Success By Design?

Is your business where you want it to be? Is this by chance or design? I recently attended a seminar on ways to improve running a business--specifically, in the areas of sales and marketing.

I became motivated to change my ways by one comment in particular. The speaker said this: "A business functions exactly the way it's designed to function." This led me to contemplate whether our business has an elegant design or if it's a result of behavior that's filling a void.

We're in the managed-services business, so I initially thought that we have a strong design. Our service offerings are defined. Our implementations are consistent. We know exactly which services are included, what items are excluded and how to run a help desk, and we consistently track issues and requests. But outside of services, I began to question our design.

As competition increases in the MSP market, our success will be based on our ability to automate, optimize and improve business processes. Our design has to be recognized first, then improved upon.

The design of our business is a melting pot. It comes from a collection of backgrounds, experiences and ideas from business peers and other professionals. It's also influenced by the dominant employees within our business, including some former staffers. All of this design was created to fill a void. When there's a lack of design, a vacuum is created, and behavior then fills that void. This fact was an eye-opener.

Little did we realize that our lack of design was being filled with behaviors--some good, some bad.

It has become clear why many companies, including ours, struggle to maintain a strong sales team. We train our salespeople to follow a sales process, yet we fail to communicate the design of how the top salesperson sells. If we identify how a person creates win-win situations, document it and then train our sales team accordingly, we could be so much more successful. Wouldn't it be nice to create a design for success and be rid of the hire-and-pray mentality?

With this new awareness, I've given myself a new responsibility. I'm now the "identifier of design," questioning whether we operate the way we do because of an elegant design or because of chance behaviors aimed at filling the void.

Linda Erickson is the co-owner of Pointivity, a solution provider based in San Diego.