What is driving your business.
What does it believe in, what is its purpose and who are its brand heroes.
These things can help establish your emotive brand positioning and inform the identity and character for brand communications.
So, how does a company go about identifying its business drivers? Let me suggest a few ideas…
- Look for patterns. An obvious example of this is the retail industry, which experiences the pattern of an upswing in sales during the Christmas season. Certain electronics OEM’s ride the pattern of new iPhone releases. These types of patterns can help determine what drives the business, and to where attention should be directed.
- Assess the customer base. Take a look at your customers and seek to determine where they come from, their buying patterns, and which segments are the most profitable. This insight will help to determine which customer drivers exists for your company.
- Assess your staff. Staff review is another way to determine what drives the business. One of my clients consistently seeks formalized feedback from clients and suppliers on how the staff cares for them. This feedback shows the correlation between treating people right and retaining customers. This is an example of an internal business driver.
- Internal costs. Driving business is not just driving sales (top line) revenue. Driving business means driving profitability. Internal processes can be identified as drivers. For example, I know of a company that invested in equipment to reduce the cost and time of making a particular part by approximately 75%. This new efficiency is allowing them to leverage opportunities in the market they didn’t have before. For them, manufacturing efficiency is a business driver.
Identifying the key factors that make the most impact on your business must occur before developing strategy. It’s best to determine these drivers with a cross-functional team. Once your team gets a sense for what those drivers are, you’ll have taken a significant step towards growth.
Let’s adlatworld.com be the driver while you watch your business grow
