The main challenge of every director or manager, responsible for a business or a business line, is to guarantee sustained and sustainable growth. The great challenge is to achieve this, understanding that there are no magic formulas but more than one route to follow. We must always remember that the client must be the center of our profitable growth strategy, and that for this to be not just a cliché, there must be concrete actions that demonstrate it.
The art of innovation
Innovating, materializing new ideas or projects, and doing it successfully, depends on multiple factors. The most important are a unique, well-differentiated proposal, a shared business vision, a clear strategy, a dynamic marketing of the commercial activity, motivated and committed human talent and having the technology that allows the vision to become reality, so that everything converges in achieving that novel effect. If we can get there before the competition, it will be very costly for our competitors to catch up.
The vision and the strategy must be able to be broken down into clearly defined initiatives and objectives that meet the philosophy called SMART (which lives up to its meaning in English: smart), to achieve that they make a difference. If we review its acronyms, we can refine its attributes: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and On time to be achieved. As one thought says: “Every objective without a date to achieve it is just a dream.”
Powering profitable growth
The available technologies, applied correctly, depend on the alignment to the defined objectives. To innovate it is necessary to make sense of each investment, because it is tied to an expected result, hence if we decompose the goal-objective, profitable growth, we can have clues of what we should invest in.
To ensure the growth of the business, it is necessary to define what type it is (retail, wholesale, B2B, services) and what are the sales channels used (direct sales, e-commerce, tele sales) and, especially, focus on the customer through a good level of service and operational excellence.
Profitability is associated with productivity, that is, the efficient and effective use of resources in the different business processes (purchase, production and employee productivity).
Profitable growth is possible through the combination of integrated information from sales marketing (CRM) and business management or back office (ERP) processes and the subsequent transformation of these data into information to measure whether they are being achieved. the expected objectives and simulate scenarios. In short, it is necessary to have the tools to measure the performance of the business.