5 SOP Examples Every Product Business MUST Create

When you're first getting started systemizing your business and documenting your processes, the biggest question is where do I start? Now, There are certain SOPs or standard operating procedures that are helpful for any business. But when you're looking to get started, oftentimes it helps to look at industry specific or business model specific areas and systemize those first. So today we're going to be focusing in on product businesses. So people who design something once and sell it many times. What SOPs should you start with? If you're first getting started with, you know, writing down what it is that you do and what it is that you know how to do, we're going to go through five examples today. But please do stay till the end because at the end I'm going to give you a bonus tip which I think will be so, so helpful to the product businesses out there. Each One of these SOPs is going to focus on an area of the business that is repetitive, that's important, and something that you potentially want to get off your plate earlier on. Because if you are a one person business, creating SOPs is nice, but they really become worth their weight in gold once you have other people who are help you out. For this first example, it is all about how to actually take inventory of what you have. This may include surveying your warehouse. This may include putting information into your accounting software. Whatever you're using to manage your inventory, you want to write down a simple process defining how anyone could check the stock and make sure it's up to date so you know, eventually you don't have to. The second SOP that I think every product business needs to get down is how to deliver what it is you sell. This could get into how you pack up the boxes that you then send out to ship. This could be how you wrap everything up at the market to give somebody who comes up to your stall the thing that they just bought. However, you're actually fulfilling the orders that people make, that is what I want you to write down in this step. With service businesses it tends to be a little bit more loose, but because product tends to be quite standardized, you are always putting things in this box or you're always giving course access in this way. This can be a really good SOP to make sure you have written down because it's in case there's ever an issue or in case you need someone to help you pack up things for shipping, or in case you know the course platform's down and you have to manually give someone access having this written down to know how to give someone access to whatever they bought is going to be a crucial SOP and a good way to resolve a lot of customer support issues. Now, the third SOP I want us to tackle today is not quite as happy. So not all orders are ones that you want to rush out the door. Oftentimes there's issues, and actually the next two SOPs are going to spin, speak to those kind of issues that come up. One of the biggest impediments I see to businesses trying to systemize their business is the fires, right? The unexpected things that happen and no one's prepared for. So the owner or the manager gets called in and everyone's just kind of looking at each other like, I don't know what to do. If we start building SOPs around emergencies, we can ensure that they're not actually emergencies. We have a plan for them. We're not a deer in the headlights. We know exactly what it is we have to do. One of the most common emergencies in a product business that shouldn't really be an emergency is someone needing to cancel an order. So whether that's canceling the one time order of a package or canceling their subscription, you want to make sure you have a clear sop, something with a start stop and clear steps in between. For how anybody on your team, preferably with access to the tools you use, can go in and cancel a customer order and let that customer know that it is resolved. That's the important last step that's often missed. Not just how to technically cancel the order, but how to notify that customer that, that, hey, everything's been canceled, you're good to go. Whether that's automatic or manual, you want to include all of that in your cancellation sop. Now, we started with bad, let's go to worse. I want to go to the next sop, which is all about refunds. Because once again, if we're thinking about emergencies that we want to turn into, well, not emergencies by building SOPs, refunds is a good one to focus on when a refund first happens. I remember when it happened to us, it was, it was scary, it was awful. It was, you know, oh my gosh, what are we going to do now? But after it happens once, you, you know it's going to happen again. And refunds are just the name of the game in any product business. It's going to happen, and often it's not even your fault. It's because someone overbought or didn't understand something or whatever else might be outside of your control. So to ensure that processing refund is never viewed as some kind of crazy thing that happens, we want to build an SOP for that. Where you want to start this process is when somebody requests a refund, being clear as to what channel that should be requested through, then how you actually process the refund. And just like cancellations, how, how to let the customer know that the refund is processed. Just like the cancellation process, this can be done manually or automagically. There's probably gonna be some manual steps involved, but you wanna make sure that process is written down and preferably make use of templates and scripts in this workflow. You don't wanna have to write a refund email from scratch every time. It's demoralizing and time consuming. Instead, build a template, have clear information linked into it, and make that template better every single time. Now, the fifth SOP is kind of a basic one, but it's one that's often overlooked in product businesses. And one actually found was something that we had failed to document for a long time. So this is about how to tell if someone's a customer. This is particularly helpful in product businesses that have repeat customers, which would be a lot of manufacturing. Anything where you have larger relationships that are formal relationships between yourself and maybe a wholesaler or you have recurring subscriptions. You kind of need to know who's a customer and who's not a customer. Now this could be something that's handled by your CRM. Maybe you have some fancy integrations that pop up in your inbox. Great. But if you don't have that, I want to make sure you build out this CRM like today. To start this process, you probably want to define where someone would go in your team to figure out who's a customer and then maybe tell them how to search whoever they're talking to to find out if that person's on that list. It doesn't have to be a complex sop, but just writing down where your customer database is and how to cross reference it. So that way if someone calls you up on the phone, you can easily check who you're talking to. That is a very important process that is absolutely essential for product businesses with repeat or recurring business. Now of course I promised you guys a bonus tip today, so bonus tip number six for product businesses and really all businesses, but especially helpful for product is to document your automations. Now if I want to turn this into an sop, I could say write an SOP about how to document your automations. Really I just mean build a documentation library of all of the automations that you use in your business. It is amazing with product businesses, the volume that you're dealing with. It's so important to leverage automation so that you're not manually sending a refund email manually, or a cancellation email manually, or a billing reminder email manually. But if you're going to set up those automations, back to my main point, write them down. Write down how they work, how you edit them, who set them up. You want to create a whole database of information around every automatic thing that you have happening in your business. Because even though product businesses can automate way more than service businesses, they also have to do a lot more troubleshooting on automations. So you really want to set yourself up for success here and have clear documentation for every automation in your business. If you want to learn more about that last automation documentation bit, I have a video up here or here where it talks all about building an automation database inside ClickUp. That way your robots and your humans can work together well and not cause each other so stress. Now, of course, if you already know these five SOPs, you already have these down and you're ready to look. Where do I go next? What else do I document? How do I know all the processes I have in my business so I know what to work on next? We actually have a free webinar for you in the description of this video called the Blueprint. The webinar is all about how to define what your business actually does, how to identify what to systemize first, and ultimately how to build all that in ClickUp. So if you want to dig deeper into this topic, check out that description below. Especially you are ClickUp user. So I think that's it for this video. Thank you guys so much for watching and until next time, enjoy the process.