What if 'think about your processes' is really 'think about your marketing'?

Hey there,

Yesterday I had a brilliant session with the delightful Dan White, of Brandiful Design.

Dan’s been creating an infographic to help me explain how The Disappearing Boss works for founders, and as we finalised that, we got talking about how he might be able to offer some sort of ongoing service to clients, above and beyond the standard ‘logo design’, ‘brand refresh’ or ‘presentation template’ people usually ask for.

“What about all the other touchpoints a business has with prospects and clients?” I asked. “How could you help clients create materials that would enhance those?”

And that got me thinking about 'touchpoints'.

In marketing-speak, ‘touchpoints’ are the points where a prospect or client interacts with your business.

As business owners we tend to place most emphasis on the points relating to attracting prospects in - our business cards, website, flyers, podcasts - but of course there are others that arise as a prospect becomes a client and travels through our business, becoming first a visitor, then maybe a regular, and hopefully, finally an advocate.

In other words, ‘touchpoints’ are those moments where a person you serve interacts with the processes you run to Share and Keep the promises you make to them.

Which means that each ‘touchpoint’ is an opportunity to make your Promise of Value a felt reality for that person.

An opportunity to deliver value, or reinforce value you’ve already delivered.

An opportunity to reassure that person that enrolling with you was absolutely the right decision (even if they arrived at that touchpoint disappointed in you).

An opportunity to prompt them into reflecting on the value you’ve delivered and give you feedback, maybe even to tell their friends.

All of which got me thinking even harder.

Whenever I exhort you to ‘think about your processes’ so you can delegate them to your team and take time out from your business, your immediate reaction is probably something like this:

“How boring. I know I need to do that, but I’ve got clients to look after first. I’ll come back to that later.”

What if I re-framed the job as ‘think about how to repeatedly delight the people you serve, whenever and wherever they interact with your business.’?

What if this wasn’t about ‘writing a manual’ but about designing and sharing how you make sure every touchpoint embodies your Promise of Value?

What if it’s actually about how you design the stuff that happens between touchpoints to be as efficient as possible, so as to minimise the cost to you and the client?

What if it’s actually about how you make sure that every single person involved in your business knows exactly where, when and how to delight prospects and clients as well as you can?

What if ‘think about your processes’ is really ‘think about the people you serve and how to serve them better every time’?

What if 'think about your processes' is really 'think about your marketing'?

Of course I had to put this into a process diagram (that's how my mind works):

The route someone you serve takes through your business

Along with 4 questions to ask yourself:

Where are the existing ‘touchpoints’ in this process for your business? Map them onto your version of this process (you may need to break bubbles down further - e.g. in ‘Deliver Value’).
Where could you add ‘touchpoints’ to this process for your business, without annoying the people you serve?
How could you make your Promise of Value tangible at each touchpoint? How could you make it a felt reality for each person at that point?
How could you minimise the time spent between touchpoints without breaking your Promise of Value?

I challenge you to answer these questions without thinking about your processes.

Now, what’s your reaction? Does this feel less boring? Does it feel more worth doing? More urgent? Where do you need to start?

Tell me.

I’d love to know.

I can help of course. This is what I do.

That’s it.

Not much of a how-to this time, but hopefully food for thought.

Thanks for reading!

The Disappearing Boss

Enabling customer‑focused small‑business owners to gently dis-embed themselves from their business, one holiday at a time, so they can turn their successful companies into self‑managing promise systems —no silos, no supervisors—where people can run end‑to‑end processes with real‑time feedback to keep customer value flowing, and anyone can take a break without breaking the business.