It is getting late; do you know where your company’s strategy is? In spite of all your meetings, strategic planning efforts, and company groupthink, are you sure your company has a clear business strategy? If not, your company is squandering its resources on the wrong efforts and missing good opportunities to grow.
But if your strategy is focused, all the efforts within your company are much more likely to be successful. Here are 10 different (but somewhere inter-related) ways to determine if your company’s planning strategy is heading towards the wrong direction.
#10. Your brochure is confusing and easy to ignore. You’re either including too much, making it so complicated for your potential buyers to follow the specifics, or lacking the logical flow of components provided. After delivering it to a prospect, you still seem to stretch it to make them understandable. Your client accuses you of dieseling, much like a four-wheeler that continues to sputter after the key is out of the ignition.
Tips:
- Simply everything. You must understand your end-user requirements. Your brochure should highlight the benefits of your products to the customer.
- What’s your wide customer area? Cover products that are most specific to most of the customers.
#9. Your website isn’t user-centric, and UI/UX causes congestion, resulting in a very few online visitors showing up in the analytics dashboard.
What you’re getting out of this –
Fewer clicks = Fewer Queries
Your friends give you a muddled look when they are asked how they like your new site. The smart ones tell you that their 14 years old loves it.
Tips:
- Are you active on social media? Do leverage these channels to promote your products or evergreen blog posts.
- Build your subscribers’ email list and send them the customized messages every time you’ve got a new offer.
- Blog more frequently. People revisit blogs, and it will also help SEO and backlink diversity.
#8. Your employees’ rewarding plan doesn’t compensate executives for completing your company’s work policy. Instead of planning to spend their bonus on a trip to Hawaii, you find out they’re booking a weekend in Sandusky and not taking their kids.
Tips:
- It’s closely related to your organization’s culture, HR department, and employee retention.
- Real talent is what you want in the business operations, and compensation is how you show their values for the organization.
#7. When a blogger or TV reporter interviews you, he or she leaves unclear on what your company does. Tragically, when you open the interview post, you are not sure the reporter was even interviewing you or writing about your firm.
Ask yourself:
- Do your strategy documents reflect your real values?
- What are the key services you would deliver better than anyone else?
- Are you allocating resources to the areas that matter with your end goal?
#6. Your closest friends cannot give you good referrals. At a recent family get together, your friend tells you about meeting three of your five hottest prospects. But not once connects their needs to your services.
#5. Your life partner, friends, or family members can’t explain what you do for a living. When asked by her friends or associates about your business, she turns to you to explain it correctly. And when you encourage her to do it alone, you constantly interrupt her to correct her mistakes.
#4. Your customers do not know that you are better than the competition. In response to your describing all the new features that your competitors don’t offer, your customers don’t seem to react at all.
#3. You can’t replicate the same response every time whenever asked about what your firm does. You hear yourself sound like a politician moving from one special interest fundraiser to the next. Just tell me who I’m speaking to, and I’ll tell them what they want to hear.
#2. When your employees are asked what your company does, no two give the same answer. Depending on the department they work in, they answer in terms of what their group does and often, it is framed in terms of how much better they would be if everyone else in the company worked as hard.
#1. The reasons your customers say they buy from a start-up like yours, do not match the reasons your sales force says sells your customers. As the old saying goes – people don’t buy shovels; they buy holes. But worse yet, your consumers are ordering for living roof foundations, and your sales reps are vending screens and dividers.
Bottom Line –
While the latest trade war news of companies executing programs based on confused maneuverings are witty, the collateral damage on profits is not. Given the number one symptom causing people to change jobs is the stress of having no control, it’s no wonder that the underlying problem is a lack of a company strategy. In simple words, set a straight course for your company’s ship, and everyone on board can row in the same direction.
