Company Growth as a Service
Sometimes company leaders are looking for more than project-based help.
They want a seasoned partner to help create a path and join in the pursuit. They want a partner to bring specialized skills, decades of expertise, proprietary tools, and technology accelerators. They want that partner to be part of the team and share in the accountability for results.
Our Company Growth as a Service was designed for these goals.
We team with companies to achieve one or more of the below growth drivers:
- Acquire more customers
- Increase customer share, lifetime value and retention
- Optimize product pricing for an immediate and sustained revenue uplift
- Create and launch highly innovative products that are enthusiastically embraced
- Increase company valuation
Here's an overview for each of these business acceleration drivers.
01. Acquire More Customers
This is a two-step process of getting more qualified leads into the funnel and converting more of them into customers.
To boost the sales pipeline with qualified leads we first identify which types of customers are most likely to purchase each product. That's followed by identifying the combination of campaigns, offers, assets, CTAs (Call to Action) and channels that maximize conversions.
With these insights and pipeline development best practices we can create optimized campaign portfolios or programmatic lead generation. Either technique will acquire substantially more leads at a lower cost per lead.
The second step is to improve sales conversions. This often starts with strategic methods such as applying a sale methodology or predictable sales process. It may also include using more tactical assets such as a Sale Opportunity Win Plan or Sales Playbook.
Technology will also help. We consider things like process automation, guided selling (with AI-based recommendations), sales enablement and proper use of your CRM system.
A combination of sales coaching and real-time performance measurement will ensure these new tools and methods achieve their potential.
02. Increase Customer Share, Lifetime Value & Retention
Compared to acquiring new customers, growing your existing customer base realizes shorter sales cycles, higher conversions, and a reduced cost per sale.
But to do this profitably and at scale you need to know precisely what each customer segment most wants and is willing to pay for. Unfortunately, you cannot accurately predict what it takes to satisfy customers. But you can ask them what they want. A Voice of the Customer program captures, categorizes and prioritizes customer goals, expectations, preferences and dislikes. This information is invaluable when applied to marketing and sales programs.
With this information, there are many methods to consider.
Sales professionals may apply intelligent up-sell and cross-sell recommendations. Or they may leverage technology to deliver AI-recommended next-best-offers.
Marketing may implement look-alike modeling or design the delivery of differentiated customer experiences.
Customer service may increase CSAT (customer satisfaction) with improved services such as consistent support, self-service support, omnichannel support or proactive support. Or they may lower customer churn with an early warning system that flags at-risk customers.
Our revenue diagnostic tool will compare all available methods to your baseline performance and rank them pursuant to revenue uplift.
03. Optimize Product Pricing
Determining the maximum value of your products and services is part art, part science and always data-driven.
There are two big benefits of this growth lever. First, it's low cost and delivers immediate and sustained revenue uplift.
Second, it has almost no cost of sale, so the increased revenue flows straight to the bottom line for increased profits.
Nonetheless, this financial lever is underdeveloped at most companies.
To do better, we start with a price model that shows how changes in product price impact the quantity sold and company revenues. This of course also shows how the company can adjust price to increase market share, revenue and profit.
The model applies price optimization to find the highest sale amount a customer segment will pay for a product or service. It allows you to manipulate the factors that impact quantity sold, statistically measure how customers respond to price changes, compare alternative scenarios to achieve financial goals, and identify the optimal sale amount to achieve revenue, profit or market share objectives.
While it can find the highest price a customer segment will pay for a product or service, it can also show when lowering a price increases total revenues. The goal of price elasticity is to identify the prices that deliver the greatest upside revenue or profit to the company.
04. Launch New and Improved Products or Services
Research from BCG shows that 78% of innovators that have achieved repeated successes have a well-defined and repeatable methodology. That compares to 46% of innovators without a similar framework and who struggle to achieve their first success.
The lesson here is not to begin an innovation program before you have a methodology that brings visibility, measurability, and predictability.
Breakthrough products are not suddenly created from random ideas or eureka moments. They are created by feeding good ideas and eureka moments into a methodology. It's a framework that scores them based on measured potential and systemically advances the most promising ideas from concept to commercialization.
That's why we apply an innovation methodology to bring structure to an otherwise unstructured process. It brings measurability to a difficult to measure effort. And it systemically transforms ideas into tangible products or services that drive business expansion.
To ensure we're creating products or services that will be enthusiastically received, we first measure demand using techniques such as market research, Voice of the Customer and White Space mapping.
And to bring speed to the effort, we mimic many of the methods startups use to out-innovate big companies.
05. Increase Company Valuation
For most companies, valuation is function of growth, revenue, and profit.
For companies seeking an increased market cap, or a planned liquidation event, we structure the business development program to achieve a financial impact that will maximize the goal.
For some companies, we ensure the business strategy is solid and backed with real competitive advantages.
For others, we shore up financial processes. This often includes deploying methods to improve cash flow, increase recurring revenue, diversify customer share, achieve consistency of earnings, and employ strong financial controls.
While finance and accounting policies will improve company valuation, nothing will make the company more valuable than results from one or more of the four prior growth levers.
Risk Mitigation is Essential
No business expansion program is without risk.
To reduce risk, increase focus and save time, we accompany each of the above 5 growth levers with a closed loop management control process. It includes, but is not limited to, the steps shown below.
Start with Strategy
Executives don't want to experiment over extended periods to figure out what works and what doesn't. They want to quickly know the shortest route to the biggest results.
So, we start by applying data and predictive analytics to calculate the route that achieves your vision and financial results in the least time, cost and risk.
Relentless Execution
We then move from precision planning to prescriptive execution.
We apply revenue engineering to make growth deterministic. We use evidence-based best practices to repeat proven successes. And we perform work in agile sprints to accelerate results.
Real-Time Performance Measurement
Analytics advance rapid progress and results. We quickly deploy performance analytics models and dashboards that track the right KPIs, analyze the data that impacts results and flag variances in need of swift course corrections.
Change Management
It's important to recognize that a company growth program may bring new processes, automation, information, roles or responsibilities. That's a lot of change. And the challenge with change is that it causes anxiety for many staff.
To help staff be successful, we apply a change management program. It systemically shifts individuals, teams, and the organization from a current state to a defined future state. It also mitigates productivity loss during the transition, creates an environment for sustained change, and realizes the benefits of change more quickly.
Governance
Good governance is all about transparency, inspection, adaption, and accountability.
There are many helpful tools and artifacts to support governance. They include things like roles and responsibilities documents, RACI diagrams, RAID (Risks, Assumptions, Issues, Dependencies) schedules and steering committee reports. One tool that we routinely use is a Governance dashboard like the one shown below.
Good governance avoids confusing activity with progress and separates the urgent from the important. It brings clear eyed rationalization when confronted with competing priorities or emergency issues that seek to divert key resources from their planned roles and contributions.
Lets Get Growing
Johnny Grow brings operators and practitioners with over three decades of experience in growing companies. We also bring business development frameworks, evidence-based best practices, industry benchmarks, predictive models and technology accelerators to jumpstart improved performance.
Our Growth as a Service program can deliver on-demand, interim or outsourced business development professionals. We can act as advisors, co-contributors or operators to get the job done.