Many kitchen and bath businesses have experienced incredible growth in the past few years. During this growth, poor systems, especially sales systems, meant that each new client brought more stress and revealed more issues with the existing way of doing things. The people power required to keep it all running smoothly increased, sometimes exponentially, and the easiest way to fix issues of stress and burnout was to hire more people. While hiring to add capacity can work short term, the long term consequences of more people with poor systems is less efficiency and ultimately, less profit. If your bottom line took a hit while your business was booming, then it might be time to shift your efforts to improving your systems before you put more people on the payroll. Good systems, especially sales systems, support the people doing the work and make it simple to deliver the expected results. People power can be used for building relationships, creating innovative designs, and guiding the client experience if it isn't being sucked dry by chasing down information, spitting out on miscommunications, or redoing work because the latest updates weren't in the right place. Not only can good systems require less people to produce better outcomes, but the people are less stressed. And better able to do the work that requires their specific expertise and talents. This isn't any pie in the sky, maybe someday, aspiration. You can improve your sales system starting today. And sure, you aren't going to get that additional 4 percent profit next week. But with continuous improvement, you can start to see the profit increase and the stress decrease. In a month or so, putting some of these pieces in place like key performance indicators will help even improve your sales system and make changes to it as your business and business environment changes. How to get started? Well, that's the whole point of this season. So maybe the first step is to be able to define your sales system so that you can evaluate it and then decide what you want to improve. To define your sales system, you first need to be able to identify what your sales process is. You might already have this documented. High five! But if not, all good. If your sales process isn't yet documented, take five minutes and simply write down the steps between someone expressing interest in your services, that is, they call, email, submit an online form, you get it, and when they give you money. Once you're able to look at the steps in your sales process, for each step, write down where that information is stored, created, and accessed. In a very robust sales system, for every step of the sales process, the information is stored, created, and accessed in a client relationship management system. CRM for short, like HubSpot or PipeDrive. A less sophisticated system might be that the initial client name and phone number is put on a post it note, and that's given to the designer. And when the designer calls back, they get an email address, and store it in their Outlook Contacts. And when they're ready to propose the design, the client information is emailed to the accounting person who enters it in QuickBooks so the proposal can be generated. Systems are neither right nor wrong. The evaluation of a system is about supporting the results you want now and in the future. Hopefully, it's fairly obvious that the second system in our example is a lot less scalable than the first. It's also a lot less trackable and much more time consuming, making it harder for designers to take vacations and for owners to predict revenue and install our resources based on what's in the sales pipeline. Taking the time to define your current sales system means that you now can more objectively evaluate how well it's working for you and see the areas you want to prioritize for improvement. Having this step complete means you can get more value from the next episodes, where we'll be discussing parts of the sales system more in depth and covering actions you can take to improve specific parts. In the next episode, you'll hear about some of the signs that your sales system might suck. There's no judgment here. If you're willing to keep using that something that every day chips away at your will to live, we all make choices. I'm just here to help you identify the places that can be different and show you there are other ways. Heads up, high-er help. My book on how to use experts to shortcut improvement, growth and capacity is launching October 23rd. Be the first to get the details on high-er help and pre order. by going to higherhelpbook.Com like what you heard. Never miss an episode by subscribing. You'll find this podcast on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, I heart radio, everywhere else. You get your podcasts.