What is the main priority of your business? To deliver value to your shareholders or to deliver value to clients?
A nuanced difference, but an important difference nonetheless with respect to achieving transformational growth.
If it’s the former, your business culture, processes and systems are built around delivering value to your shareholders. This means that the every-day business decisions by you and your team, especially those done under pressure, will likely be based upon short term financial impacts. And although for some, organic growth may indeed be achieved, this will most likely be single digit growth in nature.
If it’s the latter, your business culture, processes and systems are built around delivering value to your client. This means that client value is at the heart of your business; and no matter the pressure; you and your team's every day decisions will be in support of that vision. By embracing this culture, your reputation and brand with your clients will undoubtedly increase, as will the number of opportunities and the likelihood of you achieving exponential growth.
That sound’s all well and good, I hear you say, but without focusing on financial performance how will my business survive?
And therein lies the problem…
Your clients are the source of your income, and when your primary values are built around your own financial performance, you limit your potential to build a stronger client relationship, position yourself as a valued partner, raise your profile above your competition and subsequently restrict your ability to gain more client wallet spend.
So, accepting the premise above, when you are looking at developing your business growth strategy, how do you take your client into consideration? Do you simply assign an annual target number to an account, or do you look deeper? How well do you understand your client, what they need and what they think of you?
Some further questions to ask yourself include...
- How important is your client to you?
- What are your client's core values and do they match with yours?
- Do you understand your client's strategic plans?
- Is client satisfaction one of your top five business KPI’s?
- How do you measure customer satisfaction?
I’m sure many of you will respond positively to the first question, and if so you should surely be able to answer the following questions positively also? However, if this is not the case, some reflection is maybe needed to understand the gaps in your knowledge and how your business is set up for growth.
In my experience, many companies build business growth strategies based upon historical performance, market intelligence and statistical trends, rather than through an holistic understanding of the client's need and the subsequent size of the potential opportunity for them to access. Many are also internally focused, looking at forging ahead with growth plans based on their own firm brand beliefs, rather than having their finger on the pulse of how customers perceive their brand, and the work needed to potentially improve that perception.
However, if you can look to build your growth strategy based on a robust understanding of your client's needs and their relationship with you, you can build a more nuanced roadmap to maximize growth where relationships and opportunity are strongest, and to tread carefully where the relationship is maybe more fragile.
Finally, what gets measured gets managed, and if the client is at the heart of your growth strategy, then surely client satisfaction needs to be a primary metric of your business. Once you take this step, you will begin to better understand of the health of your customer relationship, gain increased awareness of your client’s need, improve visibility of potential opportunities to resolve those needs, and ultimately develop an increased likelihood of business growth.
And when client satisfaction eventually becomes synonymous with your brand, you will truly recognize the real potential for transformative growth.
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