Preneur Marketing Blog – Pete Williams | Author Entrepreneur

When we think of triage we tend to think about medical personnel, perhaps with many injured patients on a battlefield, having to make decisions about whom to treat first.

But triage is actually found in all walks of life. Including business.

The word “triage” comes from the French word “trier” which means to separate or select. So, in business terms, triage is about allocating limited resources in the best possible way.

If you’re a multibillion-dollar company with endless resources that can be thrown at every problem, then triage may not be necessary, but for everyone else with finite money, staff and time, business triage is something we have to do, almost on a daily basis.

We have to decide what to spend our time on, what jobs to give our employees, and where to spend our marketing budget, equipment budget, and so on.

But here’s the thing…

If the concept of business triage is something you’ve not really thought about before, then you have a problem. If you’re performing business triage on a regular basis without being fully conscious of exactly what it is you’re doing, then you’re more likely to make emotional, rather than logical decisions.

And as we’ve discussed before, emotional decisions can be a problem.

Medical personnel are trained to assess their patients so they can make accurate decisions about whom to treat first based on logic, rather than emotion. They can’t decide to treat John first because he’s a buddy, and they can’t decide to treat Mary first because they really enjoy removing bullets from an open wound.

They have to make logical decisions that give them the best chance of achieving the best possible outcome.

Try looking up “triage” on Wikipedia and you’ll discover that different countries, all over the world, have their own specific triage systems in which medical personnel are trained to help them make the right choices.

Shouldn’t your business have a triage system as well?

When work starts piling up and multiple problems occur simultaneously, wouldn’t it be smart to have a set of rules that allow you to dispassionately decide what to focus on first?

Let’s have a look at a couple of examples in which business triage can help you make smart decisions.

 1. Falling Profits

Your sales forecast for the year is turning out to be wildly optimistic.

Something has to be done.

You boldly decide to drop $10,000 on a national radio advertisement campaign.

A trickle of new customers arrives as a result, but not enough to cover the marketing spend, and you’re now in a worse position than when you started.

The mistake you made was assuming that the problem was a lack of new leads, when this is only one part of the sales funnel.  What about website bounce rates? Sales page conversion rates? After-sales care? Refund rates?

Immediately assuming the problem is a lack of leads, in medical triage terms, is akin to treating the first patient you find without examining all of the other patients to see if there are conditions that require more urgent treatment.

If you’d analysed every aspect of your sales process, you’d have discovered that 70% of your visitors were abandoning the sales process when they arrived at the checkout page, indicating that there’s something seriously wrong with the structure or technology on that page.

It’s all too easy to panic and make a knee-jerk decision, when what you should be doing is stepping back and viewing the whole picture before making a decision.

You still have a decision to make, usually along the lines of, “do I tackle the biggest problem first or the problem that’s easiest to fix?”

But in this case, a 70% drop-out rate on your checkout page is easily recognised as the biggest problem and, as it turns out, it’s just a browser compatibility snafu that is quickly fixed.

The 70% drop-out rate drops to just 5%, which means your sales will more than triple.

And the fix cost you a heck of a lot less than $10,000.

Of course, this business triage process is impossible if you’re not measuring every aspect of your business. You can track almost everything with Google Analytics, and it’s free to use.

So, no excuses.

2. Business Focus

You’ve outlined seven different strategies for improving the profitability of your business. But which one do you focus on first?

You figure out which strategy is going to have the greatest impact on your business and plough all your energies into it.

It’s a big job though. Six months later, and the project still isn’t complete. The business is running low on funds and you begin to fear that your business may fold before you can reap the fruits of your labour.

The mistake you made was assuming that the most powerful – and most complex – strategy was the best place to start, when three of the other strategies you’d considered could have been knocked out in less than a month, busy adding to your bottom line while you turned your attention to the larger project.

In medical triage terms, that’s like immediately treating the sickest patient that requires nine hours of complex surgery, while three other patients die from something you could have fixed in five minutes.

The problem stems from focusing on the outcome, and not giving consideration to the work required to get there.

When moving your business forward it’s often smarter to begin with the low-hanging fruit, achieving some quick success, before moving on to more long-term projects.

Triage is used in all branches of medicine, but triage on the battlefield is perhaps the most unusual. At times the medic will ignore the most seriously injured sickest patient, reasoning that it’s unlikely that any treatment will be effective. Far better to spend time on patients who are critically ill but, if treated, have a good chance of survival.

I’d hate to have to make decisions of that kind, but doesn’t it emphasise the importance of not immediately responding to what’s in front of you, and using your training to make smart choices.

What both of the above examples have in common is that they involve stopping everything, standing back, and viewing the whole picture.

Not some of the picture. Not some of the bits you like, while ignoring the tricky stuff.

You must be calm and collected, assess the issues, assess what needs to be done, and finally consider the context (link to article “How do People See Your Business – Context is Everything”).