Align Your Business Cycles
Your business model is different.
It requires three distinct but integrated business cycles (marketing, recruitment, and sales) to be interconnected, aligned, and fluidly working together.
To get there, your company’s leaders and individual teams must work together to see where cycles intersect and how you can entangle and refine them to optimize your candidate and client experience, create a better work environment for your teams, and improve your bottom line (and individual department outcomes).
It’s not going to be easy. Each cycle has its own audience, strategic plan, budget, and personality. You may have to call in reinforcements (e.g. strategic plan mediators, consultants).
Or, take a look at our breakdown below with tips on how your firm can easily weave each departments’ game plan together across your business cycles.
The Plan
It takes strategic planning to determine how the marketing, recruitment and sales cycles can inspire and fortify each other. Here we will provide an outline for creating this plan.
1. Map out each cycle (use our guides)
If you haven’t already, now is a good time to review our breakdown of each business cycle. Use these templates as a guide for mapping out your own marketing cycle, recruitment cycle, and sales cycle. Each department’s leadership team should be involved in this process, and you may want to include other key contributors as well.
2. The meeting about the meeting
No one likes meetings for the sake of meetings, but in this case, you need to get all of your department heads and key contributors together to work through each business cycle and discuss:
- Any instances of overlapping processes, communications, or other activities
- Missing steps as determined by your marketing, recruiting and sales cycle maps
- Opportunities for collaboration between departments at certain steps
- Variance in perspective of how certain processes and steps should be handled
Additionally, take this time to talk through any perceived issues within each of the business cycles. Because of the inter-dependence between all of your business processes, performance of one cycle could be impacted by factors in another. By looking at the alignment of all three cycles as a whole, you are better prepared to determine where the process may be broken.
3. Remediation gameplan
Each team should create a task list with assigned deadlines for any to-do’s, fixes, or other process changes that come up in the ^^ previous discovery meeting.
If deadlines aren’t assigned, it becomes too easy for important tasks to find their way to the back burner. Part of this collaboration is for everyone to hold each other accountable.
Some examples of these remediation tasks:
- Marketing always sends NPS and feedback surveys, not recruiting or sales. Develop standard survey and email.
- Sales always sends requests for new orders, not recruiting. Create the email template.
- Differentiate lead nurturing handled by sales from content marketing handled by marketing. Define the strategy and email / text workflows.
- Recruitment always publishes completed, marketable job postings. Implement SOP for job postings for recruitment team and marketing.
- Sales always hands off new client to recruiter in an introduction email. Create the email template.
- Create a recruitment marketing strategy and automated workflow.
The Implementation
Once your teams have collaborated to determine how these separate but intertwined groups can best work together, the next step is implementation of all of your remediation and process tasks.
1. Check off the list
Each group should work through that task list they have coming out of the planning meeting. Set deadlines and be sure to collaborate as much as possible.
2. Automate
Part of your implementation should include automation of workflows and standard communications that you have defined. If you need more help with that, check out our automation workbook. And, think big. Automation can help in ways you may not have considered.
3. The final (not really) meeting
Get your strategic team together one more time to talk through the changes that have been implemented and how it is impacting (positively or negatively) your business, employees, candidate and clients. What is working? What still needs work? If needed, start the process over to continue your alignment plan.
4. Set up quarterly reviews
These will likely fall under your ongoing strategic planning calendar, and if you aren’t already doing that, it’s a good place to start. Whether quarterly or bi-annually, make sure you are performing this alignment workshop on an ongoing basis.
Final Thoughts
It is important to take a holistic approach to optimize (or stabilize) your business plan along with your recruiting, sales and marketing cycles.
To find out how you can free up your humans to do things only humans can do, set up a demo today and see how our automated workflows can support your sales, marketing, and recruitment cycles.
