Slippery Rock Gazette

Take the Guesswork Out of Profitable Growth

Darlene Campagna

Direct Opinions

Take the Guesswork Out of Profitable Growth Good strategy is at the core of any organization’s success and defines what the company needs to do to reach its goals and help guide the decision-making process along the way. But running your business on baseless assumptions or half-truths can point you in the wrong strategic direction. What if your assumptions are wrong? What damage can this do to your business and how long could it set you back from achieving your ultimate goals?

According to a 2023 Gartner article, The 5 Pillars of Successful Strategy Execution, 83 percent of strategies fail due to faulty assumptions about customers, competitors or internal capabilities resulting in unwanted surprises and stalled growth, reaffirming the importance of creating a business strategy built on insights, not assumptions.

Business strategies are full of goals and objectives focused on marketing and sales plans to drive revenue and profitability, gain market share, and beat the competition. Boiled down, it’s all about selling more to your existing customers and successfully converting prospects to buyers.

However, most business strategies are developed without ever getting feedback from customers — those people you are working so hard to sell to. Assessing your strengths and weaknesses through the eyes of your customers can help identify opportunities and threats, which may be very different from what you believe to be true. Done right, this customer data can best position your business for growth, especially important now considering the tremendous amount of change in the stone fabrication industry since the COVID boom.

Consider how customer insight would drive these most critical elements of your overall growth strategy:

Marketing

Establish what marketing and advertising channels are most effectively converting prospects to customers.
Identify your unique differentiators for more effective brand positioning.
Manage your online reputation by promoting elements of positive customer experiences.

Sales

Understand why your customers choose you over your competition.
Discover what’s most and least important in the customer decision-making process and prioritize results to improve close rates.
Evaluate competitors’ strategies and operations to capitalize on their weaknesses and enhance your unique strengths.

Operations

Focus on opportunities for process improvement based on customer expectations vs. their experiences.
Conduct root cause analysis for problem resolution, ensuring smooth, consistent experiences.
Create innovative industry solutions by prioritizing ideas based on factors customers deem as most important but least satisfied with.

Finance

Assess how customers measure the successful execution of a job and what they value more over price.
Prioritize investments for the greatest ROI based on customer needs, preferences, and opportunities for advancement.
Quantify issues with underperforming areas and teams and execute plans for success and goal achievement.

Looking at your company based on your customers’ perceptions can provide a very different perspective from what you see and experience. Remember, customer perception is your reality. Consider how your business strategies would change if powered by your customer insights.

Gathering feedback from your customers to assess their needs, expectations and experiences is the key. Learning what their challenges and hurdles are will drive your value proposition and enable you to sell more products and services, which is the goal of your strategy. Integrating these insights throughout the business will enable you to prioritize the needs of your customers, elevate your brand in the market, drive sales and ultimately achieve your business goals and objectives.

Ensuring that you are making data-driven decisions will take the risk out of your business strategy and give you confidence in your decision making and goal achievement. This confidence allows your organization to commit fully to a plan or strategy without being overly concerned that the wrong decisions have been made.

Consider these Customer Acceleration^® tips that will help you make more money from your customers and make them happier in the process!