The Process Advantage: Using Process Development To Grow Your Sales Revenue With Moustafa Moursy [Episode 104]

The Process Advantage: Using Process Development To Grow Your Sales Revenue With Moustafa Moursy

We’ve got a great episode for you. We have a gentleman. His name is Moustafa Moursy. He is the President of a company called Push Analytics. They are process experts. What are we bringing somebody on who’s a process expert for? It’s because having a well-defined and well-executed process brings you more sales. It also brings you more sanity, increases your happiness, and decreases your sad days. It also decreases the frustration that happens in your organization when your process is in place.

We’re going to talk about how it relates to the growth of revenue, how it relates to your people internally, and why it is a must and should be important. Process is one of the ways of gathering some of the lowest-hanging revenue out there for your company that is untapped revenue. Without further ado, let’s go speak to Moustafa.

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Moustafa, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being here.

Thank you, Doug. Thanks for having me.

You are PushAnalytics.com. That’s the company. Why don’t you tell everybody what you do, and we’ll set the frame for the call?

It’s Moustafa here, President of PushAnalytics.com. We are a full-service digital consulting agency. We help a lot with different aspects of the business. I personally have extensive B2B sales experience. One of the things that we help a lot with that we’re unique in is getting your processes set up properly for your business so that it’s fine-tuned and fine-running. We’re working on those processes with technologies that you’re using to enable those processes in your business and building the two together. Whether it’s a CRM or other tools that you’re tying in together, we help it all.

The reason Moustafa came to this call is because he has expertise in creating a business process to help you through the lead generation process all the way through the sales, the operations, the full cycle of business, and how to increase profitability. I know that’s important to all of you, so get your notebooks out. This is going to be a class for you to take notes, I promise. People always talk about processes. We all think we know, but why does it matter in a business?

One thing we ask people a lot is, “What do you think of your existing process?” Some people will be like, “I don’t have a process.” The thing is that’s wrong. Every business has a process. You might not be paying attention to it. The process is how you get from point A to point B. If in your business, you have customers so you already have a process. Your process might be sophisticated, some Excel sheet, or stuff that you write on a napkin. Ultimately, it’s still a process. It’s very important to understand that no matter what, you have a process. Whether it’s optimized or not optimized is the question that’s being asked.

When you have a process that’s not organized and you’re like, “I don’t care about my process,” you end up with a lot of leakages in the business overall on different points. Things fall in between the cracks, like tasks that are supposed to be assigned to somebody that nobody does or lack of visibility on certain aspects. You don’t have control over your inputs as well. You don’t have visibility. You don’t have control over your outputs either as much as you would like to. You can’t understand what’s happening across the business. It’s very important to pay attention to your processes across the board. It’s critical from the customer’s perspective to be able to handle more customers in an efficient way.

I’ll equate leakage. I’d like to have your feedback on this. We had an energy audit done on our home. They came in and said, “You’ve got energy escaping out of your attic. You’ve got energy escaping out of your windows. You’ve got energy escaping out of your doorways. You’ve got energy going out the foundation in these places.” They came up and then they had a formula. They said, “If we do these fixes, then you should get a 17% lift in your energy usage. Your energy bills will come down significantly.” To me, leakage equals loss of profitability in a business.

That’s a great example. You lose profitability and that’s directly and indirectly. It’s directly in the sense that you don’t have a follow-up process for your sales pipeline, for example. You got 100 leads on a certain time period and forgot to follow up with 5 of them. Of those 5, 1 of them would’ve become a customer. You directly lost money because you did not have a process in place. Something fell between the cracks and nobody was able to catch it until maybe two months later when it was too late and the customer is already gone and bought something else. That’s one.

There’s also indirectly. Maybe your sales guys are like, “We’re good. We keep track of things in the notebook. I do it.” The thing is you might not be able to service as many customers with a given amount of resources that you have. You’re indirectly losing revenue. You could have more customers for the current scale of the organization that you have, but because your process is not optimized, things are taking longer than they should. They’re getting done, but they’re taking longer than they should. You’re losing revenue indirectly. Leakage contributes to both. Not having good processes contributes to both sides of it, whether it’s direct or indirect.

It doesn’t take much to A) Lose a lot of money or B) Not gain revenue out of it. That’s been my experience. For example, we’re missing 1 sale a week or 2 sales a week to this leakage process, whether it’s direct or indirect. It could be on both sides. Let’s say that totals $20,000 in sales for the week. If we do that 50 weeks in a row, that’s $1 million out the door that we didn’t either bring in or we lost. If we had to make that up, we’re going to have to make up maybe 5 or 7 times that amount of money in sales to make up for the million-dollar loss. It may be even more depending on what our numbers are. Firstly, do you agree with that analogy or disagree?

You’re right. Especially if you’re doing B2B sales or any high ticket sales, it doesn’t take much for you to lose a lot of money. I was talking to a customer. They do some very high ticket sales to the tune of hundreds of thousands. I was consulting them on something and helping re-implement the system. We were talking about the ROI in the system. I’m like, “If you helped prevent or gained one more sale, what would that do?” He’s like, “It would be worth it.” It’s one more sale, like a year even, in their case, for example. It could be as low as one sale a year, or it could be a little bit more frequent than that if you have more things in your pipeline but they’re smaller tickets. It doesn’t take much in either case for you to justify, “We should have a good process.”

Another thing on that note is people are always looking for ways to improve their business. If you have a business that’s operating and a pipeline and you already have all that, process is one of the lowest-hanging fruits to fix. That’s because it’s fully within your control. If you’re like, “We want to ramp up our ad budget or something.” We need algorithms. There’s this and that. You can pick and click your ad. People can get it or not. There is all this stuff. That’s important, too, but we’ll talk about that another time.

If you’re like, “We have all this stuff. We never looked at our process. We never looked at getting the right tools in place for each portion of the process on how the things interplay together,” that’s something that’s fully within your control that you can get instant efficiency. It can translate into very quick gains. That’s another cool thing about process when it comes to cleaning up your process in your business.

We’re speaking with Mr. Moustafa Moursy. He is the President of Push Analytics at PushAnalytics.com. We’re talking about processes. What hit me when you were saying what you were saying was we can increase profitability and revenues. We can also increase our happiness and decrease our stress at the same time by having the right process in place. Let’s take an online path. Let’s say we have people coming to something and they hit our website. From there, what is the path? It goes from there. Maybe it’s a lead. Would you lay it out for everybody? 

When we talk about process, people are like, “You’ve convinced me that I should probably have this. What do we do? There are so many things happening in the business. What do we start looking at?” What I always say is, “What’s the most important thing in your business?” Usually, it’s your customers. That’s 99.9% of businesses unless you’re a government agency or something. We look at it from the perspective of the customer. We then simplify what’s important and what’s not.

You said it perfectly. You have customers that might be interested in you in some way from marketing channels or whatever the case may be. A portion of them come to your website. From that, a portion of them is interested. That’s where it starts where those guys, we’re going to call them leads. We have a lead process that handles the leads.

There could be different ways to fill that lead process, whether you want to have them book a Calendly link directly or you want to have them contact somebody. There is automation where they get an automatic email, and then if they don’t reply, there’s a task assigned to the sales rep. That way, things don’t fall between the cracks. The first part of the journey is going to be the lead process. You want to handle the leads properly, store the leads properly, make sure you follow up, and make sure you don’t lose anything. That’s where it starts. It goes down from there, which I can go into, but that’s the beginning of your question.

It hits the lead, and then we have some type of interaction with that lead somehow some way. That lead either goes toward a, “I want to have a deeper discussion,” or it goes into another path of, “I might not be interested. I’m not interested at this moment,” or whatever it might be. There are different places that can go, but we need processes for all that, correct?

Absolutely. On webinars and stuff like that, we’ll show visuals on this where the first process that we put up on the board is the lead management process. That’s a whole process. You want to make sure you follow up, you got them through and talked to them. They might respond. You might end up talking to them, in which case it goes to process number two on the lead board. That is going to be the sales process.

You’re like, “We’ve talked to them. John was interested. He submitted an inquiry. We got on the phone with him. It looks like he’s going to be a good fit. Let’s put him up on the deal board. Let’s start working the deal and working the sales pipeline that way.” It may also be like, “He said he wanted to join, but he no-showed. We tried to follow up, but there is nothing. Let’s put him in our rebooking process or marketing process.” That’s the other process we’re going to put up on the board.

You want to look at them as different things that interplay together. The lead process is its own process that ties in with the sales process. It is its own process but has a tie-in with the marketing process. The marketing process also has a tie-in to other things, not to the sales process. You want to look at them as different entities. We identified maybe 6, 7, or so that we put up on our process board, like different segments of the process that you should be looking at.

If it goes to the sales process, it starts that, but also, you brought up the word follow up. I was on a call where there were people talking to one another about what was happening in their business. They were talking about follow-up as being a challenge for them. This one lady said, “I lost a deal.” They asked, “Why?”

She said, “I lost the deal because I didn’t stay in touch with the person who was the buyer. They gave me indications that they weren’t ready, so I got busy with other stuff. I continued on. Five months later, I was like, ‘I should call them.’ I called them and then the guy said to me, ‘Where have you been?’ I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ He said, ‘Thanks.’ I go, ‘Are you still interested?’ He goes, ‘Yes. We signed an agreement about a week and a half ago for that particular deal.’” The facilitator on that call asked her, “What was that worth to you?” She said it was worth $400,000 annually recurring on a five-year term.

The reason I’m bringing this story up is that what you’re talking about creating process, a lot of people don’t get it until they lose $2 million right out of the gate. What I loved about our initial conversations and the conversation we’re having here is you’re bringing forth that we all have one regardless if we’re following it or not. If we’re not, we’re still following a process if it’s laid out.

What can somebody do to start? I can only imagine there are people who are going, “This is me.” What can somebody do to start the process of creating process? Business owners sometimes get overwhelmed with things. Departments have different initiatives, but if they wanted to start with step one, what would it be?

That’s a great example. I do want to take a pause and comment there. It’s a great warning story for people that this stuff is very important. You can easily lose a lot of money. It’s an unfortunate example that the person lost that much money. I will put my sales hat on for a second to comment on that. I did B2B enterprise-level sales for a good part of the decade. I had tens of millions of dollars in deals.

One thing is as a salesperson, and this is irrespective of the process, the onus of follow-up is on you. It’s on the salesperson. Whether we think that makes sense or not, it’s how it works in the end. Ultimately, the onus of follow-up is on the salesperson, not on the customer. They might need the solution. They get busy. Maybe it would’ve been as simple as a follow-up. Sometimes, it’s not, but it would’ve been. You would’ve ended up in that situation.

As a salesperson, and this is irrespective of the process, the onus of follow-up is on you. It’s on the salesperson. Whether we think that makes sense or not, it’s how it works in the end. Click To Tweet

I was consulting with somebody. They went with a software platform to redo their system. We were helping configure their process in that platform. There was another platform, a big player, that probably would’ve worked better for him. He was telling me, “The guy was here. He got me a good deal on the price, but he didn’t follow up. I would’ve bought it.” It was very plain.

I’ve always known that following up is on the sales rep from my experience in sales. It was interesting to see it from where the customer is explicitly spelling out, “I would’ve bought this software which was going to be better for me. He didn’t follow up, so I didn’t buy it. I went with something else that’s not even better for me. It doesn’t make any sense, but that’s exactly what happened.” Part of it’s obviously the emotional aspect where they want to feel comfortable. They want to feel like the rep is on top of it. They might have forgotten. People are people. It was very interesting.

Follow-up is always on the salesperson. With processes and tools, you can improve, cut the leakage, and follow up, which are a lot of leakages there. You can improve your ability to follow up by being very organized. If you’re saying, “Where do we start the process?” usually, from the sales perspective on the lead and sales side, you want to at least tie up the things where there are certain checkpoints that you need to follow up or a certain level of activity. Maybe you know, “For my business, we got to keep track of the customer and call every two weeks to reach out.”

You can improve your ability to follow up by being very organized. Click To Tweet

If you wanted to start with one thing, I’d start with some way to get your customer into a CRM, a tool, or whatever where you’re keeping track of the activities that you’re calling. Every two weeks, you have a reminder task for yourself, a report, or a review where you can view, “Who do I need to call for this week?” There are a lot more advanced things you could do, but I’m saying if you were like, “I need to start with one thing,” follow-up is a very key one.

I agree. Many years ago, I had my first child. We went on a vacation. We went to Florida. We flew down to Florida for a week and had a great time down there. My manager was going to cover my desk at that point and make sure they answered all my calls. For any of the emails that came in, they were going to look them over.

I get back and my voicemail is full. I get a call like, “Give me a call. This is XYZ guy from XYZ company.” I don’t have permission to say who they are. They’re still in business. I call and go, “What’s up?” He goes, “Where have you been?” I said, “I’ve been on vacation.” He goes, “We’re ready to buy.” I go, “I’m back. I’ll come over in an hour or so.” He goes, “You can’t. We signed with your competitor. It’s a three-year deal.” I’m like, “Oh my gosh.”

I remember this because back then, it was a $5,000 initial commission to me. The bonus is tied to the month and all that other stuff. Back then, you could go on a nice vacation for $3,000 for the week. To go on vacation, it cost me twice what it would’ve normally cost me plus what it cost me for vacation. We had to put a process in. I went to the manager and I’m like, “What the heck?” He’s like, “We got busy and all this other stuff.” I’m like, “Okay.” We had to have a written process for when people go off on vacation. If we didn’t have that written process and followed that, then not only I would’ve lost, but other people would’ve lost. It’s not that the department would’ve lost, but the company lost all of that other stuff.

I wanted to ask you this. Once you get the sales processes down, it moves from that into operations. Operations have their own process. You being an enterprise-level guy and I was an enterprise-level guy, I remember I sold five deals at one time. This was back when the paper was paper. Somebody had knocked my orders behind the corporate fax machine. Operations didn’t pick them up and the orders were delayed for five weeks.

It was killing me because one of them was Enterprise Rent-A-Car. There were a couple of other big names, too, but I won’t name them. One of those orders was canceled, and that was a $30,000 commission to me. That was a lot of money to me, especially back then. Here’s the thing. It goes from sales, but we got to have a process from sales into operations. Isn’t there some leakage that happens between sales and operations at times? 

You hit the nail on the head. Usually, when we’re presenting, I like to show the slide where I show we finished all these processes, sales, leads, marketing, and whatever and they became a customer. I throw up a little confetti thing and they say, “We’re done. It is over.” I’m like, “It is not.” There are big texts on the screen that says, “It’s not.” I’m like, “That’s where things have begun.” That is one of the most common points of friction that we deal with and help people with all the time. Few even understand this is a friction point. People maybe don’t necessarily look there. A lot of consultants aren’t necessarily thinking of that because you have to look at the whole end-to-end business.

If somebody was trying to focus on sales, they might not think, “I’m done with sales ends.” If somebody was trying to focus on operations, they might be like, “I’m focused on getting the operations.” A lot of times, you don’t have somebody who’s looking at what happens exactly at that handoff point. That’s a very huge point for you.

A lot of times in business, you don’t have somebody who’s looking at what happens exactly at that handoff point. Click To Tweet

There are a lot of scenarios. I’d like to give you an example where let’s say you’re a software company. You’re onboarding somebody. Once sales finishes, they’re supposed to be onboarding. Let’s say you don’t have any organization or structure. A guy gets on with the onboarding rep. The customer gets on and they’re like, “Sales said I got two free months.” The onboarding is like, “I don’t know this,” so then he stops everything and goes hunting down sales.

Sales is busy. John from sales is doing whatever. He finally gets him and John is like, “I don’t know.” He looks through his notes and does all this. He’s then like, “I told him 10% off. It’s already on the account.” What happened? Everybody is pissed. The customer is pissed because he’s going to hear a day later an answer he didn’t want to hear. The onboarding rep wasted an entire day hunting down sales. The sales guy had to distract from his workflow to give information about something he already sold. Everybody is having a bad day. You lost how many man-hours. I don’t know how many man-hours but maybe it’s 8, 10, or whatever. 

I’m multiplying this by a lot. It happens a lot. It’s a common type of scenario whereas if you had a process and things were documented properly, there was a connection. We call it separate but connected. It’s where we want to connect the service process to the sales process but they are still separate because they are different teams. Service doesn’t need to see every single thing sales is doing, but they need to be connected so that they can refer back.

Let’s say in your CRM or whatever, you tied the ticket down to the deal and you had a clean note structure. They can come back, be on the call, and be like, “I see the note. John put it. It’s 10% off. It’s already applied to your account. Don’t worry.” Their customer is like, “I at least got a quick answer,” so they’re not too upset. The sales guy didn’t even know about it. The onboarding rep got it done on that call without creating any debt. This is a huge thing. You can multiply this by a lot. There are a lot of different scenarios, but that’s a big important point that can save a lot of money, time, and headache rapidly. 

If there’s a CEO of a company that is reading this and going, “I got leakage in my sales. I got leakage in my operations. I’ve probably got leakage in my customer service,” which we haven’t talked about yet, but we will, “I’ve got leakage probably in my marketing side,” what’s the first step for them to say, “Is it to step back, take a look at the whole organization, and then see where the leakage points are?” Should they call you or do something else? What do they do?

We can consult with people like that all the time if people do want to call. I’ll tell you what to look at in general if you’re thinking, “I’m going to call somebody, but where do I even start?” It depends on where you’re at and what you’re trying to do. If you’re like, “I need to work on one thing,” then I would try to look at something like follow-up. That’s because that might be the easiest to at least patch up.

Process is an iterative thing. You’re going to set up processes. You’re going to lay them out. They’re going to be constantly improving. There’s also a constant training factor as well that goes into it where you’re getting buy-in from all the users. We could talk about that in a little bit. You could start with one thing if that’s what it was.

If you’re like, “I know I need to revamp my process. I’m ready,” what we would do, let’s say you were talking to us, is we will look. I always tell this to clients. I’m like, “Tell me exactly where your processes are right now. Where are you right now?” It doesn’t matter. If it’s like, “We write up on a napkin the quote and give it to the customer,” that’s okay. I still want to know that. I want to know where we are.

I know we start looking at mapping out things. We do a lot of flowcharting to be able to untangle what’s happening. It’s very important to know what connects to what. We’re then working with the customer like, “What do we want to have?” For example, they might be like, “Anytime sales got an account that they knew that they needed to follow up every two weeks that they had some way to be able to remember that.” A CEO or a sales leader might know that. They might know what they want exactly, or maybe they know at a higher level like, “I want to be able to see this. We can work it backward.”

It all starts with two things. I’m like, “What are you doing today? From a vision standpoint, where do you feel like you need to be?” We sit there and fill in the blanks. We then map out the process diagram and get to the bottom of what needs to be done specifically. We go back and forth with the stakeholders. We show them. Usually, when people see the process in front of them coming together, things start to click.

We were doing process consulting approval because we were going to implement them into a CRM. A big part of this is the tools you’re going to use to execute all this. Before we touch any tools, we map out everything, understand everything, and lay it all out. The stakeholders for that business, the executives, message us after. They’re like, “Thank you guys so much. You helped us understand our own business better than we understood it ourselves.” That’s because they were able to see everything in front of them as it was happening and as we were making recommendations.

They can chime in and be like, “You’re going to send a reminder here. Can you do it every 2 days instead of every 4 days?” They then feel like nothing is falling between the cracks. This is all before you even get them in any tool or anything. It’s a business-first approach. You need to understand the business, build out things for the business, iterate, and then implement them. That’s the approach we take.

That’s excellent advice. We can look up statistic after statistic. Guerilla marketing says 86% of sales that would’ve happened don’t because of lack of follow-up. Fifty percent of salespeople never follow up one time over and over again. I love what you said. It’s incumbent upon the salesperson to follow up. I also feel it’s incumbent upon the salesperson to follow up on their operations or on their orders. To those of you who are selling, you are not paid until the money is in the bank. Stay in touch with people through follow-up on the relationship. That way, you can help out if there are any lagging payments, etc.

Speaking of service, because that’s what we’re talking about, you go from operations. The deal is closed. Everything is good. It goes and they have a problem in service or a service-related issue. I have seen so many customer service departments not act like additional sales teams. They’re there thinking that they’re there to answer a question but not create service. When I look at it from the clients that I’ve worked with, it all goes back to the process. There was never any real process set out with the vision, the endpoint, and benchmarks of what we’re supposed to do in customer service. Do you see that as well in customer service or do you see other things? 

We do like to tell people that customer service is a sales function if you do it properly. It can feed back into sales. It depends on the organization. There are a lot of different layouts for customer service departments. I’m not necessarily suggesting that the customer service reps themselves have some onus of sales on them. What I am saying is the customer service process itself. If you have it laid out properly and are doing the right things, you can tie in to give signals to the salespeople, where you’re like, “This guy is unhappy.”

Good salespeople knew this. If somebody is unhappy and they’re a customer, it could be a sales opportunity sometimes because then, you come in, save the day, and they’re like, “Doug is an excellent guy. He helped me out. I don’t even care. I’m going to buy from Doug. This company screwed up. I’m going to buy from Doug because he came through for me.”

If somebody is unhappy, and they’re a customer, it could be a sales opportunity sometimes because then, you come in, save the day. Click To Tweet

There was one time when I was doing sales. This is a little bit of a tangent here. A customer called me on Saturday, and there was no big deal. I worked whenever anyways. He had a question. He needed help with something. I helped him. I don’t even think I gave him details. It was only something like, “We need to go back to the factory for,” or something like that. It’s not like I had the full answer, but I did speak to him for maybe 20 minutes, 10 minutes, or whatever.

Since that time, that customer, until even after I left the role, would ask about me to be able to, “I want to buy from this guy.” He remembered, “This guy was helpful. He helped me on the weekend,” even though I felt like I didn’t even give him the full answer. I’m like, “I just took the call.” In his mind, he needed to talk to somebody at that moment and needed the service, and he felt like he got it. It was a huge customer to the tune of millions. He was like, “I want to work with this guy because he’s helpful.”

With the service side, you want to see where that lays out. You want to have a good service process. You want to also identify key opportunities where you can flag the sales function or if your service team does, and some service teams do, upsells and stuff like that. You want to flag key opportunities where you’re like, “This customer is happy. They’re saying great things about us. They filled out the survey and gave us off-the-charts net promoter scores with their survey. Let’s contact them and see if they’d want to do a partnership or if they want to recommend this. Let’s see if they want to put up a review or they want to do whatever.” You want the service part to tie into sales as much as possible.

This is where I was saying laying out everything, diagramming, and showing how things interface with each other is very key. You’re not going to be able to do this that easily if you can’t see things in front of you abstracted or if you can’t see when the service even kicked in for our particular business. We have software, so after they buy the software, they chose the onboarding. They’re still not getting service. There’s a month onboarding period. After that, they might call the service for different issues.

What are the types of things they call service for? They may be technical issues with the dashboard. Maybe they call for features. You start seeing them and being like, “The people that are calling for features, we should notify sales because we have a lot of extra packages for features that they could buy.” You’re not going to know those things. It’s going to be very specific to each business. You’re not going to know it unless you’re laying things out and looking at the full picture combined. That’s what’s very key here.

That makes a ton of sense because they may call into customer service before they even get onboarded. They start inquiring about features. I know I’ve done this. I’ve bought some software and I’m like, “I wonder if they have an add-on that will do this.” I’ve called in. The customer service department never referred me back to sales, number one, or then they’re a little bit clueless about the last time I called.

I also have called who I think does a great job at this, I’ll give them a plug, it is GoDaddy. If you’ve ever worked with GoDaddy ever and call into their customer service line, you are going to buy something by the time you leave that call. They have that process down. If the process is something they can’t handle, they have a resource that they could send you to immediately. Let’s say they’re coming back in. They make sure that the call happens at that time. They’ll set the call up so you don’t have to call back in and start all over again.

What you said is so key. You want to map out the whole playing field ahead of time so you can see and head off, “This is what’s happening.” I have a question about that. Is it advisable to talk to our current clients or potential buyers and ask them what service to them or what the value perception of service is to them? Will that give us ideas as well?

You’re saying whatever clients you have, ask them what they expect to get out of customer service when they call?

That’s correct. What are their expectations of what is great customer service? What I’ve found with a lot of customer service is they don’t realize that service is not there to mitigate problems. Service could be part of the sales process. Many companies I have found with service don’t even look at what the value perception is from the client’s perspective of what they’re looking for out of service. Therefore, they don’t deliver that at value expectations. They’re missing on the upsells, cross-sells, and even some of the remarketing and retention, which we’re going to talk about. That’s what I have found. You’re the expert on this, so I’m bringing it up to you.

A big part of service is you want to make sure you’re getting some feedback from customers and using that feedback in some way. Don’t ask people to fill out surveys and then throw them in a trash bin somewhere. Do something with the surveys or whatever it is. Don’t make long surveys either. Nobody likes to fill those out necessarily anymore. Maybe except in some cases.

A big part of service is you want to make sure you’re getting some feedback from customers and using that feedback in some way. Click To Tweet

You should interface with the customer and understand what they’re looking for. I would phrase the question in a specific way though. For example, if I had called, “What do you expect to get in service?” They’re going to give me everything. That’s sending a false expectation that we can do everything under the sun with our service department, which is not true.

It is maybe asking, “When was the time you had a good customer service interaction with our company or competitor?” That is if I was talking to a customer. That’s because then, they are giving me something that’s grounded in some sort of reality. They’re like, “Your competitor picked up the phone.” Maybe it was another domain company. They asked you and you’re like, “GoDaddy did a great job. When I needed help, they brought me to the right person at the right time. We did a sales meeting. They did a great job. I was able to get something out of that,” for example.

Another company that does well with this is HubSpot. We’re HubSpot partners. We’re platinum partners. A lot of times, we do use HubSpot as a CRM to lay out a lot of these processes, which is very good with it. HubSpot does a good job with that. It’s the same thing. You might be talking to support and they’ll answer your questions, but then, they’ll be like, “You need to talk to sales.” They’ll refer you over. That could be an example of a good experience that somebody gives you that’s actionable. That’s one.

The other thing is I would leverage the reps, too. Anytime when we’re doing some sort of consult that involves revamping support or fixing up the support process, we always want to bring in somebody from the customer rep team, whether it’s the service manager. If it’s the sales department, the inside manager, the support manager, or whatever, we want to bring in whoever is taking the calls. It’s somebody that has that visibility into, “What kind of calls are you guys getting? What are the categories?”

One of the things that we want to categorize is the types of support calls we get because that helps drive what’s important and what’s not. For example, we’ve done work with property management companies. It’s like, “Why do people call in?” We separate why the guests call in, why the hosts call in, and what are the different reasons that they might call in. They’re like, “I’m locked out of their house. The bathroom is not working. It’s this and that.” We categorize them in.

First of all, we see what some of the things are that we can eliminate after a while. That’s why it’s iterative. You have this and you’re tracking it. Maybe it’s six months later that you’re like, “Thirty-five percent of our support tickets are people calling in because they’re locked out of the house. We need better lock boxes.” It’s a dumb thing to fix. It would save us a lot of calls and a lot of money and the customers would have a much better experience, but we didn’t know it was an issue until then. Now we know and we’re like, “Let’s fix it.” There are easy opportunities that way. Also, you start seeing from there where that leads you. A lot of people are calling in asking when they can stay again. It’s like, “We need a process to upsell that.”

I stayed at a vacation rental a couple of years ago. It was in the summer. It was a rental like Airbnb, but it’s a different private company. What they did I thought was cool. It was after you finished your stay, a few days later, they send you an email saying, “Since you stayed and probably liked it, would you want to book and reserve the same exact week next summer?” It’s a cool thing. That’s something they figured based on what their customers were asking, based on requests, or by analyzing. It may be they came up with it proactively. If you’re already cleaning up your processes and already have a service team, you can leverage the knowledge that’s already in people’s heads to get a head start with the initial hypothesis.

That goes into the remarketing and retention component of the whole process that happens during and after the sale. It’s a very smart thing. I imagine people here going, “How do I get ahold of this guy? Stop talking to him.” If they wanted to reach out to you directly or wanted to know more about the company or anything like that, what would you recommend?

We’re going to put up an offer here where we have a process guide PDF. I mentioned a lot of those processes we put up on the process board. I put out a PDF guide that everybody can get access to from this call. I would go to PushAnalytics.com/ProcessGuide and then you can put your info. You can get the guide. You’ll get an email to be able to schedule a call with us for a free consult as well after you get the guide.

If they wanted to reach out to someone directly, do they go to PushAnalytics.com and then go to the contact form?

Yeah. They could do that as well. If somebody reading and they want to talk about something that they’ve read, we’re happy to do a twenty-minute consult and talk about whatever they want on their business. We’ll either give them good insight or see how we can help.

Moustafa, thanks for being on the show. Thanks for bringing your A-game. I appreciate this. I’d like to have you back down the line if you’re up for it.

That sounds good. Let’s do it.

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You either have a process or you don’t. If you don’t, you still have a process. Isn’t that a cool idea whether you have one or not? You still have one, so you have one. The question is, is it optimized or not optimized for you? The cool part is it’s not that hard or difficult to optimize a process. As Moustafa said, you want to look at the whole overall picture and how the processes interrelate with one another. You could change one process in one department, for example, and it causes hardship in another department. Look at the overall processes in your company and make that a sticking point for you to do this in 2023.

Even if you start slow and start creating a little bit of process, they call it the three Ps in the world of business which are Planning, Procedures, and Policies that you’re creating out of the process, that is a place to start. Look at the overall arching-wise advice he gave you in that capacity. If you love this episode, as always, would you please give it a five-star review? Don’t forget to download the guide that Moustafa is putting out.

If you are an expert yourself or you know someone who’s an expert and you’re like, “I want to hear a subject matter on this particular topic,” introduce them to us. If it’s yourself, send it in yourself. You send it to YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com. If yourself is looking to get in the top 1% of sales earners or someone you know is looking to get there, or maybe you’re a little confused about where to go with your sales in general that they’re not working out as you wanted to, reach out to me directly. If you are interested in our sales university and want to be on the mailing list, let us know.

Also, we are coming out with our SaaS product, which is our automated follow-up and automated prospecting system to help you convert more sales. If you want to be on that waiting list, let me know that as well. Send me an email at Doug@CEOSalesStrategies.com. A little forward thought here, I am coming out with an eBook on how to be in the top 1%. If you’re interested in that, email me directly as well.

Until next time, go out and sell something. Sell a lot of it. Play win-win. That means you win and they win. You help them and they give you a payment. They’re happy. You’re happy. Everybody is happy. That’s the way to play life in general, but certainly playing it in sales will get you more referrals, more repeat business, and much happier days. We’ll see you next time on another episode. Thanks for being here. To your success.

Important Links

• Push Analytics
• GoDaddy
• HubSpot
• PushAnalytics.com/ProcessGuide
• YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com
• Doug@CEOSalesStrategies.com
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/Moustafa-m-71909456/