The costs of employee turnover and training are substantial in any business. Spend five minutes on any social media platform and expect to find cute cat videos and memes from disgruntled workers. Today’s employees expect:

1. Clarity of their responsibilities and expectations. Ambiguity in the workplace increases stress and decreases productivity.
2. Tools that allow them to be successful. There’s nothing more frustrating than being handed a job that’s multiple times harder to do than it would be with the right software, equipment or vendor support.
3. Recognition of their achievements in the form of compensation and advancement. If the only way your employee can get paid more is to leave, they will. Establishing a clear system of measuring performance and paving the way for advancement within the organization helps retain valuable personnel.
4. A feeling of purpose. Morale erodes when employees feel their time or skills are unappreciated and underutilized.
5. Cross-training & work/life balance. Managers need to have processes in place that ensure any person’s work can be covered in their absence. Everyone needs time off of work without having to monitor emails and take calls.

We can help with:

• Standardizing the recruitment and hiring process to attract, hire, and train the right people for each role.
• Developing standard operating procedures for each department and position so no one has to “reinvent the wheel” when they step into a role.
• Defining expectations and finding resources to help achieve them.
• Implementing an appraisal, compensation and reward system that emphasizes personal growth and employee retention.

Many familiar with lean manufacturing or Toyota Production Systems think of processes of physically producing a good for sale. And, it is quite easy to find specialists to assist with the waste reduction efforts of an assembly or manufacturing process. This is because it is very easy to see the waste in these processes as an outside observer, and there generally is enough repetition of the process in a short amount of time to observe and understand the process. We can do this for you, and are very happy to do so.

But, where we find the greatest opportunities to reduce costs and positively impact morale is in the administrative office. These are typically the people on your team with the highest hourly pay and the fewest standardized procedures and most redundancies. Because most of these functions are highly specialized, it is often easier to leave it up to the individual to “figure out the method that works best for them” to accomplish their work. Inevitably, “figuring it out” means that some people will have more efficient methods than others. Mistakes made and lessons learned only benefit that individual in the long run. The person next to them, or that joins the team after them, has to make the same mistakes to learn those same lessons.

Which means more frustrated staff. And disappointed customers. And higher costs of getting the work done.

And, as a manager, you’re spending too much of your time putting out fires and reinventing the wheel.

We can help with:

• Finding and eliminating redundancies, such as duplicate entry of the same information in multiple places
• Removing barriers to efficiency, such as extra clicks, keystrokes or windows needed to accomplish repetitive tasks
• Consolidating knowledge from your team in a manner that is easy to share, implement, and adapt

If you’re finding that sales are lagging despite what your marketing team is telling you are positive trends, you may have an issue in your sales process. Maybe there isn’t a process in place for your sales team to effectively see each other’s pipeline, or a clear way for them to get help when they’re busiest, so your team doesn’t follow up quickly enough. Or, maybe it takes you too long to deliver a quote. It could be that you don’t have a systematic way to follow up. Or, perhaps you’re not identifying their needs and presenting the right solutions.

To survive, a company must sell something. To excel, companies must have an adaptive, reproducible approach to selling that focuses on their customers’ needs. They don’t necessarily have a salesforce of the most charming extroverts, rather, excellent sales organizations have a penchant for actively listening and capitalizing on what they hear.

To instill such a culture and capitalize on marketing efforts, managers of sales teams must have a documented sales process, defined goals, and methods for measuring success. Often, the best way to do this is through a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system combined with a scripted process or checklist for intaking and servicing new and existing clients.

But setting up and getting buy-in to a CRM system can be a daunting initiative, especially for first-timers. Your sales team may have had a negative experience with CRMs in the past where they viewed it as a waste of time or a micro-managing nightmare.

We can help with:

• Developing a sales protocol that combines best practices for need-fulfillment selling and your unique product or service sales cycle.
• Helping to select, setup and refine the right CRM to suit your individual business needs.
• Collaboratively defining success and adopting methods to measure it.
• Eliminating barriers to adoption of current best practices for sales and CRM use.