Plan More Often?

Executed properly, a quarterly or monthly planning process will actually consume less overall time, resources and effort than planning once a year. Over time you will incorporate a greater degree of strategic thinking in the ongoing management of your business, and discover some other great benefits:

• The expectation of brief, regular planning helps keep planning work grounded, practical and honest. Vague, motherhood statements are virtually eliminated after a couple of quarters of strategic review.
• Leaders and employees become better strategic thinkers with ongoing exposure to planning.
• The quality of your plan and its usefulness as a management tool dramatically improves after a few quarters.
• Detailed budgets, and action plans need only be articulated one or two quarters in advance, and linked to your longer term strategies. Why waste valuable time creating details for a world you know is going to look very different 12 to 24 months out?

Most importantly, the very practice of business planning becomes more familiar, and less of a chore. And of course, the process is more powerful when your frequent planning is tightly linked with regular reviews of results.

Get Closer to Your Customers

The increasing complexity and breakneck pace of business has had the effect of pushing executives, managers and employees farther away from the customers that pay the bills. Ask yourself honestly: how many days can go by without ever thinking about your customers? We can balance the need to effectively manage our operations, without losing sight of our customers. Customers can’t be top-of-mind all the time, but there are actions you can take to keep your customers at the forefront.

Turn Your Employees Into Customers Remove any obstacles that prevent employees from buying your products or services. Then go farther and take real steps to encourage your employees to become customers. For employees at all levels of your organization, you can’t get any closer to your customers than becoming one.

Put Your Executives in the Trenches Implement a mandatory program for all senior executives to be exposed to customers, and their issues, several times a year. Depending on your business, executives can spend half a day listening in to real live customers at your call centre, working the cash register, or pairing up with a customer relationship manager. The benefits are endless, and executives will see the business in a new light.

Watch and Learn Objectively observe your customers using your products. This isn’t about surveys and focus groups. This is real observation and investigation to gain an intimate knowledge of what problems customers are trying to solve, or tasks they are trying to accomplish. Begin to understand that, and product development, and segmentation will take on new meaning. These are only a few ideas that might be included in a comprehensive customer intimacy initiative. What would you do to get closer to your customers?

What is Your Value Proposition?

The term value proposition has been around since Michael Lanning coined it in 1984, while working for McKinsey and Co. So why do so few companies know what it is, or truly understand how they add value in the marketplace?

Value proposition is what a company does, that will cause their customers to realize tangible benefits through the use of their product or service. Value proposition is more than just the product you sell; or how you sell, service, or distribute your product. It’s how your company strings all those components together, better than your competitors, to deliver real value to your customers. Value proposition can be both a description of how your company adds value today, and also a concrete statement of your vision for the future.

Without a clearly articulated, well understood, statement of value proposition, it’s impossible for you to describe a compelling vision and strategy for your company, or create effective segmentation, or distribution strategies. And, if you can’t tell your employees how your company adds value for clients, how can employees be expected to add value in everything they do?

Understanding value proposition is not just an exercise for small companies, or new companies. Large, well-established companies have the burden of history, and complex value chains that are more difficult to describe. It’s here that bigger companies struggle, because managers often perceive that anything they are doing now, falls squarely within their value proposition.

Value proposition is much more than an elevator pitch or a slogan, but it is important that you can boil your value proposition down to a concise and compelling statement. It’s often when companies try to articulate their statement of value proposition in a way that others can understand it, that the tough questions begin to surface.