Seven Constraints to Business Growth

Guest post by, Mike Shook, Managing Partner, Accelerence

Every leader of an emerging business knows that there are fundamentals that must be mastered to foster business growth and success. A quality solution offering.  Excellent customer service. Focused sales and marketing. Money! 

The path to business growth can be smoothed if you focus on the constraints that must be overcome. The challenge is to know where to look for the constraints. Over many years of leading companies, we have worked hard to understand the most common business constraints and have distilled them into seven primary categories. See if you can spot improvement opportunities in your own business by using the following criteria and set of optics.

Know Thy Customer
It is crucial to develop a deep intimacy of how your target customer creates value (B2B) in their job/function/process and what the major improvement opportunities are for them to maximize performance.   This provides the foundation for creating solutions that solve meaningful problems that can be economically and operationally justified. Too many companies create a product looking for a solution. Knowledge of the size and importance of the problem you are solving, customer buying behaviors and barriers to buying are crucial to consummating sales.

Knowing Thy Competition
A high quality, unbiased and formal assessment of the competitive landscape is critical. In assessing your competition, don’t stop with solutions that are the most similar to yours. Make sure you understand all competition for the budget dollars you seek.

Developing Strong, Actionable Segments
A true understanding of market size and the segments that exist within it represent a must starting point. Discovering and defining the characteristics that define each segment provides the basis for targeting of product features, target marketing methods, and sales positioning.

Articulating a Meaningful, Defensible Value Proposition
A strong value proposition requires the previous tasks of customer, competition, and markets to be understood. The value proposition must serve as the blue print for all marketing, sales and product development activity.

Committing to Sales as a Differentiator
We believe anemic attention to the sales process represents a very common thread in tracing business failure. The cornerstone for transforming an interesting company into a great company is that management teams understand that sales and marketing excellence must be a component of their corporate intellectual property.

Building Team  Passion and Commitment
Simply put, inspired teams created inspired results.  Commitment to a vision, regular communication, and good understanding of team strengths and shortcomings enable teams to break through the problems and achieve inspiring results.

Aligning Everything, Establishing a Drumbeat

Getting the right people in the right seats on the bus is business critical. The next priority is to get everyone rowing in the same direction. History has proven that great ideas without great alignment and execution result in wasted energy and poor results.

An Accelerence seminar will be presented October 16^th, 2013 to discuss “Strategies to Break Free of Business Growth Constraints”. For more information or to register: See www.accelerence.net/workshop