A Strategic Checklist for Growing Your Business in the New Year

As we approach the holidays, marketers shift their focus to their plans for the New Year.  Have you made a final review of next year’s marketing plan and budget? Have you started your planning for next year?

Every organization has a different planning process and objectives.  At the end of the day, your marketing plan execution is likely tasked with creating demand for your products, building your brand, and driving earnings and new business growth.  A well-thought out plan will help you achieve these results.  To assist in your year-end planning preparation, I am sharing a checklist of key strategic planning steps that can help align and focus your team on achieving your strategic goals.  While you may have already completed all or most of these steps, this list may prompt an opportunity to enhance your current planning and preparation.

Understand your market and your competitive position in the market

_____ Define and assess your market, your competitors and competitive position.  Many companies use a SWOT analysis for this step.  Another method is to use market data to prepare an assessment of recent market performance versus competitors and market share trends among your target customers.

_____ Define your primary and secondary target customer.  Know why they do and do not buy from you.  You cannot effectively plan if you do not understand your customers.  If you do not know your target customers and their motivators, an earlier priority in 2015 should be to conduct research on who they are, what they value, and why they choose you or your competitor’s products or services.

Ensure you are focused on the right goals

____ Define what success looks like in the new year.  It is likely that different members of your team have different objectives and a different idea of what a successful new year should look like.  Hold a discussion with your leadership team to define what success should look like for your organization by the end of next year.

_____ Define, align on and approve your SMART goals.  The term SMART for goal setting has been used for many years.  SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely.  It is often good to also consider goals that are challenging and specifically grow your business.  Build on the previously step to “define success” and turn your definition into your SMART goals. When setting goals, make both earnings and new business growth top priorities – you cannot grow your business if your only focus for next year is on cost reduction.

Along with setting your goals with your leadership team, take time to agree on the success metrics and measurement system you will use to track progress to your goals.

Ensure your team is truly aligned to your goals – and with each other

____ Stop to make sure your leadership team is truly aligned to these goals.  If your leaders are not fully aligned on a single vision of success and the same goals for the next year, the odds are they will spend more time on their own priorities than working to achieve the organization’s goals. 

Specifically discuss on how you will respond to risk in growth initiatives.  New growth initiatives will seldom succeed if all are not aligned on risk tolerance and how your team will respond to failure.  Take time to talk to make sure everyone is really on board – resolve concerns if they are not.

Ensure you are working on the right initiatives

____ Identify the strategies that will likely be most effective to achieve your goals.

Select your top 3 strategic initiatives.  These initiatives should tie to the achievement of a company strategic goal.  Focus your strategies on leveraging the purchase drivers of your customers.  Develop strategies for your goals that drive both existing business and new business growth.  Abandon strategies that have not been productive in prior years.

Identify what you will NOT do next year.  If an initiative does not sell more, cut costs and/or tie to a strategic goal, you are likely wasting your time putting it on your to-do list.  This could be the year to stop working on legacy initiatives.  Don’t repeat an initiative just because it is something you have always done.

Ensure you have the right resources to win – and invest them in the right place

_____ Ensure you have enough of the right people and funding to do the job.  Every team wants more resources.  Every team believes they could be more effective with more people and funding.  Realistically assess your resources.  Plan your year to succeed with the resources you have vs. creating a plan that will overtax your team all year.  Do fewer things better.

_____ Put the right people in the right jobs.  If you want to achieve new results, sometimes that means changing who is leading key initiatives.  It can be especially important to put the right team leaders in place leading new growth initiatives.  Align the skills, experience and relationships with the jobs to be done, and then empower your team to lead and achieve.

_____ When possible, budget to task and not to a number.  Identify what your strategic initiatives will cost in order to succeed.  If budget cuts are needed, trim entire initiatives rather than trimming quality and effectiveness of each to keep everything on the project list.

_____ Build your budget using three categories:  strategic initiatives, New venture initiatives, tactical initiatives.

Strategic initiatives are top priority initiatives that grow your existing business and enable you to achieve your strategic goals.  This is a strategic investment in the near-term health, growth and competitiveness of your organization.  These investments should not be cut except in extreme circumstances.

New venture initiatives are investments in entering new markets, launching new products or testing new marketing approaches. These are the strategic initiatives that drive long-term growth of your organization.  It is important to always include funding for testing and development in this area to promote long-term growth opportunities.  These should not be cut if possible, but could be delayed in timing if there is a strong need to reduce spending.

Tactical initiatives are programs or events that have only short term volume impact.  Every budget likely includes some of these.  Often, these can be cut or reduced in cost and not have a material impact in achieving your organization’s goals. This should be the first place to cut costs if spending must be reduced when budgeting or during a mid-year spending cut.

If you allocate your budget across these three categories, you are more likely to focus your resources on the most strategic programs and initiatives and limit investment in areas that have little impact.

_____ Develop budget milestone review process for continued funding of new venture initiatives.  Make success criteria and timing for milestones are realistic to support new business growth.  Review progress at key milestones and do not add significant new investment if key success criteria cannot be met.

Hopefully, your organization is already implementing most of these planning steps.  If not, consider adding new steps to your process.  If needed, an outside advisor can help you boost the effectiveness and impact of your planning process.  With thoughtful planning and great execution, you will have a very prosperous new year.

This blog was originally posted by GrowthSpring Group on the MENG Blog website.

David Lund is the founder and president of GrowthSpring Group – a unique a strategic growth and marketing innovation firm that works with clients to accelerate success by helping them identify and launch new market growth initiatives. www.GrowthSpringGroup.com

Is your value proposition selling or sinking your business?

Six questions to help you assess if your value proposition and marketing plan need a tune-up.

When you introduce yourself and start talking about your business, do people truly want to hear more?  When your company advertises its products, do you quickly get more sales?  Does telling your story prompt consumers to try your product?  Can your customers easily explain to friends why your product or service is better than your competitors’?  If you answer “no” to any of these questions, it is likely time to revisit your value proposition – or at least how your are communicating it in the market.  It can be hard to grow your business if your target customers do not fully understand your value.

If the concept of a “value proposition” is new to you, I discussed this important tool in my last blog.  I discussed the importance of focusing your value proposition on the benefit you deliver to your customers rather than just talking about your product.  In this blog, we will look at how to make your value proposition a more effective selling tool.

Many companies have a clear value proposition that they use well to define and drive their marketing communication and customer engagement strategies.   Many other companies are less effective.  How is your value proposition working for you?  Are you as effective as you can be in engaging, selling and building loyalty with your target customers?  The following six questions can help you assess if you need to revisit your value proposition and brand communication.

Is it optimized for your target audience?

If it has been a while since you developed your value proposition, is it possible that either the value you deliver or your target audience has shifted?  Start with your definition of your target customer.  Is it clearly defined?  Have you segmented your market? Have you established personas to help you clearly define and communicate your target customer(s) across your organization?  Once you have a clearly defined set of target customers, you can assess whether your current value proposition communicates the most important benefit and decision criteria for that target audience.  If your currently defined value proposition isn’t what compels them to buy from you – and to tell their friends about your product or service – it is time to work on an update.

Does your value proposition engage your customers’ emotions?

Does your value proposition do more to inform or engage your customer?  If your value proposition does not engage an emotional response, it likely can be stronger.  Most product decisions include both rational and emotional components.  The emotional components are not always top of mind for consumers, but they can be powerful drivers.  Few will buy a new car, boat, fishing reel, dress shoe, bottle of bourbon, a meal from a restaurant, or many other items on a purely factual basis.  Even problem-solving purchases such as a drain cleaner, lawn service, spot remover, or toilet plunger can trigger emotions related to doing the best job and/or removing the fear of a poor result.

Doing the right research with your target customers can uncover the conscious and unconscious purchase drivers for their purchase decision.  If your value proposition can connect strong emotional benefits with the strong factual benefits of your product or service, it will be more effective.

Are you translating it to compelling communication?

Some great value propositions get lost on the way to market.  It is important that your finished marketing communication clearly communicates your value proposition – not just create a funny or engaging piece of communication.  In other words, the value proposition should be the core driver of your marketing messages.  If your target customer is not able to restate your value proposition after reading or viewing your communication, you have work to do.  You communication needs to consistently engage customers and reinforce your value proposition to create a growing number of satisfied and loyal customers – and to get these customers to become advocates for your brand.

Ask prospective target customers what is the key message of your communication.  If they do not talk about your value proposition, you are not optimizing your efforts to grow your business.

Are you engaging people in how you tell your story or simply sharing information?

Another way value propositions get lost on the way to market is when they get simplified into just the facts.  Some marketers just list the features of the product expecting that customers will read the list and buy the product. They expect this information alone to allow the product to win in market. 

As fewer brands can afford significant advertising budgets, they rely more heavily on their packaging to sell their product.  Others rely on word of mouth.  For these products and services, developing a simple, easy-to-understand value proposition will do much more than just listing product features on your package.

Tell your story on your package, in social media and other forms of communication.  Tell what makes your product a compelling one to buy – and why customers should buy it from you.  Then make sure your product delivers the value promised, and does so in a way that supports your story.

Are you speaking with one voice in the market?

Too many brands suffer from schizophrenia.  They talk with different messages, tones and character in different channels. If you use different messages or different copywriters across different advertising, PR, social media and other communication channels, your value proposition can become confused or diffused in the market.  To be most effective, you need to have a consistent brand message, look and feel across all channels.  How your message is communicated will vary by channel – so your brand team needs to review each communication channel to ensure that your branding and value proposition is consistently communicated across all consumer touchpoints.

What are your internal roadblocks?

Sometimes, even the most effective companies can get in their own way.  Internal roadblocks or constraints will reduce the effectiveness of a great team.  This can happen through a reorganization that results in a fracturing of a communication team.  It can come from a growing lack of alignment in a senior leadership team over the defined value proposition for the company.  It can come from an agency that believes it knows better than a company’s brand team about what should be communicated.  It can come from a company that does not invest the time to develop strong communication strategies or align its message across media channels.  When a marketing team gets too busy, communication of a clear value proposition can be a casualty.  Don’t let this happen to you.  Keep sight of potential roadblocks and work to remove them before they disrupt your effectiveness.

I am hopeful the above list will be helpful to you.  Remember, having a weakly defined value proposition may not stop you from doing good business in a market, but it will limit you from achieving as much as you could with a strong value proposition.

This blog was originally posted by GrowthSpring Group on the MENG Blend website.

GrowthSpring Group is a unique a strategic growth and marketing innovation firm that works with clients to accelerate success by helping them identify and launch new opportunities to profitably grow sales. www.GrowthSpringGroup.com

Your Value Proposition: Stop talking about you. What’s in it for me?

How well is your value proposition working for you?

The elevator ride challenge

I have been listening to a lot of business pitches recently.  Between working with clients, a startup accelerator and recent networking meetings, I have heard a lot of people introduce themselves and their business. And…it is boring.

Too often we communicate our businesses in terms of our functional capabilities or industry verticals.  We do not introduce our businesses in a way that is engaging, compelling and meaningful to our current and prospective customers.  I talked with a gentleman this past week and asked him to tell me about his business.  He introduced his business as “we do IT”.  It took two minutes of asking pointed questions for me to uncover their unique point of difference in the IT world. He had not been taught how to sell his business in a way that clearly defines the value they offer.

I have been listening to a lot of entrepreneurial business pitches this year.  One of the biggest challenges for an entrepreneur is to simplify his/her business pitch to a single sentence or at least a compelling 30-second elevator pitch.  After three to five minutes, many entrepreneurs still struggle to explain their business concept clearly.  If the value proposition is not clear, the opportunity for to secure investment in a new business is highly diminished.

I recently took one person for a ride in an actual elevator to pitch her concept, and she did fairly well to simply tell what they do while traveling just four floors. Could you do this?  Can you describe your business in an engaging and compelling way to explain the key benefit to your customers in a 20 to 30 second elevator ride?  Can all the members of your leadership team do this?

Identifying your value proposition

Many companies do a nice job of defining a clear value proposition and compelling reasons to believe it.  Having clear reasons to believe (or RTBs) is also important.  The combination of the value proposition and RTBs help a target customer decide if you provide interesting value to them – the What’s In It For Me factor or (WIIFM).

It does take work to identify and clearly define your value proposition.  Many companies struggle with this. It takes practice and training to do this well.  Here are a couple thoughts to assist you in thinking through how to better define your value proposition.  You and your team may be great at this, but it is surprising how many companies still need work in this area.

Let’s start with what you are not.  If you can identify the products and services you do not provide, you will avoid the temptation of defining your scope and value proposition too broadly.  You may be in IT, but you do not work on hardware.  By defining yourself as not a hardware company, it makes it quicker to define your strengths in the realm of software and/or application development.

What is the one product or service benefit you provide that your customers value from you over your competitors? Articulate what you uniquely offer. Do you make fishing lures or fishing lures that are highly effective because of they way they light up underwater?  Do you run an Italian restaurant or do you run the Italian restaurant with unique family recipes from Northern Italy where all the servers make you feel like family?  Do you sell coffee or do you sell coffee from organic coffee growers whom you work with to help develop sustainable practices in their community and farms?  Do you create websites or do you create websites that effectively engage and sell target customers through an ecommerce platform that is highly customizable?

Make sure your value proposition is relevant and meaningful to your target customers.  Is your value proposition both valuable and differentiated from your competition?  How many restaurants do you know that sell chicken sandwiches?  How many of them have a clearly differentiated chicken sandwich?  What makes it different? 

If you are willing to drive farther to buy something, there is a clearly differentiated value proposition that has engaged you.

Does your communication clearly communicate your value proposition such that a customer would drive further or pay more to get your product or service vs. your competition?  If your answer is no, you have work to do.

If you can afford research, conduct research with your current and target customers to help you understand what they value.  This will help you define and communicate a compelling value proposition.

Why should we believe you?

Once you have a value proposition, you need to support it.  What are your RTBs?

I was recently in the Florida Keys.  Almost every restaurant we saw has an “award winning” key lime pie.  That’s a lot of awards.  Many companies claim to be the best at what they do.  What the winning companies do is define how they uniquely provide a specialized product and service.  They provide clear reasons to believe why they are a better choice for this solution than others.  The restaurant that displays the awards and offers a money-back guarantee if you do not love their pie will stand above those who just claim to be award winning.

Is your company environmentally friendly because you say so (and then buy carbon offsets in exchange for how you conduct day-to-day business)? Or, do you work in a LEED certified building with a net zero use of energy and recycle over 90% of all waste? Which of these two sound more environmentally friendly to you?

Providing clear, powerful and relevant reasons to believe will support your value proposition and make your story authentic and differentiating. 

Write your story

You need to write your own story.  Combine your value proposition and reasons to believe into a 20-30 second story.  Create your own authentic differentiating story as to why customers should do business with you – not why you are great, but why you offer a unique, valuable benefit to them.  Then explain why they should believe that benefit.

When you have this right, it should become the foundation for your communication brief for your brand communication.  Your leadership team should all be able to tell your story.  And, your sales team should also be trained in how to sell with this story. 

This short story about your value proposition is the core of what will differentiate you in the market.  It should not change year to year.  If you consider changing your go-to-market strategy in a way that will change your value proposition, do your homework first.  Make sure your proposed change offers a potential reward that is worth risking and/or disrupting your customer loyalty and business.

For now, make sure your current story is the strongest story you can tell to differentiate and build your business.  Don’t be boring!

This blog was originally posted by GrowthSpring Group on the MENG Blend website 

GrowthSpring Group is a unique a strategic growth and marketing innovation firm that works with clients to accelerate success by helping them identify and launch new opportunities to profitably grow sales. www.GrowthSpringGroup.com