You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 166.

Welcome to My Freedom Grove Podcast, your calm space for practical help to get your dream business up and running while being authentically you and taking care of your mental health. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. I'm so glad you're here!

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Hi, My Strong Friends. Hey, did you start recognizing the waste in your business after last week's podcast? If you're at a place where you feel overwhelmed with your workload, or you're working extended hours to complete everything, this episode is for you. You deserve a life and business you can actually enjoy. Imagine if everything was running smoothly, the workload was easy, and your revenue and profit margins are fantastic. How much different would it be than today? But do you know how to streamline your business because you can get there.

So let me back up a second. Do you know what needs to be streamlined. So as I mentioned in episode number 165, you need to know your end to end process first, then observe where the waste exists, then you can create your improvement list to streamline. So last week, I introduced you to the concept of the eight wastes in business. Every business has waste in their business processes. So don't feel bad when you see it. I even have waste in my business process. But I'm always working to try to reduce it and streamline everything. So when you can recognize the waste in your business process, you can then take steps to remove it.

In last week's episode we explored waste during your creation and in process. And that creation specifically was content. This week, we're going to dive into your sales funnel and product fulfillment end to end process.

CONNECT YOUR BUSINESS PIECES TO STREAMLINE

First, a quick review of the eight ways. So this is also known as the acronym TIMWOODS :

T - Transportation

I - Inventory

M - Movement

W - Waiting

O - Over processing

O - Over production

D - Defects

S - Smarts (Underutilized Talents)

Sales funnels are an excellent way to connect all of the pieces together, you can see how a customer flows all the way from one side to the other all the way to the product or service fulfillment. If you have multiple products or services, they may share the same sales funnel, have a slight variation, or have their own sales funnel. Or even better. If you have multiple ones, they might be connected sequentially to a precursor sales funnel that sells a first step product or service.  

FOUR BIG STEPS TO A SALES FUNNEL

A sales funnel is composed of four big steps.

1. Traffic
2. Marketing
3. Sales
4. Fulfillment

TRAFFIC

Traffic is how potential customers know your business exists, and how to get them into your store. So if you're an online business, your store is your website. What are all of the ways that you're driving traffic from wherever they are in the world to come and visit your website. One of the mechanisms that I use is my podcast. It does great at driving traffic straight to my website. Now I know that I could also drive it to the podcast apps, but I prefer to drive them to my website, which is my store where I can nurture them and they can also see what products and services are available. There are so many channels and mechanisms for getting the attention of and driving traffic to your store. channels may be social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, tick tock YouTube or a variety of others. They keep popping up every day, right. I'm sure that you've recently heard about threads.

So just quick side note on threads. Apparently scammers are already starting to use threads to try to hack into your account. So be very very careful if you're accepting any invites from threads.

All right, going back to our episode. So in person or networking channels are also a great way to drive traffic to your store. These can include routine meetups, conferences, Ted Talks, other speaking engagements, book signings, book clubs or events. You may even use SEO, which is search engine optimization, and paid ads to drive traffic. Even paid ads can have many channels like Google, Facebook, YouTube, even the podcast apps like Spotify offer ads. So you have all sorts of options. And don't forget the old fashioned way of TV, radio and print ads. And if it matches your business, there can also be some of the big billboards or park benches. I primarily use Facebook, and live conferences.

In fact, I'm co-hosting a booth at the Small Business Expo in San Francisco on August 18. I'm going to put the link to that event in the show notes. This is a one day event. It's free to entrepreneurs. And the estimated attendance is about 3000 people. And it includes tons of vendor booths for every thing that could help your business speed networking, and lots of valuable packed workshops. So you'll want to go and check out the link in the show notes for this small business expo that's happening in San Francisco on August 18. And if you happen to come make sure you come by my booth to say hi, some businesses will spread themselves out over many different channels and use a variety of mechanisms.

If they have an automated way of doing this, that doesn't take much extra direct processing time, it's good. However, if each one takes processing time, it may not be the best use of your time, my Facebook posts are copied onto Instagram and LinkedIn. So sometimes I do a manual copy and paste. But I'm moving towards exclusively using apps like Meta Business Suite and Social Curator to publish to all three platforms with one button push, I can even schedule them. So if I wanted to batch them all in one day and schedule for the whole month, I can do that.

Let's talk about the different mechanisms for how you're presenting to your traffic. So these can include your standard social media posts, ads, event listings. And so there's some event listings that happen on your social media platforms. And there's also things like Eventbrite, where it specializes in event listings. There can also be videos, some that you pre record and then upload, you might choose to do live videos. reels are also really big right now. So you have a video, you might have things added on the screen. And there's music that goes behind it. Stories, blog posts, any social posts, podcast, audio, grams are fun. So that's usually when you have a podcast, but you want to have some kind of video or movement on a static image.

You can also do lots of speaking, speaking and all sorts of different platforms, right. So before we were looking at the different channels, but this is the mechanism which is speaking, so you're creating small, medium, or large size speaking durations. And then going out to these different platforms where you can speak. You can also use books as your mechanism, books are really good to have crosslinks in them that point back to your website or even sign up for freebies. So each mechanism requires a different skill set, equipment, processing, time investment, and money. If you're not careful, traffic efforts can become a full time job, you won't have any time left to do anything else in your business.

But here's the good thing. You can find out as you're experimenting with these different platforms, the different channels, the different mechanisms, which ones perform the best at getting people to your website. So if you're keeping track looking at your data, you can tell when you did these different activities, what kind of mechanism you used, and then go and look to see on your website, how much traffic did it create? That way you'll know which ones are your higher performing efforts, which ones are your lower performing efforts, and then you can start to trim down cut out the stuff that doesn't bring a lot of traffic and then double down on the stuff that does. So what is your minimum viable traffic channel and mechanism so that you can reach you your traffic targets. 

MARKETING 

Now let's talk about marketing. Marketing refers to how you interact with potential clients to drive up their desire for your product and service. When you spend the time to map out your customer journey, you'll know what material and activities work best for marketing. First, it's helpful to know which metric and target you're trying to impact with your marketing. There may be one or more metric you're trying to impact. So for examples of metrics, you might be trying to get people onto your email list, you might be trying to get people to register for a live interaction like a free session, demonstration webinars, you might be trying to get people to schedule a consultation, and then the best one as the number of people that are actually viewing your offer. So if you have a website that set up where you have a sales page, and a checkout page, you'll be able to see how many people are going and viewing your sales page. And even better how many people are checking out your checkout page. Because if your marketing was really good, then you know that all of those people not only are looking at your sales page, but they're so interested, they're checking out your checkout page. In June, I provided five master classes. Now you don't need to offer that many for your marketing, especially all in one month. One really good masterclass can help you achieve your targets.

So you might be wondering why I offered five. So I had two reasons from a business marketing perspective. My first reason on why I did five master classes in one month was that I wanted to get the infrastructure built. So this means the website pages, the email sequences and the slide deck. So it's possible that a masterclass can get stale after a while. So I like to have a variety ready to go so that I can rotate, it'll be a lot easier for me in the moment, because I have all of that infrastructure built, I might just need to make a couple of edits to the date, but I'm ready to go. I can also use any of these master classes for private engagements and collaborations. And then the second reason why I provided five master classes in one month was because I wanted some data. I wanted the data to help me understand what the interest level was in the topic. So I always try to address any of the obstacles that I hear my clients or potential clients bringing up, and then I'll create a masterclass for that. And sometimes some are more popular than others.

So when I have all five, then I can look at the metrics behind it of how many views did each of those masterclass registration pages get, so that I know which ones are the most popular. Something that was kind of interesting is that I can also see how many people went to the replay page. And I actually had one of the five masterclasses had the lowest registration, but three times as high on the replay page as any of the other ones. So kind of interesting data to see. So I'm very intentional when it comes to my experiments. I don't want to waste my time throwing spaghetti at the wall. Because if I do that, it's going to be a huge mess and a lot of waste. I use a structured experiment process to drive the results that I actually want. In fact, one of the master classes is called Stop Wasting Time and Money in your Business. This was a structured business experiment session for all of my students. So if you're interested in learning how you can do that the replay is still available. I'm going to include the link in the show notes. 

So when you map out the customer journey, you can also avoid the overprocessing. I did some overprocessing in my first year of business. I didn't know all of the different sales funnels yet. I was getting out and trying a bunch of stuff. And honestly, I was exhausted. I tried so much stuff. A few things worked and a whole lot of stuff didn't. So I had some clients, but I wasn't fully booked yet. So I decided I was going to map out all of the ways that I got clients. Can I just tell you, I was so shocked to learn that I had 54 different ways. I mean seriously. Okay, so one you could tell I'm pretty creative and did Want to give up, but 54 different ways? Yikes, only about seven of them actually worked. So once I could see which ones worked and which ones didn't, I could easily cut out all the ones that didn't work, stop doing those. But then I also started paying attention to how much time I was spending in each of these different ways. And I saw that one of them, although it resulted in a signed client, it involved over 20 hours of my investment nurturing that client, yikes, that is not very cost effective.

So when you have everything out of your head and onto paper, you can see it so much better. I didn't realize that I had spent 20 hours nurturing one client just to get them to sign. But once it was out on paper, I could see it. So that's why I like to help my clients with funnel maps. And I also use a Google Jam board. So the Google Jam board is a visual whiteboard with sticky notes. I call it our messy design space. Once everything is out of your head, and on paper, you can be more objective, all of the answers are right in front of you. So if you leave it all in your head, you're not going to be able to see it. I mean, after all, it's pretty dark inside your head, there's no lights.

So let me ask you this, what is your minimum viable that helps you reach your targets. So when I say targets, I mean, the number of people that you want to have in your metrics, okay, so when you're doing your different marketing activities, all the different ways out of all of those ways, which is the one that works the best. And so that could be your minimum viable marketing, that that's the one that you're going to use all the time, no matter what all of the other ones are optional.

So you can cut the rest if you want to, and then double down on that minimum viable and get really good at it. Or you can keep that minimum viable, and maybe one or two of the other ones. The bonus also is seeing everything mapped out, you can figure out where you can automate some of this marketing, because let's face it, you didn't get into business to spend the majority of your time on marketing, you got in there, so that you could actually use your skills to help people. So if you can automate some of that marketing, and it can run on autopilot, it's gonna free you up to go and help all of the people you want to help. And if you are someone that is finding, you're overworking, you're extending past your work hours. When you automate things, you can then have your life back so that you can actually go spend time with your family and enjoy your life. 

SALES

Sales is the next piece in your sales funnel. Sales can happen in so many different ways. Some include a consultation, a direct purchase, from a website, selling from a stage selling from a webinar, or workshop. affiliate sales, that's where you get a link to somebody else's product or services. Or you can give a link to yours. And then other people help to sell it for you, they just get a percentage commission of the sale. You can also have applications where people are applying to work with you, you don't necessarily have to do a sales call, because they already know they want to work with you. But you have limited space. So instead they fill out an application and they hope that they get accepted you. A good example of that is like college universities, the students are going to have to pay tuition. But they're choosing which university they want to go to and they have to apply for it. That's how the sales happen, as opposed to the colleges coming out and trying to sell to each person individually. 

You can also outsource your sales. There are lots of companies out there where they have great sales teams that are very skilled in sales. And they will take care of your sales calls for you. They may even have ways where they can get leads for you and the sales so that you can just spend all of your time helping the people that you want to help. Of course, there's a fee for that. But just knowing that that's something that's available. You can also sell through email. And then of course, there's upselling and down selling so you have your main product that your product or service that you're trying to sell. If there's something else extra that some people might want, you can upsell by offering that in addition to the original product or service or down selling comes in when someone's not quite ready for the big product or service that you're offering. So you offer them something else that costs less that will help with part of the problem.

Other times that you're going to sell is during re-enrollment. So people might have spent time with you and there was an end point, but they want to do it again, or they want to keep going. So they're going to reenroll that will usually require you to have some type of a sales conversation with them. And then of course, there's always selling the next product to your existing customers. I personally believe that selling is an art, it takes a while to develop your wording and style that's effective and aligned with your values. And if you're anything like me, you might have a lot of mindset obstacles getting in the way of selling. So you'll definitely want to make sure that you're resolving those so that you can take care of this selling process step quickly and easily.

So once you get really good at sales, there are also options for how you can streamline and even automate your sales. Could you imagine if you had a essentially a virtual salesperson that's working 24/7 on your behalf? Well, when you get really good at sales and all of your messaging, you can set something up so that you do have this virtual salesperson, and then sales can happen 24/7 while you're up spending time either helping your clients or enjoying your personal time. What are all the ways that you've tried to sell? Which one are you really good at? And if you're really good at it, how are you able to automate it? If you're not great at sales yet, or just so-so? Are you willing to focus on developing this skill set, so you can eventually automate it? How much time are you investing in so-so sales, so I've encountered many entrepreneurs that are really good at bringing people to a sales call, but they're not good at getting the sale. Instead of focusing on improving their skill of selling during those calls, they focus on bringing in even more traffic, the thought is based on math, if they convert 5% of sales, then all they need to do is bring in enough people so that 5% yields the target number of sales. Now that's pretty time intensive.

Let me give you a quick math example so that you can see what I'm talking about. So let's say that an entrepreneur has 100 People come in through their sales funnel for a one hour consultation with a 5% conversion rate. That means that five sales are made. So 100 hours were invested to make five sales. Now someone that had focused on their selling skills may have a 75% conversion rate, it only takes about seven consultations to create five sales, seven hours invested to get five sales. That sounds a whole lot better than 100 hours invested to get five sales I'd take seven any day.

So when you have your whole end to end process mapped out, you can see where you want to streamline what kind of waste is there. And if there's any way that you can automate it, or if it happens to be your skill set that you can evolve your skill set, you can improve it so that your numbers get better. So using those metrics, including the numbers, the conversion, and any resources like time and money will help you see where you need to streamline. 

PRODUCT FULFILLMENT

All right product fulfillment is the final business piece to connect. Product fulfillment can include confirmation of the purchase the receipts, account setup, material setup, welcome and onboarding, plus the actual delivery of the physical digital product and any services assessments and possibly even off boarding. Off boarding may include completion certificates or emails, summaries of the work that was done celebrations, training manuals or direct training if you're transitioning services from you to them. You might also include any gifts asking for testimonials, referrals, or even suggesting an affiliate link to them. So if you're an entrepreneur that records audio or video as part of your service, you'll also need to include processing, editing and uploading. Although it's not fun to talk about. Product fulfillment also has to include processes for client issues, such as early cancellation refund requests. bad reviews, or you deciding to fire a client? Oh, have you heard that you can actually fire your clients, usually you have a really good reason for why you're going to do that. And it's in the best interest of everybody just know that that's an option.

So having all of these details decided ahead of time, and put in place will help your business and your mental health. And you can streamline all of it. It's so easy to take things personal, but it's not. It's just business. So when you have everything mapped out, you can see all of these business processes, you can focus on the process instead of the person. And if for some reason, something didn't work out, yet, your processes were still all there, it might just be that it's not a good fit between you and the customer. And that's not meaning that it's something personal, it's just the product or service wasn't a good fit. So all of those are my nitty gritty details, you can check it out in the transcript, I know there was a lot of detail there. All of these nitty gritty details are vital to your client success, and the use of your time and resources and the quality experience that you want to provide. So remember, you're mapping everything out, and then you're going to go and look for the different kinds of ways. So the Tim Woods list of ways, is going to show up in any of those processes. So let's just refresh on what TIMWOODS  stands for:

T - Transportation

I - Inventory

M - Movement

W - Waiting

O - Over processing

O - Over production

D - Defects

S - Smarts (Underutilized Talents)

So I gave some more examples and definitions in podcast number 165. You can go back and check that. 

EXAMPLES OF WASTE IN PRODUCT FULFILLMENT

But let me give you some very specific examples of waste in the product fulfillment and end-process. So defects. Number one, defects in your products and services can cause rework. And in the worst case scenario, a refund. I've helped several companies to track their defects so that we could discover the root cause and fix it. Even in coaching, there can be defects. So I had a great conversation with a client recently about this. I shared that sometimes a client presents with an obstacle. As coaches we have standard questions, processes, and exercises to help resolve those obstacles. If the obstacle is not resolved with our first attempt, we have to go and pull out a different set of questions, processes or exercises. mean after all, it's our job to keep trying until the obstacle is resolved. What I found helpful was to keep track of which ways didn't work for those obstacles, and which ways did work.

Now I know that all humans are different. But it's still possible to standardize our main approach to get the best results in the fastest manner. It's not about being a good coach or a bad coach. It's about one obstacle at a time. Do we know and effective fast process to resolve that obstacle with all of our different clients. Now, if you do have one unresolved obstacle that your client keeps coming back with, that represents a defect in your process, the first way that you tried it did not work, you need to spend some time to resolve that defect. You need to figure out other processes that will work to resolve that obstacle. So that your process to get them from point A to point B works.

The second type of waste I want to point out is waiting. So waiting can happen a lot during your product or service fulfillment. So here's a couple examples to share. Let's say you need to provide something to a client but you procrastinate. That waiting is going to cost you mental bandwidth of remembering how many times you have to go and remind yourself that you needed to do that thing. What mechanisms are you using, you might be doing extra post it notes or putting extra reminders on your phone or on your computer. And your inner critic might also be adding emotional load of shaming you like oh, I should respond to them. I'm not and it starts to spiral downward and you start feeling worse, so it's just not worth it. That's why I like to automate as many things Since possible, it doesn't give me the opportunity to procrastinate. So then everything is on autopilot so that I don't have to worry about it.

Now the last example is when a client wants to hold their spot, but wait to start to use those spots. So most of us are really nice entrepreneurs. We want to be as accommodating as we can to our clients. But what this does is block our availability to have a full roster of clients throughout the year with no gaps. When we have those different blocks in there, it can have a direct impact to yearly revenue. Now, there may be times when waiting makes sense. If the waiting period can be back filled with other important business activities that contribute to long term business growth, it might be a good choice. So there's waste that you definitely want to get rid of. And sometimes waste actually isn't waste because you've plugged in some other valuable thing activity that you're doing that can create more value than that waste can provide. 

SUMMARY OF TODAY

Okay, so let's summarize today's information. First, you want to be able to connect all of your business pieces so that you can see them, get them out and visual. So sales funnels and product fulfillment, and in processes are great to use. Use your data to know where to improve or streamline, you can also use that data to tell what kind of waste you have in there. So creation, sales funnels and product fulfillment processes may have a lot of hidden waste. When you focus on the intent of those different processes, you may be able to find other ways that you can meet that intent with less work. So you'll find the waste, you could take it out find other ways of meeting that intent. And automation can help you with a lot of it. So that's a quick way of speeding everything up so that you can have a streamline business so that you can actually enjoy your life, enjoy your business, everything's running smooth.

So for even more help with your business, I want to invite you to check out the replays of those five masterclasses that I ran last month.

And they include first is Identity Shift, a reevaluation of what's good and bad in business. Throughout your business journey, you're going to go through lots of different levels. Each level is going to require an identity shift. Some are small identity shifts, some are a little bit bigger. So in this class, I go over all of the different things that you can be aware of what shifts are needed, and how you can do those shifts gently.

Next one is Kick Fear of Failure to the Curb. This is the seven steps to achieve success for you and your clients. masterclass.

Number three is Stop Wasting Time and Money. This is a Business Experiment Design Session. So I'm going to teach you how to design your experiments and give you the opportunity to get some free coaching so that you can actually design yours. masterclass.

Number four is Mentally Healthy Business, how to resolve your emotional triggers, we all get emotional triggers could be that we already had some underlying triggers that we didn't work through yet. Or they could be brand new ones that come up.

And the final one is the Dream Schedule. How to make your dream schedule your reality. We're going to go over some different business models and what it looks like once it's all up and running and streamlined. I'm also going to give you some automation tips in that one. Alright, so all of these master classes are available to you on my website. If you go over to my freedomgrove.com/masterclassschedule, you can access all of those. Also from the homepage, you can just click the banner up at the top for direct link to all of those replays. So just a reminder, these replays will be up through the end of July. If you want to watch them make sure to go over and watch them right now. I look forward to hearing updates from you about your streamline businesses. Also, if you have some specific topics that I can help you with in your business, feel free to email me your podcast suggestions you can email me at [email protected]

All right, my strong friends.

I hope that this was super helpful for you.

And I want you to have a great week and I'll talk with you soon.

Bye bye.

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Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove Podcast. When you are ready to make your dream business a reality and take care of your mental health, I invite you to join the Unshakable Business Co-Lab. This is the mastermind membership you've been waiting for. There's no limits on your imagination, nor your timeline. We're with you every step of the way. To learn more, please visit www.myfreedomgrove.com/join. I'll see you there!