How Great Processes Drive Business Growth

How Great Processes Drive
Business Growth
When businesses are new, things are often done by intuition.
There’s no right answer to any question. There’s no “best way” to do things.
That is, until you want to grow. At that point, you need clear instructions. You
need a way to get the entire team in line for the way things will be done so
that everyone is executing from the same playbook.
In other words, you need process.

Process is the lynchpin of sustainable, predictable growth. It’s what holds
things together. It’s what separates a business from a group of people who
happen to work in the same office.
Every great business centers around a core system of processes. No major
car manufacturer would survive if each of their cars was hand-assembled from
memory. Each car would be slightly different, most cars probably wouldn’t
pass inspection. It would be a nightmare.
Likewise, if a business is growing through an ad hoc series of actions and
decisions, those start to fall apart as you grow larger. Small gaps will become
chasms. Confusion and inconsistency will become chaos. And if employees
are operating from their own playbook, there’s no way to deliver a consistent
product or experience.

Achieving scale requires a level of repeatable and predictable systems.
Refining and developing these systems is how companies are able to go from
thousands of customers to millions.
Whether your company is a startup looking to scale or an enterprise company
looking to find new growth opportunities or scaling new parts of the business,
great process is key.

You can help put your business on track for growth by considering the various
processes within your company and how to create systems that are built to
scale. Let’s take a look at a few.
Sales Processes That Scale
Imagine if every single sales contract required your CEO to personally sign
off. Now, imagine that you make 1,000,000 sales per year. Assuming that the
CEO worked all 365 days out of the year, they would have to sign over 2,700
contracts per day. That would take a lot of time.
Needless to say, that could never scale.

But, the problems are not always obvious bottlenecks like requiring a CEO’s
signature. There are friction points all throughout the sales cycle that can
become problematic as your business grows.
For instance, not having a clear sales process can lead to stalled deals or
confusion about deals in progress. Failing to define how leads should be
scores or deals should be weighed can make revenue projections unreliable
or impossible to predict.
Having a consistent and measurable sales pipeline is key and it requires you
to have the right steps in place to track and measure revenue opportunities.

How do sales opportunities flow through your pipeline? Are there breakdowns
that occur along the path to purchase? If you increase your leads by 10%,
how much additional revenue can you expect to generate?
Many companies struggle to grow beyond a specific plateau in sales or
revenue because they lack the systems they need to measure and forecast
new opportunities. Sure, they have had success to a point. But, without a
clear and repeatable process to generate leads and drive them through the
entire sales process, it’s difficult or impossible to grow and forecast how that
revenue will move throughout the pipeline.
In an article for Fast Company, entrepreneur and author Faisal Hoque
explains this critical part of the equation. “It’s one thing to sign up a few
customers,” he writes. “It’s another thing to design and implement sales
processes that can be successfully deployed again and again at ever greater
scale.”

In order to unlock large-scale growth, you need a predictable sales process
that allows you to both close a high volume of sales in a predictable way and
understand what your sales pipeline will look like in the future.
Production & Delivery That Scales
Sales are only one step in the overall business cycle.
Production and delivery processes also need to be carefully constructed as
scaleable and repeatable systems. Many companies have fallen victim to a
growth in demand or sales that they can’t deliver because they have not
figured out how to scale production.

This may seem like a “good” problem to have, but growing a business is
difficult enough without encountering problems in the core production or
delivery of your product.
Your company should invest in rock-solid processes before attempting to grow
or scale the business.
For some companies, this may mean ensuring that you have a repeatable
process to source, hire, and retain workers. In other cases, it may be that your
production or delivery process is entirely contingent upon technology–you
need the right hardware or software to deliver what you’re selling.

In either case, perform a full audit of your production systems to identify any
bottlenecks or inefficiencies that may cause a headache as your business
grows. Develop new systems as necessary.
With new digital tools, there is much efficiency to be found that will help you
build systems that can grow with your company and won’t break down at
scale.
Communication & Support That Scales
Underpinning all of your company’s functions is the role of communication.

You need process to avoid chaos. In communication this is perhaps most
apparent. There is no communication if it isn’t orderly–it becomes a mob,
noisy, and completely unmanageable.
Being the CEO with an open-door policy works perfectly well until you have a
3,000-person company and people are lined up outside to come talk to you
directly. The same is largely true for any of your systems that involve how
people inside your team will communicate with each other or how they will
communicate with the outside world.
Without the right communication processes, you can expect a breakdown in
the flow of information. Not only do you need systems in place for how
individuals and teams will communicate directly, but how teams, department,
and tools will communicate as well.

How will the product team communicate issues to the engineering team? How
will data from sales flow through to systems used for support?
Groove CEO Alex Turnbull shares some of their growing pains along the path
to scale their business. Chief among them is the realization that they need to
build better systems and automate as much as possible, or else the team
would drown in busy work that grew exponentially with their growing business.
“Scaling our business has forced us to look very carefully at ways to take
repetitive tasks out of the hands of our team,” Turnbull writes. “These systems
have played a huge role in freeing us up to focus on the more important
challenges we face.”
Having the right systems in place for efficient communication can ease many
of the problems associated with any growing business.

Operations That Scale
It’s not surprising that operations–which itself is largely responsible for
creating scalable business processes–also needs to have systems that are
designed to grow with the company.
Operations are the backbone of your business. They’re how things get done–
literally.
So, it’s worth considering what systems you can put in place for how to
execute and manage your business operations at scale. As you grow and add

new teams, new employees, and new customers, how will your operations
apparatus grow?
Again, this applies to both the world of startups, where operations themselves
must be designed for exponential growth, and also to enterprise companies,
where operations need to be able to accommodate and manage new markets,
industries, or opportunities that arise.
This requires the right people, the right knowledge, and the right tools.
Friction Scales, Too

What’s most important to remember here is that processes are meant to be
reduce friction, complexity, and uncertainty. They’re put in place to create
efficiency and allow businesses to focus on their core products or services
without having to spend massive amount of time and money to solve the
same problems over and over again.
Every kind of company faces this same reality. Even “innovative” companies
lauded for their forward-thinking business practices face the inevitability of
friction and complexity.
“As a system scales, whether it is a manufacturing plant or a service like ours,
the enemy is complexity,” writes Kent Beck, a programmer at Facebook. “If
you don’t confront complexity in some way, it will eat you.”

Inefficient systems and processes can quickly put a stranglehold on new
growth and dampen even the most lucrative opportunities. What begins as a
small problem--a tedious task or time-consuming process–becomes a
monumental burden when magnified 2, 3, or 10x.
This means that not only do businesses need to have processes in place, but
they need to be designed to scale from inception.
As businesses grow, so does the scope and impact of each process. And if
those processes are problematic –if they’re not efficient and well designed –
then they introduce growing problems that can outpace the growing success
found elsewhere in the company.

On the HelloSign blog, we talk a lot about digital transformation.
While it’s not the only way to achieve a level of scalable process, it’s a
common denominator for all types of businesses. From manufacturing to
online marketplaces, digital workflows allow companies to scale almost any
aspect of their business and put in place the predictable and repeatable
systems they need to get to the next level.
Don’t let friction scale faster than your business.Invest in developing great
processes that will provide the foundation–and uncover new opportunities–for
business growth.
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How Great Processes Drive Business Growth

How Great Processes Drive Business Growth

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