2013:
STRATEGIC PLANNING AS UNUSUAL
What’s your Plan? The 2012 Elections are thankfully
over. Astounding negative-ad spend dollars to get what: Obama, Reid, Boehner,
the Fiscal Cliff and Part II of ObamaCare? Then, add
in our global, borrow-printed-money-to-consume, debt meltdown to yield a challenging
2013!
What is your Plan?
THESE
WON’T WORK:
·
Ambitious forecasting! Wishful thinking isn’t
a strategy.
How will you fill the strategic-innovation-play gap?
·
Tough budgets to squeeze other stakeholders
more than you?
Where is the sustainable upside, trust and
synergy?
·
Product promotions on the same commodities as
your competitors?
This will not deliver any unique customer-value or cost-effectiveness advantages.
·
Target Account programs with the same reps in
the same way?
Where is your breakthrough, win-win, value proposition for each customer on a
net-profit basis?
·
Tweaking incentive plans to change
behaviors?
Most people know what the right, smarter thing to do is - they just can’t do
it.
Incentives do “work” with employees continually learning and improving on their
own.
How will you teach the rest to: learn how to learn; improve competencies; and then,
focus them to strategically earn more?
SOME
GROUP-THINK, RUT-BUSTING IDEAS:
1.
Check out Brent Grover’s book - The Little Black Book of Strategic
Planning for Distributors- published by and sold at www.mdm.com. The distributor-oriented content is well
worth it.
Brent’s planning process is simple, streamlined, memorable and actionable. And,
his owner-operator, distribution-specific questions will make
you squirm. Revise his
tough questions to make them your own. Prioritize them and selectively share
them with your advisors and management team. Make
them sweat about and live into these questions with you!
Brent’s book will help get the team on
the same page of issues with less denial. Where
will you get the strategic insight
kernels (SIKs) that grow into
new profits?
SIKs
hide in at least two places.
Outside your business:
they are at the intersection of the living edges of your channel and what the
4% of the most innovative customers and suppliers are doing with those
opportunities. But, industry innovators only want to work with other
innovators. Partner credibility to them comes only from your progressive track
record. What’s the best way to become a fast-train
that everyone else wants to be on and join the “4%”?
Within
your business: they
are the root causes for why a small percent of your customers and items are super
net-profitable or unprofitable. Do “cost-to-serve
models” to get line-item, net-profit information. Then, follow the
8-step journey covered in “Strategic Insight #9” to: “renew your core business” to double sales
and quadruple profits.
2. Is
another “Insight” too skimpy? Then, break through the rock of inertia - right
now - by spending 15 minutes to cherry-pick and watch a few 4-minute video clips
(steps) along the (22+ hours) core-renewal roadmap at this link (an annotated
index of 338+ youtube clips): http://www.merrifield.com/YouTube/Overview%201%20to%208.asp.
3.
Without net-profit analytics to reveal
internal SIKs, you will continue to have under-penetrated and over-taxed core
customers/items. To leverage super-profitable and unprofitable customers, items
and suppliers, you need an array of journey-ware reports. To benchmark whatever
you may have been analytically attempting, check out the list of net-profit-development
reports you will find at this URL:
http://www.waypointanalytics.com/info/WPbrochure.pdf
4. If
your greed and goodwill are sufficiently aroused after checking out 4 and 5
above, then don’t be shy about requesting a go-to-meeting demo of the Waypoint, web-service,
tool shed.
5. And
finally, reserve the dates of March
19-20, 2013 to attend the semi-annual “Advanced Profit Improvement Conference” (APIC) in
Phoenix with other innovative, truly ambitious distributors. Many attendees of this
conference – past and future – are already blazing down the
Net-Profit, Core-Renewal-Journey Trail. The 9/12 brochure is at: http://www.apicconference.com/APIC_conference.htm.
2013 RESOLUTION: CARPE SIKs!
Most distributors have a core
intersection of most profitable customers buying most profitable items. This core
is vital, but hugely under nourished and under penetrated. Distributors have
been too busy pursuing and taking care of money losing customers and items,
many of which can be fixed with the right SIKs!
Why ignore your core’s huge upside?
If there was ever a year to rethink
strategy, 2013 is it.
