Your Flight Plan For Business Success – Part 2
August 27th, 2020 // 1:20 pm @ Scott Manning
We’ve been doing a deep dive into understanding how money flows through your business. The reason why this matters is because most goals and results are accidentally set and achieved (or never realized) because the business owner often doesn’t know where to place their focus.
The example I used with my Doctors is that most think the answer to their money problem is more patients when in fact it is more diagnosis that leads to more dentistry with new patients being just one component.
Still, what’s even more difficult, is that many Doctors and especially their teams see a “full” schedule as the key to success. The idea being that getting in more patients each day will automatically result in more money each day.
Ironically (and it’s great news for them), I prove to them that actually the more people they see per day the less valuable their days become. More often than not their schedule being full of patients is actually the biggest limiting factor that has left them stagnant and plateaued in their growth.
This makes complete sense if you understand the money flow and the very first thing that has to happen in order for the final result to grow. The actions and focus must shift before the outcomes will change.
Here’s another interesting fact, again related specific to my doctors, coming back from the whole shutdown they had to put in various additional safety precautions and other things related to protection – but guess what? The result was longer visits and more time with each patient by slowing down the process which actually lead to more creation of opportunity through more diagnosis because of increased engagement with patients. Ultimately, this yielded higher case acceptance on larger treatment plans.
Now, to be fair (to me), I’ve been saying this since day one. The more time you spend with patients throughout the complete experience equals more dentistry out the back end.
There is a powerful phrase I’ve heard from one of my great friends Adam Witty who credits his mentors for teaching it, he calls it CTI – Customer Time Invested.
It’s perhaps the single most important aspect of driving buying commitment from the customer and it has a magical multiplier on the value of the customer.
The more time your customer puts into ‘being’ your customer and the more they have invested their energy into your experience, the more apt they are to convert and the more valuable they will be.
Plain and simple.
Instead of watering down and speeding up your experience – it’s the wrong way to look at it – the math that matters is the value of the customer as a whole and the way to impact that is contrary to what everyone else is doing (remember that… always do the opposite).
So, before you just go looking at the end dollars or the number of customers, look at everything that happens in between.
It’s the magic of the math in between that makes all the difference in your customer value and in your profitability, in that very order.
Not to mention that this is the fun stuff. This is where it is at and what you should find excitement, even joy in, if you are passionate about your business and what you do for others.
What are you doing to get your customer more immersed in your business, experience, and processes? The more they are invested the more they will invest.
And then when it really comes down to it, you can take a hard look at each step and stage in the process to see what can be done with each point of contact to give you a better chance at accomplishing your end objective.
By the way, you can remove the word “chance” because if you are following my guidance here – it isn’t a chance – it is a calculation. You will be amazed at how much control you can have.
Finally, we get to look at the numbers that you’d expect in the first place… how many call, how many online inquiries, how many next steps or first appointments, how many convert, what is the value of the initial transaction, and how many continue on to make subsequent transactions to build the overall customer value.
Don’t mistake the word transaction, we and you believe everything is about the relationship with the customer. The point is you still have to know your numbers of what your customers are worth to you and how the money flows in.
We’ve come full circle, from the good old fashion reactively based profit and loss statement from the accountant, all the way back to the origin of revenue from each and every customer to exactly how to create opportunity and make your customers more valuable to you.
Yes, numbers matter.
But if you don’t look at the right ones and know what truly matters, you are dealing with historical facts instead of future potential. One is counting up what has already happened and the other is creating what you want to happen next… and that makes all the difference.
Category : Blog
