The Proven Process: A Map for Business Success

From it, you’re able to distill a documented path – the recipe – your customer will take when they use your product or service.

Why does Epicurious – a bastion of gastronomic journalism – declare the best cookbook ever written to be none other than the 85-year-old Joy of Cooking? It’s sold more than 18 million copies.

Irma Rombaurer, the cookbook’s creator, knew her audience. She created no-nonsense, cut-to-the-chase cooking instructions yielding dishes that could be successfully replicated by anybody who placed their faith in her expertise. Irma literally created a recipe for success, a proven process that put people at ease. A similar type of proven process is a key component of the Vision/Traction Organizer exercise we take our clients through. Here’s why it’s crucial.

Failure versus starting over

Failure has its benefits. It may derail you, but at least it deposits you further along the path. But starting over brings you back to the beginning; you sacrifice to progress. It’s why the Vision/Traction Organizer spends so much time prompting you to distill a documented path – the recipe – your customer will take when they use your product or service. You’re able to show that previous customers have used this recipe and gotten successful results.

A powerful sales and marketing tool

Successful organizations take the time to know and understand the customer experience. It helps them to find ways to overcome prospects’ objections. When you’re able to document the customer experience and turn it into a map, you take the concept of your solution and transform it into a recipe they can follow. Here are the ingredients necessary. Here’s what you’ll do first, and what will happen.

It creates a psychological attachment to your solution and invokes a customer’s need to make progress, and finish what they start. Your proven process fits into their worldview. It builds trust and certainty and helps prospects feel that they have vastly reduced their exposure to risk.

The hidden benefit

Identifying and documenting your proven process has other highly-beneficial consequences. Before you can communicate this process to your customers, you have to hack away at it to make sure it really is a recipe for success. It can be repeatedly baked with predictable results.

This exercise challenges you to remove unnecessary ingredients and refine each step. Consistency improves. Efficiency is increased. The organization is able to validate your value proposition with even higher levels of confidence because you have a track record that speaks for itself.

Going around in circles

What does a proven process look like? That depends on the documented path outlining your customer experience. Successful cookbook recipes going all the way back to the first publication of Joy of Cooking in 1936 to follow a general format. Your proven process will follow suit in terms of the end of the process.

This is where you will illustrate that the last steps of the process are circular in nature. It’s an important communication because it demonstrates that the customer experience is actually an ongoing relationship. You’re partners in the process, and while it is specific, it will evolve along with the specific needs of the customer and evaluations that will take place along the way.

“You’re not the guinea pig.”

Relationships – professional or otherwise – seldom come with roadmaps. Providing customers with your proven process shows them that they’re not a test case or a guinea pig. It’s a documentation that shows them what the journey’s going to be like.

Think about how this sets you up for interaction and engagement throughout the customer journey. You’re able to show what’s been accomplished, where you are now, and what’s left to work on. And the proven process also helps you confidently offer your guarantee of a specific level of service.

A proven process makes a strong argument that there is little chance of failure if you follow it.

Discover how we can help you define your proven process and strategize business growth while minimizing your taxes. And yes … we have a proven process for helping businesses find theirs.