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About the podcast
The Digital Utopia Podcast is for SMB Marketers and Business Leaders looking to align their Marketing, Sales, and Service departments so they’re part of one powerhouse growth team.
Each episode will dive into the strategies, philosophies, and tools that will change your approach to organizational growth, give you renewed focus and clarity, and allow you to build a brand that not only helps you stand out—but win.
The Digital Utopia Podcast is produced by Digitopia and hosted by Frank Cowell and Joseph Freeman.
Episode transcription
Frank
So when you have a business where you first build in value through process value through systems, your talent pool opens up tremendously. Now you can hire good character people, good values driven people, and set them up for success.
DJ
You are listening to the digital utopia podcast, a resource dedicated to helping b2b leadership and executives gain clarity and focus in a chaotic marketplace.
Joe
Hey, gang, welcome to the digital utopia podcast, Episode 35. I'm your host, Frank Cowell, I'm joined by my co host,
Joe
Joseph Freeman
Frank
We're talking about process today. And I think what's really interesting is how process really becomes the cornerstone to organizations that regularly meet and beat their growth objectives. And we come across organizations often, when we meet them, they're not regularly hitting their growth objectives. That's why they're talking to us, right? And we find that often times, where they're going to first to solve this problem, is they go to the people part first, hmm, you know, where we're not generating enough interest and awareness and leads in the marketplace, we've got to get better people who know how to do better marketing are better.
Joe
Well, I was gonna say sales, but that's the next one. Right? Right.
Frank
We're losing too many deals, we're not closing at a high enough to
Joe
hire someone with a with a little black book of contacts,
Frank
we need better, better salespeople, better contacts, and who can close better, right? You know, our clients are leaving at a clip that is just beyond what's acceptable, we need better people, and to make clients happier, so they'll stay and we can have that retention that's going to create that compounding growth. And so it's oftentimes people first is what the assumption is in terms of the problem to that lack of hitting the growth objectives. And so I think one of the things that we're really passionate about is process. And process, in my opinion, comes first. And we've talked about this in previous episodes. But there's a very specific reason why process comes first. And that's what I want to jump into today. And I know you've got some really cool stories from some companies that I'd like for you to talk about. Yeah, when it comes to that. But let's talk about some of your experiences recently, and kind of what brought up the need to talk about process. And when we talk about process, we can get into, you know, the granularity of you know, what is your customer service ticket follow up process to a customer inquiry? He, yes, there's process there. But we're kind of talking a little bit more macro than that, right?
Joe
But we are and I want to be clear that process is the first thing in our three P's. Right? So when if you've read the book, building your digital utopia, we talked about the three P's. I mean, there's the process, there's platform there, P and there's people, they're all important. It's kind of like the Holy Trinity. You need them all to make the Godhead but they all serve very different purposes. Right. And in our world, we really think that they go in that order when you're trying to solve a problem. They have to you have to so it that's not it's not random that we landed on process platform and people in that order, that is the the kind of the order that we triage a lot. And we should be clear, like when when we say, you know, it's almost it's not the people. Well, I'm not, we're not suggesting that people aren't important. People are wildly important. Oh, absolutely. But making sure that the right people are doing the right things in the right way, can only happen after process has been defined. platform has been defined and implemented. Now people can be set up for success, and you know, what kind of people you need, who can align with this process? You can execute and and how to hold them accountable. Yeah, and if you just think of real world examples, not b2b, but just like old examples, right. That's why Henry Ford could basically hire people out of the slums in the gutters to run and build cars, because there was a process in his his manufacturing line. That's why McDonald's can hire teenagers to make the exact same burger at any McDonald's. No matter where you go in the world, you get the exact same product, and it doesn't matter who they hire to do that, because they have a processing for Starbucks name for all of these different, you know, kind of big, successful, b2c organizations. And
Joe
I would suggest that that's actually the better human approach, in my opinion, because if you have a talent pool that maybe didn't go to Harvard, and they didn't have this great, illustrious educational background and experiences and whatnot, but but they're smart people, right? They, they, they're, there's a lot of high quality people that maybe don't have that. And so, in the business world, those may not be considered high quality people. So when you have a business where you first build in value through processes value through systems, your talent pool opens up tremendously. Now you can hire good character people, good values driven people, and set them up for success. You know, in the Henry Ford example, I wonder how many of those people who were living, you know, as you mentioned, like maybe in the slums or living in an impoverished lifestyle, who were able to get this job and actually excel in it in succeed, because they were in a system, say with McDonald's, I mean, I mean, I know fast food jobs get crapped on but like, there are a lot of people who, you know, have gone into systems like McDonald's or Domino's Pizza, or, you know, pick pick one of these, these companies that scaled through systems. And they've got a lot of really talented people, really talented people that often, many of them started flipping the burger, you know, really talented people, but there's a system. And so to me, it's it's actually, it's not only for the pocketbook, it's actually the better, the more human approach is to set people up for success instead of, you know, leaving everyone to be to have these skill sets of being able to operate within ambiguity. That doesn't mean it's someone who can is better. But it's just a very limited skill set a it's such as narrow talent pool that you have to go after, if you need people who can operate in ambiguity and just kind of succeed with like, a lot of, you know, nebulous stuff.
Joe
And obviously, sometimes you need that. And in b2b world, you know, this is not to negate the need for education and specialties and all these things. But process really ties it all together. And when we work with b2b B's, often they don't know they have a process problem. So I think the first thing that we need to talk about here is how do you know whether or not you actually have a process problem? What is the first step? What is the gut check? Right? So what would you say? A company has to look for to say, yeah, this is a process problem?
Frank
Well, I think we talked earlier, just if I can start a high level, and I can drill down into this, at a high level, organizations often start looking and examining the issue because they're not hitting their growth objectives. That's, that's typically the number one, you know, here's the catalyst, we've got to dig into this, we're regularly not hitting our growth objectives. And then it goes back to one of those three things. Generally, there are other things, and especially industry specific things, but it goes back to one of those three things generally, when they're not hitting the growth objectives are not generating leads and opportunities. We're just not closing, we're not keeping clients, you know, something in that vein, and then they go to a people problem, right, that they think it's a people problem, right. And so I think if, if that's you, and you're listening today, and in at the very top, you're just not hitting your growth objectives consistently or fast enough compared to what you know, is possible. That to me is is where we have to start. That's probably the biggest indicator that you have a process problem, which sounds very weird, that that's your first assumption. But in my opinion, that has to be the first assumption. In fact, a friend of mine guy whose name Ryan Deiss, he's a CEO of a company called Digital Marketer. And he's involved in many other brands as well. And I was talking with him the other day, and we talked about this, this idea of an accountability flowchart. So he pulled up on the screen, what his organization has as an accountability flowchart. And what was really interesting is the starting point of this flowchart was something went wrong. Okay, boom, start points, something went wrong.
Joe
That's a trigger to start looking at
Frank
the trigger. And this is people oriented. So it's how to, like have accountability people, so something went wrong person has an issue. And the first decision point, the diamond, right, isn't the diamond the decision point? You know, you know that better from a flowchart from a flowchart? Yeah. So the first dimension nerds, yeah, first diamond decision point was, was the job description and expectation of what they're supposed to be doing? Clear. So what's really interesting about this first, the very first decision, diamond is that it takes the assumption, hey, we as a company must have done something wrong. Like we must, we probably did, didn't make your job clear enough for the expectation clear enough? Let's start there with that assumption as as opposed to what happens in a lot of organizations is, oh, this person's a jackass. Right? They just they're constantly Oh, I can't believe they didn't understand this.
Frank
So it doesn't assume that they are the offender, they assume that the company failed them in some way, in some way. So it starts there. Okay.
Joe
And so if it's Yes, you know, that that the, it wasn't clear about their job description, the expectations, then boom, equip them, correct that make sure they're given the the expectation and the clarity, and you start over. So now we come back through that decision, you know, Diamond point again on the next issue, and you say, No, no, wait there. The job is clear. We've confirmed that, you know, we've talked to me, the job is clear, the expectations are clear. So now the next diamond decision point was Do they have the right tools, equipment, and resources to do the job, again, where it's taking the assumption that maybe somehow we didn't equip them. And again, the assumption is, it's the company, that it's the organization that maybe failed them in some way. And then when you answer that question, it's like, oh, wow, yeah, they didn't have the, the right physical equipment, or they didn't have the right ongoing training, or they didn't have the right, you know, subscription, they needed to really, you know, be able to be really efficient in their job, produce, you know, three times more work, whatever it might be. And so, okay, correct, that you correct that boom, reset. But when you come back to that, again, you said, No, it's clear, the job is clear, the expectations are clear. Now, they're fully equipped, they've got the training, the tools, the resources, the physical equipment, out, they've got all that, boom, now we can hold them accountable. And so that's a process that one little flowchart there. That's a process. And, and, and what I love about those two decision those diamond points is, it ensures that the company is going to do its part. And oftentimes in organizations, companies don't do their part. Right? There's so much failure in organizations because things aren't clear. The expectations are a little gray, or there's too many expectations,
Joe
will you assume we'll hire smart people, they're gonna figure it out, right? And correct. And we've actually done that many times over the years for sure, oh, let's solve it with hiring a smart person to go fix that, right.
Frank
I think like in our business model, we we are committed hiring Rockstar talent. But every every listener here today should know that is tertiary to the primary, which is we have to put in place, an amazing process. And I'm not talking about process down to granular like people need to be able to operate with some autonomy and figure things out. But the high level macro process must be dialed in. Because if that process, that system doesn't create value for our clientele, then we shouldn't be in business. So it starts there. And so just going back to that flowchart, again, it's a, it's a check, to ensure that you're you're making sure that if it's truly a people problem, then it's a people problem.
Joe
If it's truly a people problem is people problem, you can jump straight to that, but you actually need a process to understand whether or not it's it's truly a people problem in the first place. Right? So let me give you a real world example here, and I'm gonna then tie it into an interaction I had with my son. And so just bear with me here, but it'll all make sense in the end. So in consulting businesses, around Reb, ops and revenue growth, and how do you operationalize the movement of a visitor all the way to a raving fan, and pick up all of the potential dollars along the way with that person while you delight them? When we consult people on this? We often, you know, start with an audit of what are you currently doing that's working? What are you currently doing? That's not working? And one of the things that we dive into right away, obviously, is process, what process do you have in place? Do you have processes in place? Almost always, the answer is, of course we do. We're a business. We've been around for 17 years, we have processes in place. So let's look at those process processes, right. And as we start looking at them, they do a lot of times whether it's documented or not, oftentimes it is in some form, they will have for the marketing team, some process, right? They'll say, well, whenever they run a campaign, they always kind of follow these steps. And we have it written down this way. And whenever they you know, launch a new ad, they kind of follow the steps and then you go to the sales team. And well, whenever a new lead comes in through a form fill they they're supposed to be doing these things. And you start asking questions like, well, do they always do it that way? Well, some of the rockstars do it their own way, they kind of have their own Rolodex, and they do, right, so you start to quickly find that there are little holes in that, but they still have a process. And they will stand by the fact that they have a process and same thing in the service side of the world. Now, where we start to point out that they actually don't have a good process is where there is ambiguity or where there is just assumptions being made that someone's going to figure it out. And sometimes people can figure it out. But you can't always you can't always trust that. So example with my son crazy. He's seven years old. They are teaching kids how to program in school these days, I think starting in kindergarten, right? So it's great. I learned to program and code when I was 22 years old, and I thought it was awesome. These kids are already doing it.
Frank
So no, not me seventh grade. I remember.
Joe
Yeah. Oh, yeah. seventh grade. I was like learning how to program. So but that was on your own volition. Now. It's just kind of like table stakes, everybody. Anyway, he's learning to code. And as part of learning to code you learn the concepts of coding so you don't first learn, you know how to write the syntax. In how to work in the program's you first have to understand conceptually what it means when we say there's loops. And when we say that there's functions and there's variables. And there's, there's bugs and all this stuff, you need to understand what that means. So the exercises they go through, one of them is how to write an algorithm. And for those of you who don't know what an algorithm is, it's basically just a defined process. It's just all the steps and decisions it makes to make something go on the top and come out the bottom the way you think it's going to, okay, so that activity was write out the steps to draw a house, and don't say you're drawing a house, just write out the steps to draw a house and hand it to someone and see if by following the steps, it turns out looking like a house. Okay, so he did that. And he did a pretty good job, he wrote out, here's what he wrote, he said, draw a big square in the middle of paper, put a big triangle on top of it, put a rectangle inside of it, and inside that rectangle, put a little circle, and then put two little squares inside the big box as well. It's about something like that. So I knew where he was going with this. So to prove a point, of course, I draw a big square in the middle, just like he said. And then I drew a big triangle on top, but I didn't make it look like a roof, I just drew a random, big triangle sitting on top, a little off hanging off the edge. And it didn't at all look like a roof. And then inside, I put my rectangle that he thought was going to be a door, I put it over in the corner halfway up the house. And then I put the two things, he thought were going to be a window down in the bottom. And I followed the instructions. I did what he said, and I handed it back and he's all dad, he didn't follow the instructions. And I said, No, no, I literally followed the instructions. Let's read them together. And I'll show you what I did. And he's like, oh, okay, so then he goes back, and it took them three or four times before he wrote it in such a way that I was able to follow get a house, get a house and exactly what the house he was expecting to get. And this is our problem with our business friends. They write it down, they think that somebody smart is gonna fill in the gaps in between. And then when it comes out the other end, not exactly the way they expected. Oh, I got to fire that person. They don't know what they're doing. hire someone else, it becomes a people problem in their mind. Yeah, it's not a people problem. It is a process problem. So when we go in, we say great, you're running marketing campaigns. Here is a defined process to do that the same exact way every single time. And this came up with a client not too long ago. They said, Okay, we got this new piece of content, we got to run a campaign around it, let's have a meeting about how we're going to run traffic to it, how we're going to put it where we're going to show it, you know, and to which I said, We don't need to have a meeting, right? We literally have a blueprint for premium content funnels. All we have to do is say which type of content offer is this? plug it into the right level? And then everything else has already defined we know what kind of cold traffic we're going to send to it. We know what's going to get retargeted to it, right? We know what it's going to lead to next? And what's going to lead to it from a you know, like funnel standpoint, there was no how do we had sat down and had that meeting, we would have come up with some new way to do it a new way. And then we would have blamed that that campaign didn't work. Now this campaign may or may not work, because it may or may not be a good offer. But what we do know is that we did it the same way as we did the last one. And so now we can compare apples to apples and say which campaign was better.
Frank
So and one thing that we've touched on before, and I'm very passionate about this, coming up with new ways all the time, is so destructive to the business. Because every time there's a new way, it starts with very little chances of success. Ways quote, unquote, processes systems that become successful, are successful, because they've been implemented time and time again. And over that time, there's iteration to improve upon it. It's a snowball effect. Okay. And so if you're constantly developing a new way, and every time you have a meeting about how do we do it this time, you never get yourself in a place where you can snowball to where the ninth time you do the campaign. It's exponentially better than the first time. But if you you're constantly like coming up with new ways, you don't ever get that, you know, exponential growth. I also want to look, can I just stop? Yeah,
Joe
I think it's worth noting. So we are both entrepreneurs. We both figure this out just by getting in the trenches and doing it over the last, you know, 1520 years. I think we need to mention that the only reason we know that is because we've made every single mistake in the book when it comes to changing process for sure doing things the same way. I mean, I think our teams if you interviewed anybody who's ever worked for us, they would say those guys are the worst. They change it up all the time. And totally we have. We are, I was gonna say we have learned our lesson we are learning our lesson. And we are preaching what we know to be true and we are constantly trying to or having to check ourselves on this very same thing because it's really hard when you Have a brand new idea and you think is gonna be awesome. And you just want to change it up quickly. And boy does it throw the team for a loop.
Frank
Or if you don't hit your, your, your growth objectives, it's really easy to scrap what you're doing, it's we got to do something new and different, we're the worst. And so, you know, just for our listeners, we are recovering addicts, just like you. So the one thing I want to say, though, about process, especially in a b2b scenario, I don't think it's very difficult to have process all the way down to, you know, extremely granular, nitty gritty, you know, to where this is truly like a factory conveyor belt, there's, there's going to be ambiguity. So you do need high quality people to know what to do when the process doesn't get down to the, you know, the nth degree in what's needed, though, to kind of govern that and overlay that, if you will, there's two things that are often missing from organizations when it comes to process. One is a mission. And two is a set of philosophies or standards. When I say mission, I don't mean the company's mission statement. I mean, the mission of the function, the mission of the role, the mission of the person. So if we're talking about operations, for example, let's say we're talking about operations in a professional service business, the mission of that function is to deliver a service offering that so valuable clients stay for a long time and grow their relationship with us. And we do that profitably. That's the mission, simply stated. So if you have a head of operations in your business, and you don't have a mission, there's one for you that that literally could be the mission for the head of operations and in many businesses. And so you have to start with the mission, what's the mission of the function? What's the mission of, you know, the rev ops function? What's the mission of the CEO function, like, what is the mission, so you have to start there. And then the next thing is, we need a, there needs to be a set of standards, I call them philosophies. So if you read the book, building your digital utopia, there's five philosophies. These are standards, those words are interchangeable. The reason I'm using standards, because it's a little bit more generic for this context. And so the standards need to be defined such that when you're operating within the process, you always keep the standards in mind. So that way, if you come across a scenario where you're like, Huh, this step real, I'm supposed to do this step, I'm supposed to this thing. But it doesn't feel right, with this client or this situation, right? Not everything's textbook, right? This doesn't feel like should I be doing this, your standards will tell you your standards kind of overrule the steps in the process. So you might have a standard that says, you know, customers first company second, that might be a standard, that might be a philosophy, and you define that out in a short little paragraph. What does that mean? You know, you might have a standard that says, slow down to speed up, that's one of our philosophies. What does that mean? And so when you have your standards, then people can, can operate now in the process, they know the why, which is the mission, and then they know, the color of how they're supposed to do it. So if the process is the the specific how your standards or philosophies are the sentimental how, yeah. And so you need both so people can understand, you know, once quantitative ones qualitative, right, right philosophies and standards are qualitative, the process is quantitative, you need both. And so people have to understand the spirit, when paired with that mission. Now they're like, I know the spirit of why I'm doing this. The qualitative part I understand. Now, the quantitative is this is instructional. And that's that trifecta is why most processes fail. So one, there's not good process, and it's not well defined. But two, and more importantly, it's missing those other components. And that will be a game changer for how people go about executing process in your organization.
Joe
I love when you have those. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. So what do you do about this? How do you start to figure out if you have a process problem, ie, the biggest problem is that as a business owner, or somebody who is in it, it's really hard to see what's broken. So we need to talk about some ways to kind of start breaking out of this. And I think, you know, starting with something that our buddy Dan tire over at HubSpot said at one point, right? He was like, if you haven't gone through your own sales process, as a customer or as a prospect, you actually don't know what it's like, you know what you think it's like, because you are on the inside and you're following your playbook and you're, you know, you think they're having a certain type of experience, but you kind of got to pull yourself out and either go through it, or you need someone to go through it and be really honest with you about whether or not it was a wonderful experience and whether or not it helped them make a decision to go with your company. Because without that you are you're not operating blindly, but you're operating Like from the wrong side of the cockpit or something like that.
Frank
Yeah. So I think you're touching on a couple of things. You said, How do you know to me, I'll go back to what I said earlier, which is, you know, are you regularly regularly missing your growth objectives? Yeah. You know, to me, you've got a process problem. Always, you regularly missing your growth objectives. I'm not talking about a bad quarter or go through a pandemic, right, like, but if you're regularly missing your growth objectives, you have a process problem. Hands down, right? Don't challenge me on that change my mind, right? What did that mean? Right? Like, that's me what that means change my mind. So you have a process problem if you regularly miss your growth objectives, taking that a layer down. Now, what do you do? I think it's wildly valuable to get some outside perspective. Because when you're in I told I told someone, that fact this the other day, so I, I have a coach. What's funny is I coach a lot of people. But you know, the coach needs a coach. You know, it's just like any, you know, high performing, you know, individual, they always have a coach, it's white tiger woods has that person who, yes, it's his caddy. But that person's pointing out certain things about, you know, the lay, or I'm using golf terms. I don't know anything about golf. But that person helps point things out, you know, and then there's like a trainer, right? So coaches need coaches. And so that really dawned on me the other day was that, you know, there's a lot of stuff that I know that I coach people on that when I try to figure it out for myself in my organization, I lock up, they really go into this paralysis of like, I'll run myself in circles. So that's the value of the coach can say, pause, stop, answer this question, and focus me and whatnot, so that there's huge value to getting some outside perspective. audit, the first thing is audit your process audit, what's going on, in having that done with some outside perspective, is going to be wildly more valuable than if you just kind of do that to yourself, wildly,
Joe
let me just tell you a quick story about that. We, you know, we're working with a client that is going through a development project, a software development project that is going to help operationalize their business. And actually, it already has a lot of ways. And they are building a custom software to help move production through. And so he came to me and said, Oh, my gosh, we're having this problem getting some of the data into the tax system, that the system that's going to reconcile our taxes for us. And so what we need is we need to have the developers do an API integration to inject the data into this other software. And he's like, this is this is how we're going to solve this problem. And I is the consultant who's not in his business and not day to day working with these developers. And it's not top of mind for me that like the only way to solve this problem is the developers. I said, Well, that's going to cost us 7500 bucks. Have you considered this associate? Have you considered just assigning one of your, you know, $15 an hour employees to once a month, do an export from the system and then do an upload into the other system? Would that be sufficient? Like, well, I guess that that guess that would, that's it, then all you need is a process to remind them to do that once a month, and you need an exception report to remind you, if they didn't do it, so that you can call them out on it. And that's gonna save you 70 $500. And it's going to take them all of like nine minutes, Max. And he blew his mind. And he's like, this is exactly why we have you. And I didn't do anything, all I did was come in without his muddled hat on the
Frank
preconceived notion, right?
Joe
He just assumed we're solving problems with developers and technology, this is how we're going to do it, get me a cost for it. And I said, That's not how you're going to do it, you're going to do it in the most, you know, analog way possible, kind of, and this is why you need an outside set of eyes, whether that's a true like paid consultant, or whether that is a friend who just goes through your process for you need somebody outside of you, to help you understand what's really happening.
Frank
Yeah, because, you know, people have often asked me along the lines of your coaching situation, there is coaching example there, people have often asked like, oh, like, what are the skills around coaching this and that, what I'll tell people is, when you get it, right, when you truly understand how to ask the questions, and how to, you can go into almost any business and audit almost anything, because it's about a set of questions. And it's about a probing technique, in a discovery technique that can actually be applied anywhere in the problem is, is, you know, the US as leaders of organizations, we have those skills, and that's easy to understand. But overlaid on top of that is the content. It's the knowledge. Yeah, the knowledge is what actually screws us up. We know too much. Right? And so it, that process to be done right actually needs to be done with someone who has actually a lot less knowledge about your business than you do and isn't like getting all clouded with the content of your business. Hmm, right in so that those questions can be asked with the right spirit and not with these like biases. So really important, as you're talking about third party, getting an outsider to really help you audit what's going on and help expose and hold a mirror up. This is what's happening now.
Joe
So I think if you have a process problem, or if you think after listening to this, that you may have a process problem, a couple of steps, you can take one, go to buildingyourdigitalutopia.com where you can actually download some pre made processes for the marketing team for the sales team. I think if you want to even take the next step and get that extra set of eyes, we can even help with that.
Frank
Yeah. So on that, on that very website, there's a way to get in touch with myself and Joe. And, you know, we'd love to talk with you about those missed growth objectives, and what's happening in your organization. And, you know, our initial consultations are no charge, and we're happy to, you know, have those conversations. And, you know, if it's not myself or Joe, like we have strategists on our team, who can, who can talk through that with you, revenue operations strategists. So at least take the one step that Joe mentioned, which is go to buildingyourdigitalutopia.com. There's some free resources for you there. There's a link to the book, which talks a lot about this high level process that we've been talking about over so many episodes. And then again, if you'd like to get in touch, you can do that as well on that website. So thanks for joining us today. Looking forward to Episode 36. When you come back, take care and have an awesome day.
