Do you wonder if you and your team could do a better job in areas such as cutting costs, improving the positioning against the competition, innovating your offer, raising prices, capturing more share of the customer’s total spend and seeing and selling to more new customers?
Well, your mind should wonder about these, because they are a few of the top nine areas where most companies could improve. Let’s walk through a few of these areas and get the juices flowing for how you might facilitate your next phase of growth.
Time to Raise Prices
Inflation has been affecting prices of most products and services, but how quickly have you adjusted your prices accordingly? Just raising prices without reason or notice can be a risky move for customer retention, so consider how to increase the value delivered and reprice accordingly.
This doesn’t necessarily mean you should make significant changes to your offering, but it does require you and your team to think about how you can identify areas of value you can deliver to your customer and present that value in a new and differentiated way. However, do make note of this point. The pushback to inflation-related price increases is currently about as little as we might ever face.
Don’t lose your opportunity to adjust prices before this time passes.
Make Vendors Partners
On the flip side, most companies miss some cost-cutting opportunities. Ask your team to list every vendor relationship you have. Then, group the opportunities and relationships into related buckets. Consider inviting your vendors to summits and sessions designed with them in mind. Offer to help them grow their businesses through innovative thinking around your business.
I have facilitated dozens of profit improvement dialogues with my clients’ vendors and partners with great success.
It is nearly impossible to assemble a number of vendors and not stumble upon ideas that will help grow the represented businesses. Prepare diligently with thoughtful dialogue topics, questions and exercises, and within a few short hours, odds are you will create increased profits for both sides of the table—a pretty good return for hosting a great meeting.
Even if you didn’t come up with a profit-improving idea, the relationship improvement will be worth it.
Sell Deep & Wide
I have worked with more than 350 companies in three decades of consulting, and when conducting in-depth interviews with top customers from businesses generating at least $20 million, I have never once failed to find more than seven figures of untapped potential growth.
Depth interviews are a required step in developing strategy, according to the man who first used the word in the context of business, Peter Drucker. He declared customers should be interviewed on a quarterly basis—ideally by a third party—to provide dialogue about the potential in the relationship.
Step Back & Assess
If you would like to assess how much additional profit might lie in what I’ve seen as the most common profit-improvement areas, then send my office a note, and we’ll send you a Profit Improvement Assessment checklist. Use it as part of a one-hour deep dive, and you can build a plan to help you capture an extra seven or eight figures.
