Develop and drive profitable growth strategies.
FOCUS ON YOUR BEST CUSTOMERS
Do you know who your most important customers are? Do you know which ones are the most profitable? Or do you try to please all customers equally -- which is a costly endeavor for any business.
Experts know that it is much easier to retain and grow existing customers than to acquire new customers. Is competition attacking your customers to grab market share in this economy? How are you reacting? Do you know how best businesses retain customers?
RATIONALIZE MARKETING INVESTMENTS, CAREFULLY
You can cut costs significantly by rationalizing your brand or product portfolio. When was the last time you did it, perhaps never? In addition to cost-cuts, such pruning will clarify your brand image and value proposition to customers. Downturns are perfect times to do this. But such work requires cross-functional cooperation, across marketing, sales, engineering, manufacturing, and purchasing. Who is doing that on your team?
To conserve profits, did you cut innovation investments? Is that a sound decision? Which programs got the axe and why? Do you have a toll-gate process to systematically generate ideas, select & nurture the good ones, and kill the bad ones? Do you know how best companies do it?
MEASURE RESULTS. ALIGN INVESTMENTS WITH STRATEGY
What is your way to compete? Do you have better insights about future than competition? Or do you execute better than them as a fast-follower? Or are you more flexible than them? Does your team understand this and does it compete accordingly?
What is your ROI on innovation? How much price premium did you achieve because of your new products? How much market share did you gain? Are you using innovation to pull ahead of competition? Do your people invest in new products to keep up with competition -- do they know that me-too innovations cannot help you win?
What do new tools such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter mean for your business? Could the tools facilitate creation of new community brands that replace your existing brands? How would you leverage the tools, if at all?
What is your crisp value proposition and brand promise to customers? Can your customers articulate it? Can your employees? Do all your customer touch-points reinforce your value proposition and brand image? Do all your functions behave accordingly? Or are you a premium-branded company that selects its vendors on the sourcing side based on lowest quoted price?
Who are your best channels/partners? Why? How well are you managing them? Are you motivating them well enough? When was the last time your objectively reviewed their performance, based on data? When was the last time you took actions to realign your channels/patnerships? Who visits them and how often?
How much do you invest in organic growth? How about acquisitions? How does that compare against the best growing companies?
How are you attracting and exciting the best sales and marketing talent? How do you train them? How do you motivate them?
CHAPEL HILL ADVISORS GROUP, LLC
Chapel Hill, NC 27517
chagroup@chagroup.net