CEO Mike Hoffman oversees operations and aligns business functions with SBI’s corporate strategy to deliver scaled growth and client success
Operating a business through a recession during a period of inflation can be especially challenging. As demand has tightened, and capital is more expensive, companies have been forced to tighten their belts and make the most of every dollar. All this doom and gloom has been taking its toll on the market. But I have seen some companies announce positive earnings in recent quarters, which has been welcome news. This is not simply because they offered the hope of a turnaround but because of how those companies got into the black; they acted.
They cut costs, made difficult decisions and shifted their focus in response to market changes. They replaced leadership, eliminated jobs, prioritized business transformation and they have been focused on driving profitability. Like other businesses, I’ve seen these companies experience slower sales cycles. As a result, they have focused on the segments of their business they can control that will deliver value for investors. None of these companies settled for a “wait and see” approach.
For companies that may have been a little slow to implement cost-cutting moves or may be unsure what to do next, it is time to conduct a thorough assessment to determine how to redirect investments to get the best possible return. Depending on your circumstances, many of the following steps can help you drive a turnaround by finding and redirecting resources toward growth initiatives.
10 Best Practices For Balancing Growth And Investments
1. Organizational Alignment: Track cross-sells across the organization and document delineation between cross-sells, upsells and renewals. Build out account segmentation, and centralize operations where possible.
2. Customer Success: Map out customer journey, construct an operational playbook enabling the customer success manager (CSM) to upsell and support all accounts and review operating procedures, service level agreements and SOPs between customer service and sales. Identify and prioritize automation specifications with estimated costing and develop data-driven org sizing and headcount models for CSM and renewal teams.
3. Market Expansion And Channel Strategy: Revise your total addressable market to focus on target markets; determine if territories are balanced and segmentation is accurately targeted, outdated or nonexistent; establish a channel charter; determine the appropriate geographies/verticals; and if relevant, determine the appropriate economics to launch partners.
4. Market Alignment: Balance personnel and program budgets in alignment with benchmarks; allocate more resources to support programs and align targets with sales organization; align marketing with customer service and sales functions to drive cross-sell and renewals; and establish the role of marketing within channel program.
5. Compensation: Identify and communicate performance concerns to low performers and re-allocate sales personnel to growth areas; define upsell/cross-sell targets and build into mechanics of the compensation plans; and maintain annual quota and accelerators, not semi-annual or quarterly plans.
6. Market Competition: Continue researching competitors to determine unique features; develop an M&A strategy and list of targets that could add cutting-edge features or add-ons; and orchestrate targeted campaigns around new and novel capabilities.
7. Data Discrepancies: Detail data architecture’s current state and detail data future state architecture. Create standardized reports and dashboards identifying each contract license.
8. Talent Alignment: Identify all top talent in the organization and establish retention programs for A-players in sales, marketing and customer service; implement company-wide performance management with functional leads; partner with enablement to develop a consistent training format across functions; assist with facilitating trainings; and build talent dashboards for recruiting and performance management.
9. Cross-Functional KPIs: Determine metrics (and leading indicators) that you have control over and the ability to influence (such as building pipeline versus bookings). Communicate metrics across organization; track usage and adoption of metrics in core GTM functions; publish reporting dashboards regularly; and establish a process for metric review and update based on adoption or change in strategy (KPIs might evolve over time).
10. Evaluate Marketing Function: Look at SEO conversion rates, the ratio of MQLs (market qualified leads) to SQLs (sales qualified leads) and SQLs-to-close rates. Determine the effectiveness of marketing and calculate a ROMI (return on marketing investment).
Everyone’s journey is different. Your organization may have already addressed some of these steps or may prioritize this list differently and tackle them in a completely different order. But no matter what your circumstances, your best tool for navigating uncertainty without abandoning growth is planning.
When you go through the checklist above, think about where your process can be improved and where investments are not working hard enough. Ask where investment can be redirected to make your existing people more productive by introducing digital technologies, creating enablement and making their job easier to give them more efficient, productive selling time so they can process more volume.
Once only a nice idea, running a tight ship is now vital to survival. Even if things turn around more quickly than everyone expects, you will have used this time to fine-tune your operations, which will position you to build momentum running and better accelerate growth when demand returns.
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