Mike Cymbrowsky / Consultative Sales Enablement
With every passing year, the business environment gets more complex and competitive. Globalization requires strategic partnerships. Rapid advances in technology must be quickly exploited. Work forces that are mobile, virtual and diverse need to be inspired.
Active investors and board members need to be continuously updated. With such significant macro forces to contend with, business leaders rely heavily on inside management to deliver sustained growth. Unfortunately, this reliance tends to be a leader’s Achilles heel.
With a tightening economy, management is usually stretched and focused on day-to-day activities. Basically, there is simply not enough bandwidth to accomplish critical marketing and sales initiatives. Or sometimes the internal management team has insufficient skills or experience to know how to develop a growth plan.
And of course there is always office politics. All these factors can inhibit an organization’s courage to make the changes it needs to make to maximize top line revenue production.
Regardless of the “why”, it is critical that business leaders are realistic in what current management can and cannot deliver relative to a strategic growth program.
Savvy leaders realize the risk of placing all eggs in one basket. They also recognize the dangers of an echo chamber and working within a bubble where objectivity is in short supply. Wise leaders know that even the best managers require assistance and unbiased guidance.
The following are 8 critical marketing and sales activities that can ensure sustained growth:
- Analysis to determine “true” customer profitability
- Creating a clear profile of the ideal customer
- Understanding and clarifying your marketplace positioning
- Objectively understanding the strengths and weakness of competitors
- Designing and implementing targeted marketing programs
- Investing in best practices consultative sales training
- Moving to performance based sales compensation
- Adopting a regular, recurring sales accountability process
Ascension is a management consulting firm that helps clients accelerate revenue growth and improve business performance. We utilize business analytics, insight mining, marketing optimization, and sales enablement programs to help clients achieve measurable revenue and market share growth across a broad range of industries.
Ascension brings an accomplished team of professionals to every engagement and combines strategies with hands-on executional support to ensure sustained growth.
More than anything we provide objective perspective on our client’s business and augment their internal management and capabilities to create meaningful top line impact.
