The struggle to cut costs has moved many companies well beyond lean. At times the sharp knife they’ve had to wield has cut a little more meat from the bone than anticipated. Too often the push to cut and then cut some more has focused strategic attention away from customers, and away from a growth agenda. Without a focused growth agenda, revenue streams can begin to run drier than anticipated — or even, than once conceivable.
The Set Of Six: Growth Barriers & Killers
1. Weakened Business Relationships usually created by tangled communications with the customer, as well as by senseless positioning battles between the inside and outside teams that must coordinate and share information well in order for the customer to receive the service and value the organization has promised.
2. Unacceptable Customer Service most often caused by unwieldy, complex, or even non-working technology and process in the hands of undertrained, unmotivated, and internally-focused individuals not fully committed to serving the customer profitably.
3. Longer Selling Cycles and sales team inefficiency from time wasted selling the wrong thing at the wrong time to the wrong people — an outcome made worse by unresponsive and passive information flow that leaves unsatisfied and underserved customers interacting with distracted and overwhelmed salespeople.
4. Hidden & Uncontrolled Profit Leaks worsened by cumbersome inventory levels and inefficient organization-wide activities that take root around wrong, insufficient, or too-late information about what is selling, what is profitable, and who is buying and why.
5. Competitive Disadvantage and Strategic Confusion usually driven by ever-changing strategy that results from an over reliance on "my gut tells me" decision-making, old biases and certainties that just aren’t true anymore, or just plain guesswork about the newest realities of the marketplace.
6. Ongoing Brain and Knowledge Drain in an increasingly tough to recruit environment, driven by factors ranging from poor cultural and strategic communications to aging workers taking their know-how, customer knowledge and business acumen with them as they leave the workplace.
“The Set of Six” Growth Barriers and Growth Killers are all rooted in a lack of clarity around the complex technologies, tools, processes and skills required to implement productive and sustainable growth strategies. Successfully implementing these strategies requires more than just technology or process expertise. It rests on fully understanding the business, its customers, and how the company consistently and profitably goes to market.
Winning requires an understanding of how customer-facing team members work, and how to help those teams work even better. It depends on savvy, disciplined project engineering that can integrate specialized technologies with the complex processes and interwoven relationships that operate both within the business and among its customers and partners.
