Improving Growth Requires Understanding Your Business And Market
“What is strategic consulting?” is one of the questions that we’re asked regularly. The short answer is that strategic consulting helps companies figure out how to improve their performance, become more efficient, and make smarter decisions more consistently. While every industry and company have their unique characteristics, there are huge similarities among almost all businesses that make much of the knowledge and skills transferable. How this work is done is somewhat more involved, but we can expand on this explanation to show how businesses can benefit from this service.
One of the first things potential clients are interested in is seeing how to improve growth. The first step here is understanding who is currently buying what and why. This can be more involved than it sounds: an analogy we’ve used in the past to ask what people are buying tools. Are they buying a drill or are they really buying the ability to make holes? Understanding what it is that customers get from a company’s offerings is the key to understanding how to expand sales. Sometimes it helps to better understand how to target customers that are more likely to want what a company is selling or, perhaps, the results that a company can provide. Other times it helps a company to develop a product or service that appeals more to a broader market or to provide increased value to a specific market.
The key to understanding these things is market research. This can include looking at the industry as a whole, identifying the segments, details about the buyers, determining who actually uses or benefits from the purchase, demographics of these groups, etc. Another important factor is identifying trends, both in the industry and outside of it. The sources for this information vary widely, ranging from publicly available reports to industry publications and shareholder information to proprietary data.
Once this market research has been collected, the company can use it to make better and more informed decisions. Instead of relying on assumptions and what might be outdated information, they can use more current data and actual details to improve their marketing to align more closely with what customers and clients want. This research can also refine their offerings such as adapting product features and options as well as changing pricing to reflect the value provided to customers. In a larger sense, it also often impacts how a company budgets its money, allocates its staff and other resources, and ultimately manages its operations.
But growth is only one part of strategic consulting. In future installments, we’ll tackle other topics such as increasing efficiency and addressing risks.
- John Thrush