Easily Replaceable Employees

If you’ve been running a business for any length of time in Kenya, you probably already know that it is extremely hard for a small business to get good employees. Yet, a business needs skillful and dependable employees to succeed. However, one of the keys to running a highly profitable and low-headache business is not depending on key individuals to make or break a business. While it would be nice to hire a bunch of overachievers to build and run your business, it’s a shaky strategy to rely on.

Searching for a Sales, for example, All-Star is not easy or cheap. The process to find good candidates and put them through the interview process can be very expensive and time-consuming. Even if you take months to go through a rigorous hiring process and think you found the person you were looking for, there is no guarantee that that person is even going to live up to expectations.

But let’s say that you do find that “diamond in the rough” – someone who is highly energetic and can bring in new business for you. You will have invested a decent amount of time training them and getting them ramped up. Everything has started running smoothly. Your new employee is bringing in a ton of new business and you don’t have to pay any attention to what they are doing or how they are doing it.

All of a sudden they drop a bomb on you. They got a better offer at another company and will be leaving in 2 weeks. You’re frozen in panic. You knew that it took 2 months to find this person and you were extremely lucky to find them. You went through 2 other people and wasted 8 months to get your “All Star”. Now you have to start all over again and be ready in 2 weeks. On top of that, you just kicked off a huge new marketing campaign that’s going to run but not have anyone to follow up and do the sales work. There is no way you’re going to be able to get new clients any time soon.

Enter The Real “All Star”
Here’s a slightly different situation for you. You’re tired of going through the crapshoot hiring process and praying that you get lucky and find a salesperson that can keep your business afloat. Instead, you decide to take matters into your own hands. You’re not going to rely on having the best talent, which is extremely hard to retain and keep happy. You’re going to depend on more readily available resources – lower wage employees.

How can your business do as well with someone who isn’t as talented compared to a rainmaker? Simple – you create processes that anyone can follow. You don’t leave your business up to chance. You create systems that you can constantly modify and tweak to make better and then you find people who can execute them.

Humans aren’t robots so you need to provide motivation to ensure that they do their job well. You can start providing incentive-based bonuses that are tied in with your revenues and profits so that everyone wins.

Now you have employees who are sufficiently motivated and happy because they are making more than they would with other similarly-paying jobs and you have turned a risk and a headache into a reliable and consistent system within your business.

What Kind of Systems Should You Put In Place?
Throughout this post, I’ve referred to salespeople when I talked about employees. That’s because they can have the biggest positive or negative impact on your business because sales and marketing for a small business has the biggest impact on the success of the business. And what we’re trying to avoid is the unpredictability that good and bad employees infuse into your business.

Your Sales and Marketing is the first part of your business from which you should remove the unpredictability of star employees. Here are some suggestions how to do that:

• Create a Follow-Up Sequence that details every single contact you will have with leads from the day they become a lead, until a year later.
• Write scripts and create every single marketing/sales piece that goes out to prospects. You should drive the sales message so that it’s not who gives it but what’s being communicated.
• Add “Call-To-Action” in every sales and marketing piece that goes out. You shouldn’t have messages that say “are you ready to buy yet?”. They should spur on the prospect so they are calling to purchase from you.
• Automate your sales presentations. Create web bases sales presentations that prospects can view at their leisure. This removes “bad days”, “being off your game”, etc. that affect even the best of employees. Nickel Pro can help with this, incidentally.
• Create targeted marketing campaigns that deliver interested prospects. This way, you aren’t dependent on your employees ability (or inability to generate leads).

These are just a few examples of how you can replace highly skilled, valuable, but hard-to-find salespeople with replaceable, easy-to-find, and less expensive employees who provide the benefits without the headaches. Many of these ideas can be applied to your operations, customer service, and accounting. It’s all dependent on YOU setting up the repeatable systems that anyone can execute and not relying someone to just “get it done”.