How to deliver Growth

There are 2 levers we constantly work on to turnaround a company: growth and cost.

After initial change of control, the first priority is to stabilize the business, we need to make sure that the operations is running and main customers are staying with us on board. During this phase it is important to keep good sales employees on board especially those with main customer contacts. Sometimes, communication to main customers can be launched, to ensure to continuity of the business and dedication of services to them and address any doubts and fear may raise from the customer side. This is ideally done within a holistic communication plan within the integration plan.

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After initial period of stabilization and taking time to understand the business, it is essential to set up a growth strategy for the business. This shall entail the vision for an exit equity story for the story:

1. How shall the business look like when it is ready to hand over to the next owner?
2. What is the core value and asset of the business?
3. What is the unique value we can add to the asset compare to former owner?

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All the value creation plan shall be aligned with the underlying vision for the asset we bought. The vision could be: transform a traditional company to a digitalized one, transform a local leader to a global player, transform a inefficient company to a high performing one. While forming the vision it is important to balance ambition with feasibility, back up the vision with any required investment forecast. (Put your money where the month is!) Another typical trap is not being focused enough. Typically the asset we bought have limited team size and cash flow, wanting to growth in every area will most likely end up in spreading too thin on all the areas. Having a low market share in a few business segments is undoubtedly less attractive to a new investor than being the leader in one dedicated segment (hidden champion). Being too diversified in your product offering can be a value destroyer as well, because diversification mean complexity, which requires more resources, lower bargaining power with supplier, higher inventory level both in raw material and finished products. Reduce complexity is mostly value creating to non-performing companies.

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Based on the Growth Strategy, the Go to Market now needs and can be defined. A Go to Market strategy shall help us to address 3 questions:

1. Whom to sell to?
2. What to sell?
3. How to sell?

Most companies take answers as given based on what they always have been doing.

1. Whom to sell? Many companies have a lack of clear definition of target customers and their profile. Especially a lot of companies are used to sit passively wait for the customers calling. To change this case, it is important to create a target customer list and create strategy to target them. A target customer strategy always sound fuzzy and obscure. There in a B2B context you really want to be very concreate of the companies and the potential contacts you want to contact. This list shall be followed up and tracked regularly.
2. What to sell? Mostly we are confined with what the companies are doing today. A core competence /asset of the company might be the products, but if we take a deeper look, it maybe the unique engineering capability, our flexibility and scare testing capabilities. It may be the data (even though hesitate to say so, cause it is too hot now a days, many companies dreaming of selling data, without knowing if they own the data and how these data can create customer value) and problem skills. In the end, business is all about helping the customer to create value and then take a fair share of that value.
3. How to sell? This requires understanding thoroughly how our customers buy? Where do they get information? How do they evaluate information? How are purchasing decisions being made? Who makes those decisions? Who influences those decisions at which stage? Your account plan is exactly created based on the purchasing journey of your customer to guide you through on which stage, whom to and how to influence the buyers.

A typically neglected tool is cold calling. At big cooperations, sales are used to passive selling. Company is mature, customer will call on demand. Imaging first years of ALIBABA, the selling team was visiting office buildings one by one, looking for opportunities to talk to the decision makers and introduce their services. Without any initial appointment, you will mostly get rejections and sometimes you need to wait for hours to get an opportunity to speak to the decision maker. Most BDs we have don’t have the spirit/pressure and tenacity. I still encourage BD to make their target list and email them, call them, contact them on LinkedIn. You need to get used to NO. It is mostly more effective than we would like to think.

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I would like to end this sharing with a Chinese saying "Even a 1000 mile journey starts with the first step". We may have the biggest vision but the implementation is always tedious, whcih requires a lot of small steps. Plesae do not only focus on the sexy work of setting up big strategy, any successful strategy requires a lot attention to detail to ensure successful implementation.