This week’s blog is inspired by the “LEGOⓇ Principle”, a concept developed by Brad Martineau at Sixth Division. It’s a beautifully simple idea that applies to pretty much any business you care to imagine.
Let’s say you’re trying to build a 1,000-piece LEGOⓇ castle, and all you’ve got to start with is a huge pile of mixed-up pieces. It would be a total mess! You’d have no idea where to start.
Luckily, that’s not how LEGOⓇ is packaged. You’re given step-by-step instructions, showing you which pieces go together and in what order. They also put the pieces into packets you can open one at a time, so you can start by putting together smaller parts of the structure, rather than trying to build the whole thing at once.
In other words, LEGOⓇ is modular. This means that each part of the whole set – a tower, a drawbridge, a staircase – can be put together separately and stands on its own. It’s only when they’re all assembled that you recreate the magical picture on the front of the box, but the best way to get there is to focus on building one section at a time.
Your business is the same. Just like the LEGOⓇ set, it’s made up of separate modules – sales, marketing, fulfilment, finance, operations. To reach its full potential, each of the parts must fit smoothly together, but you won’t get there by trying to build it all in one go. You have to make a plan and follow it step-by-step, starting with whichever module is most fundamental to the type of business you are trying to create.
Businesses Are Modular
All businesses contain the same basic modules, but they will be weighted differently depending on what kind of product or service you’re selling. Some businesses need to focus more time and resources on their sales operation, others on fulfilment.
For example, in an e-commerce business like Amazon, the sales process is supposed to be as streamlined and frictionless as possible. Customers come to the site, find the items they wish to purchase and check out as quickly as possible. Amazon wants to minimise the number of steps between making first contact with a customer and concluding the sale.
With a higher-ticket item like specialist dentistry, however, the customer journey is much more complex. An initial consultation is followed by the creation of a treatment plan, which must be sent out to the customer. It’s then usually necessary to talk the customer through that plan in order to address any queries or concerns. Only then can we move on to making a sale. Each step here is vital, helping to build the confidence and trust that is the foundation of any clinical relationship.
One of the biggest mistakes business owners make is to copy what others are doing without first thinking about whether these methods apply to their business. If you’re copying within the same sector you might be OK, but the only way to be sure is to think long and hard about which of your business’ various modules are most important to you, and what results you want to get out of them. Otherwise, it’ll be like trying to build your LEGOⓇ castle (or Star Wars ship) without having first read the instructions.
Finding Your Pain Points
As an example of what I mean, let’s think about how this applies to the private healthcare sector. Private medical practices are selling a high-ticket item, and onboarding new customers is always a major pain point. You’ll inevitably have to invest a lot of resources just to get potential clients to the point of sale – attracting them to the practice, providing them with the right information, building confidence and trust.
How do you know which of your current strategies are working, and which need to be scrapped or upgraded? The key here is data. You need to make sure you’re getting the right details from your customers – not just their name and address, but what services or procedures they’re interested in, and how they first contacted your practice (was it social media, telephone, email, website form?). Without this information, you’ll have no way of evaluating your marketing operations.
By understanding who your customers or patients are and what they want, you’ll be able to see what they need to know. This will enable you to provide them with relevant information in advance of a full consultation, meaning that you can use this time to focus on developing the clinical relationship and filling gaps in their knowledge. After this, the next step is to make sure they’re properly followed up. Your team should always know where each customer is in the sales funnel, when to next make contact, and whose responsibility it is to reach out.
By making sure that each stage in the sales process is properly documented, you can find out where your pain points are. If you can measure how many people are inquiring about your services against how many are booking consultations, and then compare that with how many actually become customers, you’ll be able to see exactly where you need to focus your attention.
For instance, you might see that your practice is very good at converting consultations into paid treatment plans, but not doing so well at turning inquiries into consultations. With this insight, you now know that this is the module you need to focus on. With some targeted automations, you’ll be able to boost your conversion rate in no time. Once you’ve cracked this, you can move onto other modules, gradually progressing towards that magnificent picture from the front of the LEGOⓇ box!
If you’re having a hard time deciding which part of your business you need to focus on first, we can help you identify which modules are most fundamental to your strategy, and help design a strategy to get the biggest ROI with the shortest turnaround.
