What Economic Downturn? How to Create Strategic Growth NOW!

The present economic downturn looms over the heads of business executives (and their employees) like the Grim Reaper.

How do you ensure your company doesn’t fall prey to the hype or the financial crisis and actually maintains — or even grows! — during this economic downturn? How can you use this time to focus and develop more sustainable customer relationships to increase your customer satisfaction or customer quality?

Those very questions are what our new article series at Bizmanualz aims to answer. We have created new Strategic Growth Web pages and article sections not only to help your company grow despite the economic downturn, but to help you grow strategically so that you can maintain that growth in an uncertain future.

So what can you do to ensure your company stays on top and pursues the right opportunities?

The areas of operational improvement we will be rolling out in several articles over the next months include: Quality Management, Value Proposition, Lead Generation and Quality Training. These are tools you need to grow.

Quality Management can mean a variety of things, but it centers on achieving your vision for your company. What is your growth strategy for your company, and what tools do you have in place to get there? Quality Management can start right now with a Gap Analysis to show you the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Your improvement process can be formal, such as implementing an ISO Quality Management System. Or it can be informal and start with whatever elements you have already identified for operational improvement.

The benchmark for all operational improvement should be customer quality, which comes from discovering your Value Proposition. A Value Proposition is simply a statement that captures the customers’ perception of what your company does that they value. What makes you unique among your competitors? Understanding customers’ perceptions of your company—and aligning your strategy to meet those perceptions—will lead to increased customer quality, the ultimate goal for any company.

Once you have established a Quality Management System and sharpened your understanding of your customers, what is left? Well, all that improvement should lead to increased sales and increased profit. That’s where Lead Generation comes in. You don’t want to waste time cold calling and selling to people who don’t want or need your products. Lead Generation uses what you have learned about your customer to create highly focused, customer-centric, often visual marketing campaigns. Creating a website with the right message—and proactively getting that message into your customers’ hands—means they will come to you, not vice versa.

So now you have established operational improvement, you have increased customer quality, and you are selling more. How do you make sure your company continues running at a high level? Quality Training enables continuous improvement throughout your company so that all of your employees are equipped to work smarter, reduce waste, and work more closely with customers. Regular Quality Training leads to an empowered workforce, buy-in across all levels, and continual improvement.

Over the next few weeks we’ll examine these topics in more depth and also offer advice on how to establish and maintain strategic growth using these tools, regardless of the current economic situation.

If you have any questions about any of these services, please contact us or visit our new Strategic Growth Services pages.

    Email     Print    Subscribe     

Posted on Monday, January 5th, 2009 under Strategic Process Improvement

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Originally published by Bizmanualz, Inc. under the title What Economic Downturn? How to Create Strategic Growth NOW!.

This and more articles like this can be found at www.bizmanualz.com. This article may be reprinted freely as long as this resource box is left intact.