Does Your Marketing Rely Too Heavily on People

What’s the biggest and riskiest single point of failure in your marketing and sales?

Is it a particular ad?

Is it a type of promotion you run?

Is it a potential change in the economy?

Is it pressure from competitors – and the chances a competitor will eat your market share?

Chances are these things will continue to run on the same even trajectory, at the same pace, and have a low chance of changing in a way that results in a marketing, sales, or cashflow failure.

Chances are the biggest risk to your business is CHF: Catastrophic Human Failure.

Coming into winter, it’s worth thinking about.

Around this time of year, there’s a naturally evolved response that slows us down.

It’s the time of year when we see a lot of Seasonal Affective Disorder, Depression.

Our “fair weather” habits around diet and exercise falter and fail as we stay in, do less, and eat more.

Our resilience takes a stumble.

And (whether it’s you, your staff, or your clients) we’re more likely to let important things slip. Only to stress about them and let even more things slip as the pressure builds.

This is why I love things that run on autopilot.

On my computer, I have a taped note that has followed me for years:

“How do I do this so I don’t have to do it again?”

It lights me up to know that I can do something once (or twice, or three times) and then it handles itself from that day forward. It gives me scale, personal effectiveness, and it’s perhaps the reason I like to solve problems permanently with technology and systems – rather than relying on humans.

I got to speak about this at the Business Systems Summit – and share my creative process for reviving dead websites and turning them into profit machines.

To me, the beauty of this process is that it’s like a recipe for a cake.

Even someone who isn’t a baker can follow the recipe and masterfully recreate my chocolate gateau – even if they have only basic baking skills.

And they almost never miss an ingredient, or important step either!

Plus – because the burden of success sits inside the system, rather than on the human (staff member, manager, business owner, etc) – it reduces your human risks. A “backup” staff member stepping into the role with no experience will be able to follow the system to achieve the same outcome.

When it comes to marketing processes, systems and technology don’t just build scale, and improve the quality of output.

They also take away the risk of human failure.