ISO QMS Helping Us “Walk the Walk”

Today is a big day here at Bizmanualz.  Colin Gray from Platinum Registration is conducting our first-ever ISO 9001 certification audit. (Yes, we are going for our ISO certification.) Over the past couple of years, we’ve been incorporating the ISO process model into the way we do business.

Colin Gray (left), Platinum Registration auditor, reviews visual management board with Bizmanualz managing director Chris Anderson (right).

There are many posts and articles on our site about ISO 9001, so I don’t need to explain it here. In this post, I’ll offer my perspective as a non-ISO sales and marketing guy on the importance of ISO 9001 to sales, marketing, growth, and the health of our organization.

ISO 9001 gives us the common language, measurement, and follow-through tools we need to achieve our goals for ourselves and our clients. ISO helps us do what we say we will do and achieve what we want to achieve. Simply put, ISO 9001 helps us walk the walk.

If you sell services for a living (like I do), you probably know where I’m going with this. Every time you meet with a prospect or client, you put your reputation on the line. Doing your job requires that clients trust you enough to share their problems with you. Keeping that trust depends on your and your organization’s consistent performance, keeping promises made to each and every client. And that’s what ISO 9001 helps us do — it helps us keep the promises that we make.  And that is “performance by design, not by accident,” as Colin said during our opening audit meeting.

ISO Helps Us Define and Deliver Customer Solutions Reliably, Predictably

Assessing client needs, defining solutions, and developing plans to meet the needs is what I do as a sales executive. Statements of work (SOWs) I write are promises that we are built to keep because we are built using ISO. While all successful sales people grasp the importance of uncovering customer’s needs, ISO has helped us dig deeper to uncover multifaceted and sometimes conflicting needs. ISO has helped us understand risks to performance and to client’s satisfaction with our work. ISO has helped us dig deeper. ISO has helped us verify that we are meeting customer needs. ISO has helped us improve continuously. ISO has helped me become a better sales executive. We’re writing an article this month about how we used ISO-inspired planning to select and pursue sales targets for a client, part of our sales and marketing services for them.

ISO Helps Us Communicate More Effectively

Applying the Plan-Do-Check-Act, or PDCA, model — the basis of ISO 9001 — to our marketing process has helped make our marketing results predictable. “Planning” when preparing product descriptions, case studies, and other communications means listening to customers. “Checking” means measuring customer reaction and behavior on our web sites, and asking them directly what they are getting from our marketing stories. “Acting” means improving our stories based on what customers tell us. In essence, ISO reinforces a culture of listening to customers. We are working on an article this month that compares and contrasts one client who demonstrates the value of listening, and one that simply tells their story no matter what their customers are telling them.

ISO helps us take concrete steps every day to attain our goals and aspirations for ourselves and our clients.  Our articles this month will show how ISO thinking and tools has helped me make and keep promises in Sales, and communicate more effectively in Marketing. Check back soon. If you haven’t signed up to receive our articles, do it now — you won’t want to miss out!

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Bizmanualz has been at the forefront of deploying business best practices since 1995 delivering Policies, Procedures and Forms; quality systems implementation; and strategic business process improvement to help business owners achieve the growth and expansion they envision.

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Originally published in 2009 by Bizmanualz, Inc. under the title ISO QMS Helping Us “Walk the Walk”. All rights reserved. Reproduction permitted with attribution only. www.bizmanualz.com