Process Mapping Your Business
The ability to be a great business and marketing consultant lies in his or her capability to not only tell it like it is, but to truly empower small business owners and entrepreneurs with the knowledge they need to improve their business and continuously deliver their highest value to the world. Over time the pressure to tell it like it is has been increasing, and in today’s world, consultants are faced with the strengthening need to provide more and more value for their clients. In this market, it’s important to be able to set yourself apart from the competition, but more important is how you set yourself apart from the competition.
As a consultant, you know there are certain questions you need to ask your clients, and the most difficult one is to ask them to define their value. That is, to separate what they believe their value to be from what their customers perceive the value of their product/service to be. The real question is, what can you do to help make answering that question easier for your clients, while still delivering to them your value? The answer is simple: help your clients build a successful, more scalable business through two ways; process mapping and divergent thinking.
What is Process Mapping?
Process mapping is a workflow diagram that illustrates the most clear understanding of a process or series of parallel processes. Mapping brings clarity to plans and strategies and lays out all of the different steps in that plan or strategy, always telling you what happens next. Mapping your clients’ processes sets up the foundation that nothing falls through the cracks and eliminates having to be reliant on another person to If done successfully, mapping out business processes can change the way your clients do business and how they interact with their clients.
This can be a big project, especially when trying to convert manual processes into efficient automated processes. The key thing to do is to focus on one thing at a time and go from there and work on the systems that will cut down repetitive, manual work that will allow your clients to have more time to focus on other parts of their business. There are a couple of things you need to complete before beginning mapping.
First off, it is important to help your client to determine how they want to map out their processes. If you already have a method for teaching your clients how to map successfully, that’s great, if not, you just need to make sure that you explain to them the difference between two different types of mapping – system and process – and how they can benefit from each. Next, you are going to want to help your clients to think about automating and mapping processes that align with their customer promise. Once that is in mind, you can begin consulting your clients to turn happy customers into referrers and and really optimize the conversion of leads that come to their website. To successfully map your clients, it is key to tap into your divergent thinking skills, and use those skills to create the wow factor that will separate you from other consultants.
Tapping into Divergent Thinking
The capacity to be able to tap into divergent thinking lies within us all. It is just a matter of understanding what it is exactly and how to reach back into that type of thinking we used to have. Divergent thinking is where you are able to come up with multiple and varied solutions to a specific problem or question. To illustrate this further, I want to go over a study that was conducted on a group of 1600 kindergarten kids on the topic of divergent thinking. If the child scored above a certain score, they were considered a genius in divergent thinking. Out of the students tested, 98% scored in the genius category the first time the test was conducted. Five years later, a second test was conducted where only 32% of students scored the genius category and five more years later, only 10% of the students scored in the genius category.
The point being, is that we all have that genius somewhere within us and at an earlier stage in our lives we accessed into it without even realizing it. As we get older, thinking in that way begins to fade, and that is the style of thinking required for great system building. It is important to tap into that genius again to be that consultant survives the shark tank, and to become invaluable against your competition.
Get your free Survive the Shark Tank: How to Use Process Mapping and Divergent Thinking to Tank the Competition and Make Yourself Invaluable workbook and get started now. Uncover how to tap into your divergent thinking genius and break away from the competition along with how to successfully map out business processes and help your clients deliver value continuously while becoming invaluable as a business and marketing consultant.
