Eight reasons why your business may not be growing
You know you need to grow. You need to innovate. And you need to change.
But how? To what?
What’s blocking your growth?
- Lack of internal trust?
- Missing a robust sales pipeline?
- Unable to sell value?
- A resistant culture?
- Misallocation of resources?
- Missing or outdated strategy?
- Misalignment with a changing market?
- No real innovation or product development plan?
In our experience, we’ve identified eight issues that indicate that your organization may be out of sync:
| 1. Trust issues: | Trust in another means you’re willing to invest and take a risk with them. It is the glue for a team. A lack of trust in an organization is like throwing sand in the gears.
When trust breaks down, collaboration slows, complexity expands, and costs go up. Trust is built upon shared values, shared vision, assumed responsibility and always delivering on your promise. |
| 2. Pipelines issues: | As organizations grow, strong sales talent rises to the top. A dependency upon the personal skills of individuals then creates relief when they can magically fill the pipeline.
Relying on individual heroics to make the sales quota creates crises, undermines morale, and puts customer loyalty at risk. Great organizations nurture disciplined sales processes to create interest, engagement and demand. In this situation, the organization grows with the talents of a strong sales staff but is not held hostage by their personal client relationships. The company and brand have a predictable, sustainable process to fill the pipeline. |
| 3. Value issues: | Perceived customer value of an organization’s products and services is the foundation for pricing, loyalty, referrals and peer-to-peer advocacy. When value is low, lower pricing and commoditization occur. This is the beginning of a destructive cycle that you cannot win – the demand for continually lower prices. Low prices, while they may make a customer happy in the short term, can never be low enough.
When customers don’t recognize a unique value, engagement slows, loyalty disappears, pricing drops, margins fall, and advocacy is non-existent. Great organizations are constantly listening and developing new ways to solve customer frustrations – in effect, delivering value. The value is communicated and reinforced at every point of customer contact. |
| 4. Culture issues: | At first, every organization starts out focused on meeting each individual customer’s needs. As organizations mature, they institutionalize to increase cost efficiency.
As organizations institutionalize, they lose flexibility. Entrepreneurial spirit, innovation and responsiveness are eroded in the interest of creating predictability. With this strengthening of the organizational structure comes resistance to change, aversion to risk, and departmental silos that keep structures fixed and predictable. A culture of self-preservation erodes transparency, cooperation, and creates silos. Great organizations intentionally infuse a strong structure with creativity, breaking down existing barriers, encouraging new business ideas, and investing in emerging leaders. |
| 5. Resource issues: | There is never enough money, enough time and enough talent to take advantage of every opportunity that lies before the CEO. CEOs and COOs are tasked with identifying the best investment of these limited resources to produce the greatest long-term result. Without a roadmap to growth, loud internal voices with limited understanding can influence resource allocation and handicap growth.
Poor allocation of resources creates bottlenecks and uncertainty, limits emerging leaders and saps energy. A great organization continually refines their growth strategy among their team to ensure that the investments they make will result in predictable growth. |
| 6. Strategy issues: | Markets constantly change and with them customer demand, opportunity and predictability. A focused growth strategy and roadmap are essential for deploying resources and tracking progress to goal.
Without a clear strategy, opportunity is overlooked, vision is obscured, and passion to grow is frustrated. A great organization is continually refining their business growth strategy, analyzing market trends and the organization’s performance against short-term and long-term opportunities. |
| 7. Market issues: | As a leader, it is way too easy to see only the trees in front of you and lose the perspective of the forest. Consequently, your organization relies on the vision and understanding of your strategic leadership to point to the path of growth. If you’re out of step with the market, your entire organization can be lost. Disconnects are apparent at the field level, while the organization is focused on internal matters rather than customer opportunity.
Without the voice of the customer, fragmentation grows, innovation is lost, and staff blames others. A great organization continually seeks the voice of the customer to ensure a reality check. They push this voice of the market down through the entire organization to ensure alignment with customers’ needs, to address their frustrations, and to seize emerging opportunities. |
| 8. Innovation issues: | Without innovation, every organization struggles with being commoditized. The heart of innovation is a clear understanding of the voice of the customer – their needs, frustrations and where opportunity lies.
When innovation slows, customers lose interest, differentiation is lost, margins fall, and competitors win. A great organization pushes the voice of the customer down to every nook and cranny within the company. Employees, partners and staff hear, take notice and begin to think differently and creatively, about ways they can better serve the market. Innovation is the result. |
The VALCORT Process is proven to address all these issue quickly, efficiently and effectively, providing a framework for internal trust, customer engagement, pricing to value, innovation and growth.
What’s holding you back? Take the ROI Survey now.