'A map for finding the bottlenecks and a framework for guiding the flow of work'
High Level Concept
Bottlenecks can occur in any area of your company. Tackling the bottleneck and increasing its capacity with the right tools depends upon where in one of three funnels the bottleneck can be found to be choking the flow of work. WorkFunnels focuses on fixing bottlenecks in your Product & Services funnel. However, we can suggest ways of fixing bottlenecks in the Customer and Support funnels too.
Back Story
To better understand everything that needs to be done and the flow of that work through your company, it is best to envisage three separate funnels through which your work flows. These three funnels are titled Customer, Products & Service and Support Functions.
The Customer funnel deals with all the work that relates directly to your customers: Marketing, Sales, Customer and Product Development. Within the Knowledge Capture element of WorkFunnels you can record successful marketing strategies, scripts that generate high sales conversions and the processes used to develop products and your relationship with your customers.
We’d find a bottleneck in the Customer funnel when there were insufficient sales in the pipeline to fulfil the current throughput capacity of your products & services. Fortunately there are hundreds of marketing solutions to improve the throughput of sales, from mail drops, email marketing, paid and organic marketing on Facebook, Instagram and other social platforms. Other marketing methods to research are Google Ads, networking and web-based sales funnels. The list and resources available online are almost endless.
The Support funnel deals with everything that indirectly supports your company getting products and services to your customers. The Support funnel contains: Executive, Legal, Quality, Storage, Security, Finance, Team and Human Resource WorkCentres. Within the Knowledge Capture element of WorkFunnels you can record how bookkeeping is to be maintained or how Team Members are to log their time on specific projects.
Support functions really shouldn’t be a bottleneck and if they are they need to be outsourced so that your effort and time can be dedicated to and focused on getting your products and services to your customers as quickly and effectively as possible. There are now lots of really great bookkeeping, courier, storage and virtual assistance services available.
The Products & Services funnel contains the WorkCentres that are unique to your business. This funnel contains the WorkCentres that are concerned with the fulfilment of your products and services to your customers.
A bottleneck in your Product & Services funnel is the focus of WorkFunnels. Using this framework we can ensure that we’re tackling the bottleneck with the correct tools. Only in the Products & Services funnel can we impact revenue and leadtimes by increasing the capacity of the bottleneck using resources from non-bottlenecks. That’s why it’s important to understand this framework before using the QuickScan tool or conducting a full Bottleneck Scan with us.
Next Step
Together the QuickScan, Bottleneck Scan and Funnel Framework get us to the point where we can identify the bottleneck and potential solutions. Later on we’ll show you how successfully implementing the solutions is the role of the remaining two elements of WorkFunnels, the 90 Second Checklist and the 9 Minute WorkScript. So get started and kick off the QuickScan of your company by clicking the button below.