Instituting a new business process requires change – which is temporarily disruptive, scares some while making others uncomfortable. Because most business processes directly or indirectly influences your sales efforts, it also impacts the company’s future revenue growth potential. How well your company adapts to and change these internal processes as your industry or target market shift is critical to your company’s ability to compete, and in some cases, survive.
Shake Things Up
As Peter Drucker once said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” For a strategy to succeed, it must be adopted into a culture and embraced viscerally to become part of the day to day practices. Management needs to underline their expectations of staff based on the strategic direction, so the goals it supports become a mindset of how to handle daily activities. In other words, your staff needs to keep their “eyes on the prize” representing your strategic goals. Your entire team has to all pull in the same direction at the same time to achieve the changes you need to win. There are ways to minimize the growing pains to make it easier for your staff to get on board. Here is a partial list to accelerate the process and to keep everyone on the same page.
- Establish an accessible, simple structure to gather and respond quickly to feedback. Doing so acknowledges that you value the input.
- Look for and encourage the identification of gaps or potential pitfalls in the new processes then fix what isn’t working or benefiting the company or your customers.
- Make your progress known and communicate favorable outcomes from the executed changes. This way, your new business strategy gains the support neededto expand and entrench it as modem operandi.
- Exploit new technologies to design products and enhance operations – especially those that increase efficiencies and streamline the process for a more positive experience.
- Don’t hesitate to cannibalize existing products that aren’t performing to support your new goals because they consume time, moneyand resources at a minimum return on investment – if any at all. (This includes “sacred cows” and other legacies that prove to be obstacles in achieving the established goals and objectives.
- Consistently assess and reassess existing business processes. Do system checks to ensure that the tools, steps and staff that support your internal business processes are current, applicable and effective.
- Be alert for signs of failure, missed milestones, and patterns or trends of “isolated cases” that indicate fatal flaws. (Think about CocaCola’s new product launch strategy to which they needed to revert back to their original formula and strategy.)
You are in the business to win and create the best experience for your customers. By developing your business strategy from the outside-in, having a willingness to disrupt your existing business process and model, pre-totyping to develop the best solutions and communicating clearly with all stakeholders throughout the process, you give your company the advantage it needs to make the competition irrelevant.