Is your business stuck in neutral? Are you in a situation where you’ve worked hard for business success, but your growth has stalled? You want to grow your business to its greatest potential in the marketplace, but you’re just spinning your wheels.
It’s time to take stock of your processes and nail down what’s limiting your growth. What’s the bottleneck that’s keeping your business from developing quickly and efficiently? What’s holding you back from skyrocketing to the next level?
What If It’s You?
Are you the choke point in your business? In trying to advance your business, you give it your all. Your time, your dedication and your personal touch. But the limitation on your resources could be the greatest impediment to your business’ growth.
Do any of these problems ring true for you?
Do you:
- Spend too much time on administrative work rather than marketing your services or delighting your existing clients?
- Find yourself weeding through the wrong kinds of prospects instead of taking valuable meetings with your ideal customers?
- Act as the sole source of expertise in your business, so all client education has to come through you?
- Offer one-on-training with clients, but your ability to grow that area of your business is limited by your schedule?
When you’re an integral component of each stage of your sales funnel, you’re the obstacle.
You wind up wasting your time and energy on low-value tasks and unlikely customers. Instead, the goal is to free yourself to focus on the key areas that most need your time and attention.
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Unclog The Pipeline With Automation
Can you automate part of your process?
A great way to start is to get a better return on your investment when it comes to meeting with prospects.
- Before they’re able to secure a call with you, qualify your leads. Make it clear in your marketing materials and web presence exactly who you are, what you offer and who your target customers are. When you make this information available upfront, your site will do the job of filtering out a host of bad prospects.
- Gather some critical qualifying information from a lead upfront. A web form, brief questionnaire or quick email does the trick. You’ll learn from answers to key questions whether a business meeting would be a waste of both of your time.
- Want to entice and capture leads in your system? Setup and promote a lead magnet on your business website.
Then automate an email drip campaign to provide educational materials to your leads before they get the precious one-on-one access to you. You might send a video series, links to your cornerstone blog content, a downloadable e-book, a worksheet or any number of tools and reading materials.
Unclog The Pipeline With Delegation
Some tasks you simply can’t or wouldn’t want to automate. There’s administrative work that requires human decision-making. And there’s the personal touch required in significant client interaction.
Here are a few ways you can delegate those tasks while improving the quality of your business:
- Identify the low-value tasks that are sucking up your time. If your time is best spent growing your business, delegate the necessary activities of invoicing, keeping client contact information current, scheduling social media posts and more.
- Hand off tasks with which you struggle but that fall within someone else’s area of genius. If you fumble through your accounting software or cry when your computer crashes, enlist the technical skills of one of your colleagues.
- Bolster your services by training and certifying additional experts. With extra specialists on board, you can radically increase your client face time, have back-ups when you’re unavailable and grow your business that much faster.
- Increase your capacity even further by reformatting client training. Consider transitioning from consistently one-on-one services to a mix of one-on-one meetings, group training sessions and even online learning systems. You’ll be able to service more clients in less time and at a lower cost to you.
If you’ve gone through this process of eradicating a major growth obstacle, congratulations! I challenge you to pinpoint and resolve one of your business chokepoints on a monthly basis. In one year, you won’t believe the transformation your business has achieved.
Sound off in our Business Owner Only Community! What’s the biggest obstacle to your business growth, and how are you committed to knocking it down this month?
This is a sponsored post by Dr. Tony Pennells. The views expressed in this article are their own. To learn more about Dr. Tony, visit our Specialist Panel.
image credit: Bigstock/Gearstd
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Dr. Tony is the co-founder of MindShift.money and the best-selling author of three books on personal and business finances. Having achieved Financial Freedom at 27, Dr. Tony believes that through Financially Fit Bootcamp and Cash Flow Cure everyone can get there. He has made it his life’s mission to help others live a life where their money works for them—not the other way around.