Does Your Company have 20/20 vision on the year 2020 & sales growth?

Ivor Kellock & Phil Polson Blog

Generating New Business & Sales growth is the Lifeblood & Oxygen of all Organizations big and small, new and old.

From 2012 to 2020 is your vision 100% and do you have an action plan to ensure it succeeds?

Yes, before you know it another decade will have slipped by and it will be 2020.

The future of business sales growth is based in relationship building, communicating, & collaborating with others.

Be it in the cloud, by smart phones, other mobile devices we must be using social media to build develop & maintain those vital sales growth relationships.

For business, customer relationship management is the new way of sales & marketing & advertising.

Which is where it should be let’s face it………. you know that intuitively this feels right. By giving customers great service they will tell their friends which will bring in new enquiries.

Cloud computing & social media for sales growth is heavily discussed but often misunderstood.

Because infrastructures are readily available, they are already built, and then rapid innovation and development of ideas right through to marketable product can happen rapidly.

This also means that huge cost savings can be achieved – take a look at this Forbes article about the US Government & their huge savings.

Yet many large & small organizations today still seem to be running on 1980′s technology & ideas hoping somehow for miraculous sales growth.

These ways attract new customers through the front door with great offers & high acquisition costs only to let these same customers trickle out the back door as issues they have are still not being dealt with timely, properly & effectively.

How would Toyota, BP & News Corp be today if they had taken a more open and forthright approach to their individual secretive corporate strategies & PR disasters over the last 12 months?

Toyota now offers a 5 year warranty on all new cars in the UK – it was 3 before they failed at informing consumers properly about the brake problems. BP are still struggling to recover from the Mexican Gulf crisis & it cost them their chief executive – will they be more careful in future?

News Corp closed one of their profitable newspapers after lengthy investigations, allegations, & final admissions over phone hacking and their Chief Executive is now being labeled an unfit person to run a business. No sales growth there-no winners either.

This is challenging all organizations to understand & accept as it smacks at the very heart of corporate culture.

Social media is now proven as a super effective and efficient way to gain a more strategic world view, become the pinnacle of distinction, and to ensure that you differ from your more generic competitors. Tell the world is old hat thinking; ask the world is the new way.

But, there’s a real problem that exists in the gap between an ideal outcome and current sales growth reality….

Social Customer Relationship Management, CRM, currently creates concerns for top C level executives, those with C in their title like CEO, CFO, over what will staff be allowed to say publicly on a day to day basis, let alone when in crisis.

Irrespective of size of the company, its leaders, stakeholders, managers, workers, entrepreneurs, volunteers & students all grapple with the practical application of what this actually means & how to go about practically implementing actions for sales growth !

All organizations are simply made up of people.

Let the people speak – so long as you’ve got all your ducks in order – if they’re not in order what else needs to be done?

This is surely imperative to satisfy your stakeholders, shareholders, fellow directors, & customers anyway!

Whilst you are working with this social media you also need to contemplate & acknowledge new ways of innovating, and providing customer satisfaction because we all now intimately know that they all have a high expectation of choice, in a fast moving instant gratification world.

This is where your data collection, management, & analysis are now the key drivers for accelerated outcomes and resultant monetary corporate success.

Why?

Because without this data you won’t have market intelligence that allows you to understand what your customers want when they want it.

Lacking this data then gets in the way of lean & nimble innovation & product development allowing your competition to get or stay ahead of you.

Of course these statements have been true for many decades but the vital difference now, is that with cloud computing it is easier to create these data systems & with the convergence of all media allowing 2 way communications making it simpler for you to listen & engage.