48] And typically the way that works and there's the entrepreneurial operating system, which is another great system that exists out there.
And we certainly sort of take from that and building these revenue systems for attracting the right prospects, accelerating opportunities to the sales pipeline, activating clients.
But it typically works with sort of establishing a.

[14:10] That might be weekly. And for many businesses, there's at least one weekly meeting where they align on sort of the most important issues.
But for certain teams, it might only be as frequently as monthly because people are working pretty independently.
But through these meetings, you come together, identify maybe systems that aren't fulfilling their desired objective, and then create an opportunity for people to come together and collaborate by hypothesizing ways that they can improve it.
And so what we oftentimes see companies do is they'll say, well, our cost to acquire a customer is too high.
So let's look at all the systems that are acquiring customers for us and hypothesize some ways that we can improve them and set some targets on what we want it to be at.
And so marketing, sales, customer success can come together.

[15:01] Hypothesize some ways to improve the existing system.
But then the delivery person that owns owns that system, then goes to work and does it, and then sees what those results are.
And they might reconvene after a month to say, well, we tried these new strategies or these new tactics, and we got this better result or this worse result, and we either achieved our objective or we didn't.
And if we achieve the objective, maybe we want to move to some other things within our organization and focus our efforts on some other places and keep this system in place so it sort of runs on autopilot.
It might might be someone doing it might be bringing in technology to actually automate some of those things but once you have the system in place you have that freedom and so.

[15:48] When you're deciding how to put the system together, I mean, you're saying some companies are using like technology, some of them are using like checklists, some of them are using pen and paper.
Like, how do you how do you decide what is going to be used to capture all of these processes and like what's comfortable for all of the team members to use?
Sure. Well, I mean, we typically work with companies and it's sort of a collaborative environment.
So we have best practices and sort of ways that we recommend, but it starts by really sort of understanding what's the kind of critical client flow.

[16:26] What are all of the things that take place between creating awareness with your target market to getting a renewal from one of your ideal customers?
And really understanding all those steps along the way is the first step.
And then, you know, the best companies will use some sort of separate systems hub where they can document and update things in real time and then use a project management framework that then sort of points you towards that system stuff so that you might have a project management that says, well, we need to onboard a new client.
Well, what is our system for onboarding a new client? Well, it includes all these steps.
Those steps might get updated by different people on the team.
As you have these meetings to onboard new clients and leaders might make changes to the system, but then the sort of front end delivery people can then reference always the latest and greatest version of that system. But it really depends.
Some companies can do it in very simple, you know, shared Google Docs or, you know, Google Sheets.
Other companies want to be a little more robust.

[17:34] It tends to sort of balance based on the complexity of your business, how many steps you have, the complexity of your sort of business context, how many people are working on it.
Are they all together in one office or are they all remotes?
That sort of guides the decision-making on what's the optimal way to set up the systems for your business.

[17:56] Okay. That makes sense. And so you're just kind of like asking the leaders, you know, what would you like to do?
Or is it just kind of like one big conversation where everybody's kind of figuring that out?
Or how do you even decide on what's the best technology? Or like, what are some tech stacks that you tend to recommend to companies? beneath.
So the way that we approach it is, you know, we tend to focus specifically on those revenue systems.
So attracting the right prospects, accelerating those opportunities through the sales pipeline, and then activating clients for renewals, upsells, and referrals.
And we have a number of benchmarks of sort of key performance indicators or metrics of success that we've built over the the last 20 years of working with B2B companies in the sort of SaaS technology, B2B services, really companies that are dealing with long sales cycles, large complex buying committee where there's a decision maker and a champion and influencer, really usually for large contracts.
So within that context, we have some really good benchmarks that we can use to do a diagnostic and and identify where is the biggest need.
And we usually will try to identify an opportunity to double revenues within the next 90 days through implementing better systems and taking those to market.
And through that diagnostic, we can focus on either those attraction, acceleration, or activation systems.

[19:23] And then once we've identified that, we start by really focusing in on that critical customer flow and understanding that path that goes through through from sort of the beginning of that process to the end of that process and really just documenting it in a simple way.
And then again, based on the sort of context of the company, are people working all remote?
Are there people in different time zones or are they doing regular meetings?
We'll recommend different technologies.
There's actually David Jennings in Australia wrote a great book called Systemology, and he built a great piece of software called Systems Hub, which is actually designed specifically for capturing and documenting systems that you can then bring into Asana or Monday or some project management software so that when you start a new project, it automatically inherits all of the different steps from that system's documentation.
And so you can bring that in. But there are many other systems hub type solutions out there.
And we've worked with many of them just sort of depending upon what the client's already using or what they're familiar with or comfortable with.

[20:31] Okay. And then you mentioned that you come in and help establish KPIs and benchmarks for, what is that, like customer acquisition or like business revenue growth that like based on, yeah, based on what you've seen from your past clients, right? That's right. Okay.

[20:50] And so let's say theoretically, our listeners are not working with your company, unfortunately.
So they have to come up with their own KPIs and their own industry kind of benchmarks.

[21:04] How can they make sure that as they're setting up a campaign that it's going to be accurate? period. Yeah, absolutely.
So there's a few key things that we look at, you know, sort of for all businesses and kind of diagnosing their current health from a revenue perspective, and then identifying, you know, where do they focus on?
But at the top of that sort of those attraction systems, it's about your cost to acquire a new customer.
And what we typically tell people is you want to look at your revenues from a customer in the first year or the lifetime time value of the customer.
So for early stage companies, they may not really know what their average lifetime value is going to be over three years because they're just starting.
So what we normally say is your cost to acquire a customer should be less than the amount of revenue you make off of them in the first year.
So that's sort of an early benchmark of what are you spending to acquire a customer?
Do you make that back within the first year or not?
And again, this is designed for companies that have a renewal type of business, these large average contract values for SaaS company or B2B services, technologies where you expect to work with someone for multiple years.

[22:20] So that's one of those sort of initial measures that we do on that upper.
In the middle, around sort of the acceleration systems, we look at both pipeline quality as well as pipeline velocity.
And so pipeline quality is around what's the percentage of leads that actually close and do they close and become tier one customers?
And how quickly does that happen? We really focus on that quality first, because one of the things that we see, and actually the title of the book we published earlier this year is, Are Your Leads Killing Your Business?
And the reason it's called that is because a lot of businesses are sort of chasing bad leads because they really want this quantity, but they don't realize it's really the quality that delivers success.

[23:10] So we focus on pipeline quality first. Are they moving through the pipeline fast, meaning they were actually qualified for your business?
Are they closing at a high average dollar amount, meaning that they understand the value that you bring to the business so that you can really look at that quality?
And then we look at velocity by layering in what's the volume that you're bringing in of those leads.
So those are sort of those metrics on that acceleration portion.
And then on the activation portion, we look at what percentage of your clients are sort of providing referrals or what percentage of your leads are coming from referrals.
And one benchmark that we commonly use is for, you know, in the B2B space, 30% or more of your business should come from referrals.
And if you're not achieving that, there's something broken about your referral system. And for many clients, they just don't have a system in place to ask for referrals or to encourage it.
And so we look at ways that we can incorporate the renewal conversation.

[24:15] The upsell conversation and the referral conversation more frequently and in less stressful ways between customers and their clients so that we're having less churn.
We also will sort of recommend that you're targeting churn of 90, you know, less than 5% churn on any given timeframe.
There might be reasons for more depending upon some nuances of your business, but that's a key metric that we look at.
And then what percentage of your new business is coming from referrals?
And again, that 30% benchmark is something that we typically use.
Okay. Yeah, those are helpful numbers. Numbers.

[24:53] You mentioned that most businesses don't even have a referral system before you come in.
So with a new referral system that you're helping them implement, like what what do you typically start recommending?
Like, do you recommend they use like some kind of software or like that they incorporate it into their customer success follow up process?
Or what do they typically do that ends up working out to be like a decent and like.

[25:19] Easy to maintain, I guess, referral system. Yeah.
So for referrals specifically, it's actually one of the biggest hurdles.
So they say in the lottery, you can't win unless you buy a ticket.
And so it's one of those things like 80% of it is just showing up.
With referrals, a lot of it is just asking, but asking in a structured way and at the right times. but a lot of it is just asking more frequently.
And so we work with our clients a lot to just sort of structure when are the appropriate times when clients are sort of having their best moment with you when it makes the most sense for you to ask for a referral and then to ask in a way that, you know, sort of highlights benefit to them.
And so very often our clients will put some sort of incentive plan in place.
If you think about your cost to acquire a customer customer could actually be as much as your entire revenue from that customer for the first year.

[26:18] So if you think about the cost to acquire a customer and all of that money, if you're not paying to acquire a customer, could be used as incentives either to that new customer or to the referrer or to both.
It's sort of giving you a benefit for both of those parties.
And just by sort of documenting and standardizing some of that, and then telling your customers that I'm going to give you a service that's so good.
I'm going to deliver a product that's so good that I'm going to feel really comfortable asking you for a referral when I deliver in 90 days or at the end of our first month or at the end of our first quarter, whatever it might be.
By setting that expectation up front, then customers sort of know, okay, A, it's good that you feel confident you're calling your shot and you're going to hit that home run for me.
And B, I'll start thinking about people that might be a good referral for you that I might be able to recommend.
And so managing that expectation, then they're not surprised or taken off guard when you do ask for a referral.
And if you incorporate a benefit to them, like a discount on the next month or next quarter service, for any referrals that actually come into new business, then they're happy to make referrals.
And in fact, we'll look for opportunities to refer you more.

[27:36] Okay, that makes sense. So one outcome that I want to discuss with this is, you know, obviously this is having a tremendous impact on the revenue of the

[27:49] businesses you're working with.
But what other impacts have you seen to the team or to the customers or just anyone else as a result of using this system, of systematizing the marketing, sales, customer success, revenue, growth, and generation process?
Yeah. So I'll go back to that earlier statement that systems really set you free.
And what we have seen as one of the benefits is it's this sort of freedom from worry and just the stress that comes up, not knowing if your revenues are going to sort of deliver to plan or if you're going to hit forecasts.
And also this freedom from strife within teams, because when you have a system that people can collaborate on, it becomes much less about sort of abandonment.

[28:42] Blaming an individual for not doing a good job and more about blaming a system that doesn't have any feelings.
And so people can then work together to improve the system and come together.
And we actually really recommend a lot of transparency around sort of reward structures and compensation as it pertains to systems.
And one of the things that we see our clients do that's really successful is having marketing, sales, and customer success have a shared sort of revenue scorecard.
So it might include things like the volume of leads that come in, but only leads that are qualified as determined by sales and the volume of sales that close, but only people.

[29:26] That are qualified to renew and grow as determined by customer success.
And then the quality of, the quantity of renewals and upsells.
And so each of them has different things that all contribute to the revenue of the company, but they might be weighted differently.
So marketing has much more control over the number and the quality of the leads that they bring in and how much those leads cost than they do about the renewals and sort of upsells.
Although they do a lot of marketing that leads to customer renewal.
And that's something that by having a unified process, we see a much better interaction.
So having sort of weightings on the scorecard that's different for these different teams means that each of them is compensated fairly, but they're all sharing the goals together and all working together to improve the overall revenue systems within the organization. Okay, that makes sense.
So now I'd like to zoom out and look at this from kind of a perspective of, let's say, a B2B marketer. I'm working for a company.
I have a team and I want to create content.

[30:39] A really good or refined our systems and encourage that kind of collaboration between different teams, like step-by-step, what could I do in that situation to, you know, start seeing some of these benefits?
Yeah. So, I mean, the easiest thing is to hire somebody like us that can help you, but recognize that's not always an option for folks.
And sometimes you got to do with what you have.
What we typically recommend is see if you can build some coalition of people that agree with you, that identify, man, there's more strife than there should be, or there's more ambiguity than there should be.
And things would be better if there was a system.
You might be the only visionary on your team that sees that and understands that.
I think many of us have experienced that in our work lives.
So maybe you're on your own, But if you can build a coalition, it helps both to share the load and in just sort of building consensus as you want to take this out broadly.

[31:43] The next thing that we recommend doing is sort of identifying a discrete area where there's the biggest opportunity for improvement.
And again, we tend to focus people on these sort of attraction systems, acceleration systems, or activation systems.
You likely are focused within your role at a company on one of those three areas. is.
And within your team, you might be focused on even sort of a subset of that.
So where you have the opportunity to influence, try to just document what is our process to the critical client flow.
How does a client move from the beginning of my process to the end of my process?

[32:22] What are the metrics that we use to measure success at each stage?
And then what are the things that take place within each step of that?
And one of the myths about systematizing your business is that it has to be like way overdone.
At McDonald's, they talk about each onion is cut within a few millimeters of the same size of every onion on every burger. And there's an exact process.
You don't have to be that detailed. Just capture the key things that are necessary for really a successful outcome.
Again, a system is just a list of procedures that, when followed, delivers the desired outcome.
So what are the three to five or maybe five to seven things that have to happen at each stage in order to successfully move that client through the flow?

[33:09] Document those and then share those with other people on the team.
Get their input on ways that you can improve the things that you're doing or ways that you can start to implement this as this now becomes the baseline of we're all going to do it this way every time because then you know you're all doing your best selves we all have bad days at work but when you have a system in place it makes sure that you do what you know you're supposed to and it ensures that you really sort of do your best work every time it's not designed though to to be sort of handcuffs and limit your ability to improve the system.
That's why we recommend, you know, only three to five or five to seven kind of the major steps, because you want to empower people to, as they see opportunities to improve it, to make a note on some regular cadence, come back together and say, anybody have any ideas on how we can improve this system?
Then everyone can discuss, debate, make a case for it.
And then we can relaunch a new system with with sort of new improvements in place. Okay, that makes sense.

[34:14] Generally, you're identifying an area that you have influence over or there's an opportunity to improve.
You're creating this kind of brainstormed process based on your prior experiences.
These are the three to seven steps that we use to acquire a customer or something along those lines.
And then you're also noting the metrics that you're using to measure success currently.
And then you're sharing that with the team, asking if there's better ways to implement this and then establishing a regular meeting cadence to keep improving on that. Is that an accurate summary?
That's right. The only sort of nuance to that is you don't have to be the person that knows the best way to do it.
And in fact, we usually recommend sort of having a system documentarian and that's oftentimes the role we play for our clients where there's someone who already knows the right way to do it. Unfortunately, it all lives between their ears.
And so we can have a short sort of interview where we'll ask them, how do you do this? And document it.
And then we can watch them do it a couple of times and further refine that documentation.

[35:28] And then write up that system and then say, did I capture it here?
That way, you now have documented the sort of best performer on your team, the way that they do things, without them having to do all of that work because they're already busy actually doing the job but so you can sort of add that additional layer of documentation that then you know might empower them to say actually there's a nuance here that i didn't tell you about because i've never seen it laid out this clearly before and so just by sort of creating that you know relationship between one One documentarian and one sort of knowledge worker that knows the system themselves, you can really sort of share the load and bring in a lot of creative solutions.
Nice. So have you...

[36:16] Have you seen examples of this like not working when people try to implement this, like pitfalls that people have come across or just like, you know, things that people do or attitudes that people have that kind of prevent this kind of system creation process from really coming to fruition?

[36:33] Oh, for sure. There's always challenges. You know, humans as a as a species are resistant to change and moving from not having systems to having systems is a change.
Change it's typically a change for the better and one that most people can get behind but it is change and so people resist it and one of the ways that you know we sort of diffuse that is by really being clear on you know what what are the goals and objectives and you know one of the main ways that we see success and uh sort of building consensus is oftentimes when you don't have systems people can't go on vacation they can never not be in the office because if they're not there the work isn't getting done because no one else knows how to do it, or at least they don't know how to do it right.
But if you can document the way that they're doing it, the best way that these best performers do it, well, now they can be out of the office and not have to check in every morning from their hotel in Mexico or wherever they're trying to get their mind right.
So just leading with that benefit of, hey, this is really going to empower you to take a vacation, to have less stress in your life.
That can be a real benefit for people.

[37:47] So the other things that we see is that some people see it as sort of limiting their power within the organization or sort of creating job insecurity.
Well, if I'm the only person that knows how to do it, I could never be fired.
But unfortunately, that isn't really true because when you don't document the systems, the company can't grow.
And without growth, you could be fired because the company could go out out of business, be surpassed by a competitor that takes all of your market share.
And so having that power isn't really a successful long-term strategy by not documenting your systems.
And so by really sort of understanding and being really clear on the goal isn't to write all this down so that we can get rid of you.
The goal is to write all this down so that you can take your brilliant mind on creating the best way to do this and apply it to other parts of our business business or to help us create scale by overseeing multiple people that can do this now and do it almost as well as you could because they can follow your system and process.
But it really comes down to sort of understanding what's their friction, what are their concerns, and then, you know, really sort of overtly overcoming those concerns by explaining what the real goal of implementing systems is.
Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so...

[39:09] Yeah, I guess another thing I'd like to ask is, are there certain things that you've seen companies or team members do that make it make this process go even more smoothly or like even more likely to be successful? Like, what are those things? For sure.

[39:28] Oftentimes with companies, the biggest sort of bottleneck for systems is leadership, because oftentimes they came in as founders.

[39:39] They built the way to run the business. They own a lot of it between their own ears, but they're then actually the ones that benefit the most from implementing systems.
But as they start to do it, they miss that flexibility that they had to sort of pivot on a dime or to interject into someone else's work because that person wasn't following a system. They were just trying to get the work done.
And so they could jump in and interrupt them at any time.
And so when leadership really gets behind the idea of systems and then holds themselves accountable to documenting systems and then living by the systems that have been put in place, rather than having that flexibility to pull someone off a project whenever they want, or to sort of have the ability to reassign people on a whim without following the system for that.
That when leadership really adheres to those systems, then you get much more buy-in throughout the organization.
And that's one of the things that really leads to success.

[40:39] The other thing too is approaching it with this sort of, as a team sport, having not requiring the person that already is doing all the work and that has all the knowledge, don't saddle them with now documenting the system.
Assign someone to do that short interview that documents the system them to then write that up and then watch them do it a few times so then we find that so then they just sort of you know sort of check off on yeah that is a good representation of how i do it so that they're not sort of tasked with doing all of the work themselves.

[41:14] Okay. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. So generally, as we're wrapping

[41:20] up, I just kind of like to shine a spotlight on you, Mark.
So are there any projects that you're working on? Anything you'd like to promote anywhere people should get in touch with you?
Absolutely. So I mentioned this earlier in the call, but we did publish a book earlier this year, Are Your Leads Killing Your Business?
And it documents really sort of how to build the systems that will attract the right prospects, accelerate those opportunities through the sales pipeline, and then activate your clients for renewals, upsells, and referrals.

[41:52] And how to bring your teams together to collaborate.
And I want to give a special offer to all of your podcast viewers.
The first 50 folks that go to modernrevenuestrategies.com slash free download will get a complete copy of the book.
And with that is included a few bonuses. businesses, all of the sort of templates and calculators that we use in sort of building these systems for driving revenue within an organization.
And not only that, but hours of training that we've put together of videos talking through how to implement these within your business and really sort of diagnose opportunities.
So all of that is there for free for the audience.
If you already sort of have some of these systems in place or you really need more sort of external and it'll help.
The other thing that we'll offer to do is I'll spend an hour with you really sort of diagnosing your revenue systems today.
We'll use some of those benchmarks that I talked about earlier to identify what's the fastest path to growth for you.
How could you double your revenues in the next 90 days?
And we'll help you sort of identify your fastest path to growth and where you could grow.
And then if you need some help implementing that, we could talk about how we we can help you with that too. Oh, sounds awesome.
Can't wait to read that book.

[43:13] Yeah. Thank you so much, Mark. And I appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today.
Yeah, this was a real pleasure. I enjoyed it. Thanks so much.