There will be times when the pursuit of sales can cost your business money.

This might seem a bit of a strange thing to say, as we know that both survival and growth in your business rely on increasing profits.  Of course, we need to become savvy at attracting those sales, but often this drive for increasing profits may equate to chasing sales and the exclusion of other areas of your business management.

“Manage the cause, not the result.” W.E Deming

Driving sales growth is so attractive to business owners, the global study showed that less than one-quarter of the small businesses surveyed had a dedicated process improvement plan in place. Now that blows my mind! Without improving processes, it does stand to reason that your capacity for growth will at some point hit a wall. Prioritising sales over systems will create guaranteed bottlenecks.

Well, that’s exactly what we’re going to talk about today, the areas affected when we don’t have a good balance of sales mixed in, with a sustained dedication to the development of systems.

YOU RUN OUT OF ENERGY FOR SALES:

So firstly, you will run out of energy. If you don’t have systems sustaining your sales process, both for you and your team, you will become exhausted. It is really hard to chase around after individual clients, it’s really hard to generate individual leads, and it’s really difficult to service individual sales. And if your sales processes are relying on you making the effort, then you’re in big trouble and it cannot last.

YOU RUN OUT OF TIME FOR SALES:

It’s also time-consuming, and you will run out of time. There are only 24 hours in the day, and your calendar can only fit so many appointments with clients or customers, and this is not sustainable in any way. This ultimately means you start running out of time to fit everyone in, and when there are no minutes left in the day, you will find that you’re not able to continue to grow your sales and the cracks will start to show.

YOU RUN OUT OF CAPACITY FOR SALES:

And then finally, you’re running out of capacity. This is meant in a structural sense in your business and what you are seeking to provide. When you run out of capacity you will not have the time to service your sales, you will not have the infrastructure to service your sales, and you’ll not have the physical space or resources to service those sales. There are only so many sales you can process, and you will find it harder to deliver on the promises you have made.

It is valuable to think about what you can do to develop systems that will sustain your growth so that you’re running a business that can grow without you. These systems will increase your capacity in line with your growth and increase sales. If you try to grow without building the structures needed to support that growth, you will provide less of a service than what you promised, which is exactly what we want to avoid!