A TALE OF TWO PHASES!

This is a story about two phases and how they transformed two faces. Sounds interesting? Let me hope so. You see there was this old man who was in the business? of selling a service. Each month, his customers would pay him $40 just to use his service. The more customers who used his service the more money the old man made. And this kept rising each month. The old man was happy and so were his employees. Over time, customers started getting wary of the service and started looking at other companies that were providing a similar service to what the old man provided. He did not receive as many new customers as he had been receiving and many of the existing customers were not as enthusiastic as they were before about his service. In short, the old man was not growing his business. He was not replacing the departing customers fast enough and this would soon leave him in a difficult situation where he had to improve his service delivery, recruit more or better sales people, perhaps pay them more while his revenues were declining. The old man could not figure out exactly what was happening. He had not changed his delivery in a number of years; the customers had been receiving the same service and not complaining. He had recently lost three of his best sales people and just recruited two to replace them. The two new salespeople have to be trained on the product after which they will join Karama’s sales team. Karama is his Sales and Delivery Manager who has been with him for close to twelve years. He is known for his no nonsense dealing with salespeople who deliver more stories than sales. For a salesman to survive two years of Karama, he must be in a class of his own and almost invincible when it comes to meeting targets.

One day on his way back from the local market, he met Joshua, one of the many sons to his uncle. Joshua had been working for a highly rated management consultancy firm and after many years of doing consultancy at the firm, he was looking to start his own consultancy. After the usual pleasantries, Joshua realized that the old man was not as vibrant as he usually is and sought to find out what was really the problem. After a lot of conversation, it came out that the old man was a worried man. His business was bleeding yet he could not see any significant change in his operations that would annoy his customers and fail to attract new ones. Rival companies had sprung up around him and the sales leaders in those companies were the good salesmen who left Karama’s team. They seemed to be fairing on better than they did while they were with the old man’s company. It also came out that Karama was using very outdated methods to prospect for, close, and deliver to new customers. These methods had been working very well for the old man or at least he thought so. The outdated methods led to inconsistent sales and haphazard retention techniques by his sales and customer delivery teams. These same teams came under so much pressure to perform that sales meetings ceased being platforms for information exchange but a battleground for blame games and threats of sacking. Working in the old man’s company was not as attractive as it had been in earlier years. It was clear that the clouds were gathering around the old man. He needed help and he needed it very fast.

While his competitors were embracing AI automation to fasten delivery of services, the old man saw that as a fad that would soon pass away. He has used his old methods and they have worked for him very well. His HR department was proud with the level of training they have been delivering and the numerous awards his workers have scooped in past industry events. In short, they were stuck in the mud because of the numerous good things they have been doing. Because these systems worked very well, the old man and his business have been reluctant to change and instead have been waiting for the cloud to pass. The cloud has of course refused to pass and is instead gathering into a storm. The old man has become a victim of good management practice. A victim of getting stuck in too much success that he failed to acknowledge the changing landscape, the systems he had installed worked very well and the training was so good that they could not notice the changing patterns in customer behaviour, did not acknowledge the smartphone revolution, the changing habits of their market and the development of Large Language Models like Chatgpt, Claude and Perplexity and how they could give him an advantage and impetus to surge way above his industry and never be easy to catch. “Excessive success fosters complacency”. The old man was finding this out the? hard way and very quickly.

So, Joshua called us at Fanisi Online and after two hours of listening to him, we promised to book a meeting with the old man to get full details of his operations and processes. At a high level, we felt the old man’s immediate problem was to grow his monthly sales? and install a seamless lead generation machine system that will attract strangers, engage them, harness them into leads and then into his customers. Once they become customers, we would present the service delivery personnel with as much fingertip level information as they can have so as to provide first contact resolution to almost all cases and make customer delivery impressive to both them and their customers. When we later called the old man to book a meeting to discuss the same, we indicated to him that? what we have in mind was a two phase approach that? would involve the installation of a Lead Generation Machine System and having it fine tuned over a period of about seven months to get it to double if not triple the current sales of the business and keep it rising steadily.Then as a second phase build a referral machine to reward his existing customers for referring new customers to his business. Finally we would install an affiliate program for him that would bring in qualified strangers not employed by him, to use the Lead Generation Machine System we will have developed, to continuously generate new sales for him for a commission. The old man was elated and over the moon and cannot wait for our first meeting.

You definitely cannot blame the old man for being over the moon after finding out that there is a simple and clear path back to prosperity. A path that is clear, believable, does not require deployment of numerous resources and which will start delivering results immediately. The real killer was how simple the math looked. Currently, the old man charges $40 per month for his service. When we have 200 affiliates fully trained and each delivering at least 10 new customers each month, he will be assured of 2000 new customers per month each paying $40 generating $80,000 per month as new business. With this kind of progression alone, in two months, his additional recurrent monthly income will be $160,000 and $320 at the end of the first quarter of this system, and all this just by making simple tweaks to his customer acquisition processes.?

I hope it is now clear to you how two phases of a system can change the face of the old man from a dull face to a radiant one.