Not Ready to Shake Things Up? Test These Low-Commitment Game Changers

If you’re not ready to go big, go small.

Wholesale change can be scary. Maybe you know you need to raise your prices, but all you can think about are the obstacles charging more might bring: objections from customers, objections from the sales team, even a loss of business.

There are too many negative implications, so you’re hesitant to risk it.

Plus, so many other things have to happen to make big changes work: changes in processes, changes in ideas, maybe changes in how you do a proposal. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s too much. So you stall.

But maybe there are some small changes you can try to help you make progress without committing to something big and permanent. These smaller moves can even help soften the beach of change, so to speak, getting you and your team more comfortable with change in general.

Small changes today can pave the way for the bigger changes down the road.

Why Small Tactics Are Important

When my new clients start looking at their businesses differently and become open to new ideas, they’re often overwhelmed by all the things they need to do. They see 100 different needs that all seem urgent.

But part of the process of change is finding one thing you can do.

I tell them, “We’re not going to change 100 things. We’re going to change one thing. When we’re successful with that one thing, we’re going to change another thing.”

The wonderful thing about making small changes is that not only do they add up, but they also beget other small changes.

When you make one small change — maybe updating a class of labor pricing — the process of making that simple change lays the groundwork for 10 more changes.

Not only that, but very often, since you’ve overcome the resistance to changing one thing, you’ll find yourself changing four or five other things along the way. This means the next time you look at your to-do list, you can cross five things off.

There’s a cascade effect that comes with making small changes.

I like to illustrate this with cleaning out the garage.

To clean out a full garage, you start by just taking one thing out that doesn’t have a place. You don’t move it elsewhere in the garage; you physically take it outside. Then you take out the next thing that doesn’t have a place. Eventually, you remove everything that doesn’t have a place in your garage, and your driveway is full of stuff.

Then you move on to the next task: going through everything still in the garage. Now that you can see what’s in there, you can cull what you don’t need, make more space, and rearrange effectively. Everything gets a place, and there’s more room to walk around.

The simple act of taking one thing out of the garage leads to you toss out the useless stuff you didn’t even know was in there.

Your business is the same. Changing one small thing makes an impact because it creates room for another thing to happen, and another. That’s why I love small tactics!

Let’s look at six low-risk examples you can try to get started.

6 Small Tactics That Can Improve Your Organization

1. Test New Pricing

You probably price things almost daily, so this is one you can try immediately. You can take the proposal in front of you and change something.

Suppose I advise you to charge 5% more on every proposal. Notice, I didn’t say charge 5% more the same way each time. I simply said charge 5% more.

So if you’re writing a $1,000 proposal, what are all the ways you could make it $1,050?

• You can change the line-item price.
• You can change a multiplier or duration.
• You can change a discount.
• You can put a line on the proposal indicating a surcharge of $50.

Choose one change to try; then try something different on the next one. You’re testing each change. If the customer doesn’t comment, the test was 50% successful because it was accepted — but you don’t know why. If the customer pushes back, you get a chance to ask them, “What if I had done this another way?”

The simple act of doing something will create more data for you. And it’s easy. Give it a try.

The goal here isn’t to raise your pricing across the board, though that will be the end result. The goal is to understand how to effectively raise your pricing with maximum acceptance, minimum friction, and hopefully a much better bottom line.

2. Use Decision Deadlines as a Filter

If your goal is to get customers to confirm more quickly, why not try adding one sentence to your proposal? It could be as simple as, “This proposal is valid until this date,” which is a week away.

You can test different sentences. On the next proposal, try, “Due to unprecedented demand on the supply chain, this proposal is only valid until this date.” Say the same thing, but in a different way.

It’s as simple as that. But the impact is enormous.

Once you put a quote out, every proposal becomes a placeholder. And if it’s a quote without a deadline, it becomes a placeholder forever. This causes a lot of challenges for your overworked operation.

The most valuable word in sales is when a customer says “No,” not “Yes.” When a customer says “No” to your proposal deadline, they free up your capacity to work on a more valuable “Yes.” The sooner a customer rejects the deadline, the sooner you stop holding room for that job.

Now, do you need to enforce that deadline? Sometimes. But you can’t use it if it’s not there.

3. Reject Competitive RFPs

Sometimes a buyer sends you a request for proposal to compare you to another supplier.

This isn’t something you do when demand is high and supply is low. It’s a form of price shopping. Most of my clients tell me they wish they didn’t have to respond to these. That’s a great mindset for this next change: Set the criteria to reject an RFP.

The first RFP I ever rejected felt so good. It was from an agent who kept sending in RFPs because he wanted to use our budget numbers to justify who he’d already planned on hiring. We just kept writing quotes because we didn’t know how to stop. Until we set the criteria.

We said that if you’ve written more than two quotes in a row for a buyer and did not get substantive feedback (nevermind acceptance), then don’t write another one.

The small tactic here is to set the criteria for “No.”

Once you’ve rejected your first RFP, you’ll reject your second one. And as you keep going, you’ll save time and resources for putting together proposals and solutions for real buyers — buyers who are far more ideal.

4. Change Your Time Tracking Platform

Going from little or no time tracking to tracking everything and everyone is way too big of a bite to take on all at once. Instead, you can just start with one small thing.

One option is to change your time tracking system from something (or nothing) to anything else.

Maybe right now your employees come in, fill out a three-by-five note card, drop it in a box, then pull the card back out to write their exit time at the end of the day, and drop it back in the box.

A reasonable change here is to give them the option of tracking their time using a free app on their phone. This alone will cause people to change the way they think about time tracking. It makes room for the fact that not everybody can be in the office to punch a time clock, and it also introduces a little efficiency.

The benefits of this simple change will drive the need for additional changes. If we made things this much better with such a small change, how much better could we actually make it?

5. Pay Expense Report Reimbursements Immediately

Everyone hates filling out expense reports. They have record-keeping, minutiae, and math. It’s a very unsatisfying experience.

You can make one small change that will get expense reports turned in a lot quicker: immediate reimbursements. Someone turns in an expense report, they get a check. Maybe it’s immediately, maybe it’s on their upcoming paycheck. Whatever it is, there should be no waiting.

Part of the problem with expense reports is they’re not only tedious to fill out, but they’re also tedious to review. So it takes forever for them to get approved, which means the check gets delayed, which means people are even more discouraged about filling one out.

By taking away the roadblock of delayed payment and replacing it with the immediate gratification of getting reimbursed fast, you motivate quick action. Need money? Just fill out your expense report.

You’ll still review the expense report. You’ll still find the mistakes and fix them later. But you’ll actually have the expense reports, which was the goal.

6. Require Purchase Order Compliance for Large but Infrequent Capital Purchases

Nobody wants to fill out purchase orders, either. But they’re important.

You can start small here by requiring purchase orders for something that’s extremely important, but infrequent — like capital purchases.

A capital purchase is something you’re putting into your serialized inventory. It’s going to show up on your balance sheet as rental inventory. It’s a big deal, but you’re not making capital purchases every day.

Only one person in your company should be issuing purchase orders for capital purchases. That’s the first step.

The second step is simply requiring that all capital purchases have an approved purchase order in advance. Since this will be less than 1% of your transactions, it’s easy to accomplish.

This two-step change introduces the idea that there’s a non-negotiable need for this kind of financial control. Once introduced, that idea will lead to the next level of purchase order compliance, which might be on something that makes up 10% of your transactions.

You’ll learn along the way all the different ways to do it, but it won’t take long until you have full purchase order compliance for ALL purchases. You just get there one small piece at a time.

Change Is Good

We’re not talking about completely overhauling your business in one fell swoop. We’re talking about testing small changes, learning, and testing again.

Most changes have a benefit, but we can spend too much energy focusing on the downside. So to move forward, make a small change that’s reversible. Evaluate the benefits. Did they outweigh the sacrifices? If so, you’re going to be much more encouraged to make another small change. If not, just reverse it and move on to the next thing.

Change moves you forward, not backward. If a small change doesn’t work, instead of reverting to the old way, change it forward again and do something else that will take you closer to a better version.

When change works, which is often, it leads you in the right direction — and the next step can have an even greater impact.