Systems Enable Sales

If you want to sell more – and who doesn’t – you need to develop systems to enable your success.  This episode of the 60 Second Sales Show is all about replicating your sales success.  Imagine duplicating your best performance, over and over and over.

That’s not only possible, that’s what the best people and companys do.

The best in any industry or profession create systems and processes to replicate success.

Today we speak with an expert on systems who will show us how to create these systems to enablesales.

The title of this episode is: Systems Enable Sales

Here is the transcript for this episode of the 60 Second Sales Show:

Welcome, everyone, to another edition of the 60 Second Sale Show. I’m your host, Dave Lorenzo, and we are focusing today on systems and how systems help you make more money. That’s right, when you’re organized, you make more money. I know, it is shocking. Absolutely shocking that being prepared, being organized, having a plan, and executing that plan would help you put more cash in your pocket, but it’s absolutely true. On the show today, we have proof. That’s right, we actually have someone who has systems and who’s used systems, and systems help him make more money every day.

Before we get to that, I want to welcome in our fantastic producer, Nancy Pop. Hello, Nancy, how are you today?

Nancy Pop:      Hi, Dave. I’m doing well. How about you?

Dave Lorenzo: I am absolutely wonderful. It is two days before Thanksgiving. We’re recording this just two days before Thanksgiving 2016. Everyone’s all fired up for the holiday. Nancy is ready to go eat turkey and drink eggnog or whatever it is she drinks after she drives 140 hours in a car to a very cold place. I, on the other hand, am preparing to deep fry a turkey. That’s right, for the second year in a row, I will be deep frying a turkey, and this is not just the second time I’ve done it. I was so successful at deep frying my turkey last year that I not only deep fried a turkey for Thanksgiving, I did another one the week after Thanksgiving, and I did one every week from Thanksgiving to Christmas. I am now proclaiming myself an expert on deep frying turkeys. I also have deep fried chicken. I’ve deep fried a leg of pork. I love to deep fry stuff. I just discovered that I love to deep fry stuff last year.

Now, the reason I think this is important, the reason I think you need to know about this, is because I have developed an entire system for frying a turkey from start to finish. The system began two days ago when I double-checked both the fire extinguishers that I put on either side of the area where we fry the turkey. You need two fire extinguishers, by the way, because deep frying a turkey is a two-person job. You always need one person keeping an eye on the oil, the temperature, and the flame, and the other person can actually keep an eye on the turkey while it’s cooking. If there is an incident and some oil splatters and it happens to catch one person’s pants on fire, you want a fire extinguisher next to both people so that if anything happens, one person can grab a fire extinguisher right next to them and put it out.

My system consists of a couple of days before, checking the fire extinguishers. Today, we set up the entire frying system, which is a propane frying system, and I tested it out with water. Tomorrow, we will take the actual turkey, and put it in the pot with water, and sore the side of the pot so we know how much oil to put in. Then, I have a checklist, step by step, on the day when we actually fry the turkey, which is two days from now, as to what we do, when we do it, and how we go about it. The reason that I created this is because I didn’t want to forget how I did it successfully, and I wanted to be able to replicate that process quickly next year. This was last year. I wanted to be able to replicate the process quickly last year.

For example, last year, to put the bird in and out of the oil, the bird goes on an apparatus, which it looks like a grappling hook. The grappling hook goes through the center of the turkey, and it has a little eyelet at the top. You have to get that. You have to put it in the oil and fish it out of the oil somehow. I, last year, wasn’t aware of this, so I quickly rigged, with duct tape, a coat hanger, and a broomstick, a way to fish the turkey out of the oil. Well, broomstick is wood, oil is flammable, not good. This year, we have an entire apparatus we’ve built, and it has a swiveling paint bucket hook on it. It has an eyelet that hooks it to a metal pole, and we have duct tape grips at either end of the pole so that we can raise and lower the turkey without ever having to get near the pot, nor worrying about anything flame up on us. We have a whole checklist, a whole system set up for frying the turkey this year on Thanksgiving, and I am thrilled. I could not be happier. I am ready to go.

The point is systems do three things for you. Systems, number one, help you replicate success. Systems help you replicate success. I’m going to replicate my success of deep frying this fantastic, beautiful bird from last year to this year. I’m going to be able to replicate it exactly. I’ll probably even enhance or modify the system to make it even better for the next time I do it. The second thing systems do is they give you the advantage of speed. Systems allow you to get going quickly. They allow you to make things happen at a rapid pace, because you don’t have to think about each step and think about the possible ramifications of what you’re doing. You’ve already done it, and it’s written down. It’s right there for you. It’s ready to go.

The third thing that systems do is they allow someone to step in your shoes. Let’s say that someone, one of my friends, has a turkey emergency, and I have to leave my house on Thanksgiving, and I have to go attend to this turkey emergency. Any one of the people who are here could step in and follow my checklist for frying a turkey and do just as good a job. They could follow my detailed instructions, my step-by-step guide, for frying the turkey, and they could do it just as well as I could, because the system is already in place. Systems help you make more money. Systems lead to success. That’s the point of our show today. Although you may not be frying a turkey while you’re reading this or listening to this, you will need systems in order to sell more.

Today, I have invited the person who is the best at creating systems, the best I’ve seen in my 20-plus years in business. This guy is a systems maniac. He has systems for everything from loading the toner in his printer. He probably has a system better than mine for frying a turkey. Nancy, if you’d be so kind, would you please introduce and welcome in our guest for today.

Nancy Pop:      Yes. So, today we have Enrique J. Fernandez. He is a Miami native who is a veteran of the United States Air Force. After completion of his military service, Mr. Fernandez pursued his education, earning his bachelor’s degree with cum laude honors from Embry-Riddle University. He then attended the University of Miami School of Law, focusing on real estate, and earned his Juris Doctorate degree in 2006 and was admitted to the Florida Bar in 2007. Mr. Fernandez has been in private practice representing clients in real estate matters since 2007. He represents clients in many types of real estate matters, including rental disputes, real estate purchases, code violation resolutions, lien mitigation, quiet title actions, short-sale processing, loan modification processing, and foreclosure defense.

In his representation of investors, Mr. Fernandez strives to develop a pricing structure that results in a mutually beneficial relationship that allows the investor to obtain quality, accessible legal counsel. Whether it be protecting the investor’s interests in the purchase of an asset, its management, or sale, Mr. Fernandez strives to streamline the processes involved and protect his client’s interest at every stage of the process. Mr. Fernandez is also an active member of the South Miami Kendall Bar Association and currently the acting treasurer and the president-elect of the association. Sounds like we have a celebrity.

Dave Lorenzo: Wow, welcome Enrique Fernandez. That’s fantastic. Is there anything else that we need to know about you, Enrique?

Enrique:           Yes. I’ve actually been frying turkeys for some 20 years now, and I can add a couple points to your process, if you’re interested. Just let me know.

Dave Lorenzo: Oh yeah, please do. Please do.

Enrique:           Well, one of the things that I do is I fry a practice turkey before the turkey that I’m going to actually cook for the guests. What that allows me to do is get the oil up to temperature. It gets one turkey in, which kind of seasons the oil a little bit, and that first turkey we take out, and we actually carve it before most of the guests get to the house. We go ahead and put the meat into aluminum foil little turkeys and throw them in the fridge, so everybody has nice chunks of meat to go home with as leftovers after the meal.

Dave Lorenzo: Wow, that’s a great idea. That is an absolutely fantastic idea. We do one fried turkey and one baked turkey, because there are some traditionalists who like the turkey made in the oven. I love the idea of doing the practice turkey and giving people that to take home. I think that’s awesome. Fantastic. Now, do you have a system you use to get your turkey frying together?

Enrique:           I mean, I do. You know, it’s funny. I actually started doing this when I was in the Air Force, and believe it or not, it’s one of those don’t try this at home things. I learned how to fry a turkey on the second-story balcony of a wood building in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Dave Lorenzo: Oh my gosh.

Enrique:           Which is, now looking back, a crazy, very dangerous thing to do. We were, at least, smart enough to know how dangerous what we were involved in was and took it very seriously. We developed a plan and really some experience that helped us put together a procedure that I’ve been using now for 15, 20 years, I guess.

Dave Lorenzo: That’s terrific. I am going to do an entire video. I’m not going to do it on Thanksgiving, because there’s too much pressure on Thanksgiving for everything to go perfect. I’m going to do a video, probably, next week of how to fry a turkey. What I’d like to do is I’ll do the video, and then you and I can get together, and we can do live commentary on frying the turkey. You can give me some extra tips that you have for doing it. I’ve found that you would think you’d be able to find more YouTube videos, more really good videos, on how to fry a turkey, but there really aren’t very many good ones out there. There are videos of people burning their homes down.

Enrique:           Exactly.

Dave Lorenzo: There are videos of them spilling hot oil on each other, but there’s very few videos of people doing a good job frying a turkey. I am going to do a YouTube instructional video on how to fry a turkey, and we’ll lay it out step-by-step, and you and I can do the color commentary.

Enrique:           Count me in.

Dave Lorenzo: Enrique, let’s do this. Let’s talk about the systems that you use, but what I’m interested in, we’re not going to sell people on using systems or standard operating procedures. What I want to do is I want people to learn, in the next five to 10 minutes, how to develop a standard operating procedure. Give us, if you can, a two-minute overview of the value of systems in your law firm. Then, after you give us that two-minute overview, let’s you and I get into a discussion about how to develop systems or standard operating procedures in sales and in marketing.

Enrique:           I think it really comes down to two things that I despise when it comes to my business. I really cannot stand making the same decision more than once or on a repetitive basis, if you will, and I cannot stand making the same mistake twice. I’m not naïve enough to think that my staff is not going to make mistakes. We’re very, very careful about what we do, but my bigger concern is when we do have a misstep, no matter how minor it is, we make sure to look at the procedures and determine whether this was a breakdown in our procedures or was it something out of our control? That has been a huge help in what I do in making my business profitable.

I shouldn’t say mistake as much as a challenge. When we come across a challenge, is this something that stemmed from our procedures, or is it something that’s outside of our control? If it’s something outside of our control, is there something that we can put in our procedures to identify it earlier in the process in order to resolve it? Making the same mistake or having the same challenges come up is one part of the downside that we’re trying to address with the procedures here.

The other is the repetitive decisions. Hey, is it time to order tuner yet? In my business, we have to order searchers for closings. Should we order the searches now? If we don’t order them now, should we order them tomorrow? When should we order them? By writing down procedures and policies about all of those things, it keeps me from having to make, for instance, that decision on when we order a title search on every single file.

Dave Lorenzo: That’s fantastic. Let’s talk a little bit about how you develop standard operating procedures or how you develop these systems. What is your system for developing systems, Enrique? How do you get people to keep track of what they’re doing, particularly when it’s something that’s in their area of natural talent, right? How do you get them to keep track of what they’re doing? How do you test it and make sure it works for everyone? Give us the way that you develop your systems.

Enrique:           From the most basic level, the policies and procedures, it’s a living document, first of all. One of the things I realized when I set out to try to accomplish this was I had documents scattered everywhere throughout my hard drive, on my desktop, all these different kind of notes I’d taken and checklists and these types of things. One of the biggest things that helped was putting them all in one single folder, one single place where you keep everything, and coming up with a little bit of a numbering system to identify and separate the different types of procedures, different areas within the company, those types of things. At the most basic level, just structuring of the documents themselves was a little bit of a challenge. Really, whenever we put it in one place, it became a lot easier to find things. We also have a Word document that is a template for procedures. If you’re going to create a procedure, we use that template to start with.

Then, the drafting of the procedures themselves really comes down to taking notes. Whenever we’re trying to come up with a procedure, it’s not as if we’re sitting down and thinking, well, how do we do this? How do we process a file? What is the first step that we should do? Okay, that’s the first step. We write that down. Then, we think after we do that, what will we do? That’s not how we do it here. What we do is we process a file. If we’re writing a procedure on how to process a file, we will process a file. As we’re processing the file, we’ll take notes of what we did. Then, those notes of the steps that we took to process a file will be the beginning draft of the final procedure.

Then, we will analyze those notes and think, okay, is this the best way to do it? Is there something we should add here? Is there something here that’s not productive that should be removed? Then, the journey begins on that procedure. A procedure’s never done. It’s a living document. The starting point for it is really just taking notes as we do something that we want to have a procedure for.

Dave Lorenzo: From a sales perspective, if you’re reaching out to clients and you’re making a follow-up call, maybe what you do is you quickly write down first look up the client’s file, review notes in file to see what the last conversation was, review notes in file to see client’s name, review notes in file to see client’s kids’ names, review notes in file to see client’s spouse’s names so that you have something to do to start the conversation. That would be the initial start of how to make a follow-up call, the procedure for how to make a follow-up call, the system for how to make a follow-up call.

Now, Enrique, you do a very good, in fact an excellent, weekly email newsletter. I don’t want to get into that. That’s a separate conversation for a separate time, but tell us about the system you’ve developed for doing the weekly email newsletter. You do it yourself every week, but you have a procedure for doing it, don’t you?

Enrique:           Yes, absolutely. It’s my newsletter, and one of the things that sets my newsletter apart from most newsletters is the fact that all the drafting, the language, the copy if you will, is mine. It’s my personal work. What I do is I’ve created a procedure that allows me to sit down and write, and when I’m done writing, that’s all I have to do. Then, I hand it over to my staff. I have somebody in my staff that proofreads it. I give it one last check to make sure that I agree with whatever changes they think should be made. Then, we have a procedure in place to upload that article into the system that we use to send out those emails. We also have a schedule of when those emails are supposed to go out, who they’re supposed to go out to, those types of things.

When it comes to my actual time involved with that newsletter, it’s limited to sitting down and writing it. That is not something that I can delegate. It’s very important to me that that newsletter has my voice and that my readers get to know me and feel a connection with me, because they know that it’s actually me writing as opposed to some of the newsletters I get. For example, I just received one on how to winterize your house. We are in Miami, Florida. That’s not all that difficult down here. You can tell it’s a national newsletter, and they’re subscribed to some system, and they sent it out.

Dave Lorenzo: How to winterize your house in Miami: turn off the air conditioning.

Enrique:           Right, exactly. Now, if they would have sent it out and made a joke about it and said that turn your heater on and burn off the dust, then that would have been great, but it wasn’t that. It was something else. The point is I’ve limited my time, my investment of time, in that newsletter to just my writing. Then, from there, my staff takes it, uploads it, makes sure it gets distributed, and all of that.

Dave Lorenzo: I think a huge takeaway is that even for something that you’re personally involved in, you still have a system associated with it. You still have a process, a procedure, associated with it so that everybody knows what’s going on, and everybody knows what’s happening at what point in the process.

Enrique:           Absolutely.

Dave Lorenzo: Now, let’s give everybody a starting point, everybody who’s listening. I’ve never written systems before. I’m out there in a business. I’m an entrepreneur or I’m a sales professional. I’m out here, and I want to replicate my success. What’s the first thing I need to do to get started with my system? Do I make an inventory of everything that I need to do systems for? Do I have like a table of contents? How do I start?

Enrique:           Personally, what I would do is I would take out a notebook and a pen, and I would put it next to my desk. The next thing that I do that I do often, I would take notes of how I do it, and I would have created my first procedure. One of the things that I think holds people back when it comes to this is overthinking it and making it into a mountain whenever one procedure is better than none, five procedures are better than one, and so on and so forth. I think I’m up to, I haven’t counted lately, but I’m somewhere around 400 plus that we have here in my office, between the procedures and the forms and everything. We keep all of that in one folder, like I said.

Dave Lorenzo: That’s amazing. That’s absolutely amazing. You get to replicate your success in every area, and anybody new who comes in can look at it, and it saves everyone a whole lot of headache, a whole lot of time. It helps you make more money. That’s the bottom line. Fantastic. I absolutely love it. Enrique, if our folks want to reach out to you for advice on this or for real estate advice, particularly real estate advice in south Florida, where can they reach you? What’s the best way for people to reach out and get a hold of you?

Enrique:           They can call me. (305) 226-4529.

Dave Lorenzo: Give it to us again.

Enrique:           (305) 226-4529.

Dave Lorenzo: That’s Enrique J. Fernandez, PA. Enrique is an attorney here in Miami. He works on real estate transactions, but I encourage you to call him with any legal need, if you have any issue in Florida at all, anything from a DUI to a maritime case, you want to register a boat, call Enrique. He’ll put you in touch with a lawyer. If he doesn’t handle that area, he’ll put you in touch with a lawyer who handles it. Enrique, you have my deep thanks for joining us today to give us your insight on systems and on turkey frying. For more on the latter topic, stay tuned as Enrique and I add commentary to a fantastic turkey frying video.

As always, I am grateful to our wonderful producer, Nancy Pop. To both of you to everyone listening, I want to wish you the best and happiest of holiday seasons. By the time everyone listens to this, we’ll all have had our fill of turkey, but the holiday season will be in full swing. Once again, everyone, the happiest of holidays. Thank you for joining us, and until next time, I’m Dave Lorenzo. I hope you make a great living and live a great life.

Go out right now and build your systems because Systems Enable Sales.

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