Gain Clarity In Your Business To Drive Revenue Growth – Part 3

In Part 1 of this series, we talked about the importance of gaining clarity on your vision, mission and guiding principles and aligning your branding to showcase them. In Part 2 of this series, we discussed how your community involvement, social media presence, and overall reputation affect how your business is seen in your community.

Today, I would like to discuss the third group which affects your business’s image – your products & services, employees, customers and vendors.

Products & Services

This one is pretty simple – your products and services define what your company has to offer. There are a few things to keep in mind when analyzing your products and services:

• Businesses add products and services to try and reach additional customers or gain more sales from current customers. Make sure that the additions coordinate well with your current offerings. For example, if you offer house cleaning services, you could add pressure washing as a new service since it is related to home cleaning or expand into commercial cleaning for office buildings. Adding landscaping services for example, while still related to the home, might be too far from your core offerings and confuse your customers since they know you as a cleaning company.
• Quality and consistency are key. Whether you resell other products, manufacture or design your own, or provide services, you must have high quality and perform consistently. You want to be known for going above and beyond expectations, not barely meeting them, or worse, disappointing your customer.
• Don’t take on more than you can handle. Be careful when launching new products and services – don’t rush the launch. Make sure you have fully examined any quality issues and made adjustments so that roll out goes as smoothly as possible. Make sure you have enough people on staff to handle the additional business.

Employees

Your employees are the backbone of your company! Ask yourself these questions:

• Do your employees know your vision, mission and guiding principles? Are they on board with the culture of your company?
• What key positions are needed to maintain stability and prepare for growth? Do you have the right people in place in those positions?
• Do your employees have adequate training and access to the proper tools so they can succeed and grow your business?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, what can do you to make it a yes? All of these areas are necessary for your business to provide high quality products and services. Your employees need to know how you expect them to represent your company, be comfortable in their roles and have the proper training for high performance.

• Include your vision, mission and guiding principles in your employee handbook. Post them throughout your company in high visibility areas. Talk about them in company meetings and encourage employees to share how they are working towards them.
• Create a current and future organization chart showing the positions needed in the company – not people’s names. Focus on the functions first to see what you have and what you need. Define the skills and training necessary for each of those positions. From there, you can look at your current employees to determine if they are in the correct positions, can be trained for new positions, or if you need to hire someone new.
• Create training materials and an employee development program. You can work with a third party vendor to help you with this, but it doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming. You are training your employees to help your company succeed and showing them that you see their contributions as valuable. This increases employee engagement, reduces turnover and has a direct correlation with performance.

Customers & Vendors

The customers and vendors you work with have their own reputations – good or bad. Depending on your business, it is possible that their reputations can affect yours.

If you are a supplier to a company that ends up in the news because of some wrongdoing – paying kickbacks, for example – it is fairly easy for someone in the media to find out you are a supplier and link you to the story. Even if you have done nothing wrong, you could be associated with it anyway and have to prove your innocence. Media coverage can be beneficial – if your customer highlights your support of one of their charity events, for example, people reading the article will see you in a positive light.

The vendors you work with also impact your business. If they provide inconsistent quality or service, it reflects on you and vice versa. For example, if you choose the cheapest Internet provider and service drops or have software that always needs to be updated to fix bugs, your service to your customers will not be the best. If you buy components for your products and quality is not consistent, your customers will not be happy. Of course, if you have software that runs your business efficiently or vendors with high quality components, this definitely works in your favor.

Check out your customers and vendors before agreeing to do business. The ability to make a sale or save some money on the front end is not always the best choice. How much your customer’s or vendor’s reputations and performance affect you really depends on your business model.

Now that we have explored the internal and external workings of your business thoroughly, it is time to move on to the fun stuff – getting to know your customers! In Part 4, we will look at your target market, put together customer avatars and look at gaining feedback from your current customers to see how you are doing.

Ready to take action and increase your revenue growth?

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