At times, virtually all companies face growth challenges. Whether it’s simply stalled growth or the bigger issue of declining revenue. Growth can be affected both by a company’s ability to generate new customers as well as a company’s ability to retain and grow existing customers.

A valuable first step companies can take is a quick audit of their ability to generate new business as well as retain and grow existing business. Via Strategy Group developed the Revenue Audit and Scorecard System (RASS) in order to help companies quickly assess their current situation and develop a plan that can help them quickly and materially ramp up revenue. It’s important to note that every company is different and the successful application of RASS needs to be adapted for each unique situation. RASS has allowed some companies to double their growth rate and others to reverse a decade-long decline. The impact on the bottom line is profound.

RASS involves a quick but thorough audit of all factors within the organization that affect revenue. Based on the audit recommendations are then developed along with balanced scorecard that will ensure successful execution of the recommendation. The audit covers three general areas-the Market, Sales and Marketing, and Customer Experience. Briefly, the types of issues the audit will cover in these three areas include:

Marketplace.

Several techniques can be used analyze the current market. Once the market situation is better understood, appropriate actions can be taken. Some of these techniques include market research and competitive analysis. Once the current and future market is well understood, the company can formulate a strategic response. Possible actions include product modifications, new products, new distribution channels, product eliminations, expanding geographies and price changes.

Sales and Marketing

Both new and mature companies often face challenges in effective sales and marketing operations. More often than not, the focus is on the sales organization and the sales process. Rather, companies need to consider all steps inn what is generally called the “customer journey”. This involves every interaction that a customer has with the company beginning with their initial search for a product or service and continues through their continuing experience as a customer. An audit of this journey, will help companies identify any number of issues and opportunities that are the subjects of entire books themselves. Briefly:

1. Does the company have a good understanding of their target market?
2. Does the company have a good understanding of what their best prospects look like?
3. Does the company have sufficient presence in the market that they can participate in a prospect’s initial research? This may include useful online content, participation in independent market research or traditional public relations.
4. Are there effective mechanisms in place for suspects to self-identify as prospects or for company marketing activities to identify them?
5. Is sales execution effective? Any number of issues can affect sales execution.
   • Are appropriate salespeople hired and trained?
   • Is incentive compensation appropriate?
   • Are sales processes appropriate including the use of tools such as a CRM?
   • Are the sales forecasts accurate?
   • Do all parts of the organization support sales including finance and legal?

Customers

More often than not this is the most important area. As mentioned earlier, no matter how effectively companies acquire new customers, if they have significant turnover in their customer base, revenues will suffer accordingly. So how do companies that face the significant customer satisfaction challenges inherent in their businesses improve? Here are five steps that companies can take to significantly improve customer satisfaction and gain substantial improvement in financial performance.

1. Seek constant feedback and measurement.  In order to have a comprehensive customer satisfaction program, companies need constant feedback on how they’re performing and need to establish a baseline measurement.
2. Establish a customer centric corporate culture. Companies need to establish and continually reinforce a culture that places the customer and the customer experience the center of all activities and decisions.
3. Establish multiple regular points of contact.  In order to drive improved customer satisfaction and experience, companies need to maintain multiple points of contact in the customer organization and in particular, these points of contact need to be at all levels.
4. Create multiple opportunities for engagement. Companies need to establish multiple mechanisms through which they can engage customers.  Very effective traditional approaches include Social media, advisory boards and user groups.  .
5. Make your company easily accessible. Companies need to be easily accessible through as many channels as possible-phone, chat, e-mail and in person.  In person can range from a visit by a salesman to a local company or user group events.

RASS

RASS involves the three steps shown below.

To explore RASS further or to request the Revenue Growth White Paper, contact me at jtreleaven@viastrategygroyup.com or 708-306-1825.

At the end of a recent board meeting of the Illinois technology Association (ITA), the members were asked    to offer observations on how their respective companies were doing under the current economic conditions.  In general, the technology industry has been somewhat less impacted than many others by the recent protracted downturn.  There was, however, an almost universal observation that one of, if not the most significant, impediment to improved growth is the shortage of technically trained employees.

This shortage of a workforce trained in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) is potentially the biggest long-term threat to a US economy that has thrived on its ability to innovate and develop much of today’s rapidly advancing technology.  According to the US Department of Labor only 5% of the US workforce is employed in fields related STEM, but that 5% is responsible for more than 50% of economic growth.

There are significant global implications for this workforce shortage as well.  For quite some time, the US was a primary source of innovation while other countries, particularly in Asia, provided much of the manufacturing.  US Universities remained the most significant training ground for the world’s STEM graduates.  The percent of students enrolled in graduate STEM programs in US Universities is approaching 70%. The problem in the US was exacerbated by the lack of visas and green cards which would allow STEM graduates to remain in the US.  This was partially addressed by the STEM Jobs Act of 2012.  This legislation sets aside 55,000 green cards for graduates with graduate degrees in STEM fields.  These green cards are allocated first to PhD graduates with the remaining going to Masters Graduates.

In recent years the situation has changed somewhat dramatically.  First, other countries, again particularly in Asia, have invested heavily in expanding their university systems.  Europe continues to have excellent universities but less overall capacity than the US.  Second, a noticeable amount of research and innovation is now taking place in other countries.  Ironically, early signs of manufacturing returning to the US are taking place.

What is causing a massive shortage of US students entering STEM fields?  For some time, it seemed like there were sufficient employment opportunities for graduates in a variety of other majors.  Throughout most of the first decade of this century unemployment was relatively low and most college graduates had little difficulty in finding employment.  That, of course, has changed recently but has not driven more students into STEM fields.  One obvious problem is the difficulty of these majors.  The course material is challenging and requires a significant aptitude in math.  Perhaps more of an issue is the work load these majors demand.  A recent study showed that the average engineer devoted twice as much time to their studies as other majors.  Fully 40% of entering freshmen who intend on majoring in a STEM field switch majors.

A second challenge I believe is that the US K-12 system does not encourage students to enter STEM majors, doesn’t adequately prepare students for STEM majors and, perhaps most important, doesn’t create the enthusiasm necessary to overcome the challenges mentioned above.  The favorable employment market conditions and the above average compensation for these majors is not communicated.

So, what to do?  First, we need to address the issues in the K-12 system.  We should allow more technically trained individuals to become teachers without the necessity of gaining teacher certification.  Those who have worked in the field are uniquely prepared to pass on enthusiasm for the field.  My youngest son had an excellent teacher in high school who was an engineer, conveyed significant enthusiasm for engineering and has resulted in one more enthusiastic engineering student.  Giving high school guidance counselors more information on the field and the concomitant opportunities would also help.  Universities need to provide extra support for students entering STEM fields in order to significantly reduce the attrition rate.

Next, a vast untapped pool of potential STEM students is found among women and minorities.  The old joke is “how does an engineer know he’s in the wrong class?  If there are more than two girls in the class and they are cute.”  While women account for close to 60% of the undergraduates in the US, they represent less than 25% of the STEM majors.  In addition, only 15% of STEM degrees are awarded to underrepresented minorities.  Again, changes in the K-12 system are needed to help address this challenge.  The Chicago Tech Academy, a Chicago public school system high school focused on STEM fields is a terrific example of one way to address this issue.  Other efforts can help here as well.  I serve on the board of the Chicago Engineers Foundation.  The purpose of the foundation is to provide scholarships for Chicago city high school students to study engineering in college.

Unfortunately, changing this trend will probably take at least a generation.  The tendency with problems that require long-term solutions is to kick the can down the road.  The US, and in fact the rest of the world, cannot afford to wait.  Our future economic growth depends on it.

We’ve seen this movie before.  A hot, exciting new technology comes along and it gets furiously snapped up because it’s cool, shiny and the thing to do.  Business enterprises are far from immune.  This phenomena certainly predates the 1980s, but let’s start there.  Prior to the early 80s, a few small microcomputers had been on the market.  Introduction of the IBM PC, however, was a game changer.  We were just coming out of the 1970s when “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”.  So, the IBM logo made the device relatively immune from corporate scrutiny.  Companies were snapping up the over $4000 device (for those too young to remember it had no hard drive and little memory) with relatively little thought to specific applications, let alone the financial return on that investment.  Often it was explicitly for experimentation.  After a decade, the technology had improved significantly, the applications were well developed and calculating a quantified return on investment was required.

Fast forward to today.  Social media in some form has been around for almost a decade.  Again, most of the early versions are becoming distant memories (MySpace) and the technology has improved significantly.  Unlike the PC however, virtually all of the early adopters were consumers and in almost all cases were teenagers and young adults.  In fact, that was the target audience.  The applications allowed an asynchronous way to stay in touch, share pictures, update statuses etc.  Adults joined the fray in many cases simply to keep tabs on their children.  So, social media was introduced to the denizens of the corporate world.

At that point we’ve entered the shiny object stage.  Eventually corporate marketing types were being told that social media was table stakes.  They had to have a Facebook page-all their competitors did.  Some were skeptical, but many succumbed.  As time moves forward again, the applications became more sophisticated, more targeted to specific corporate objectives and gradually became an integral part of most organization’s marketing mix.  Other applications of social media developed as well.  Companies began using social media techniques to improve customer self-service and knowledge sharing.  Communities that could influence and inform product development were formed using social media techniques.

As budgets grew, CEOs, CFOs and others began to question (appropriately so) the return on those growing investments.  This is where we are today.  Marketers especially love to track measures such as Facebook or Twitter followers, webpage hits, SEO rankings and other commonly available metrics.  Having more Facebook followers than your competition may give you bragging rights of sorts but doesn’t tell you much about the effectiveness of your presence or how it affects corporate results.  There are many intervening factors that need to be considered.  For example, having more web page hits on an ineffective webpage doesn’t really do you any good.  Having many more followers on a Facebook page that has an ineffective message doesn’t help.

So, to get an effective handle on the value and return on investment in social media, several steps are critical.

1.  Each program needs to have quantifiable corporate objectives: increased revenue for a specific product, decreased support costs, decreased product development lifecycle, improved customer satisfaction metrics etc.
2. All components of the program need to be identified and quality assured: effective landing pages, clear and effective messaging etc.
3. Appropriate metrics need to be identified, quantified and collected: Facebook followers, landing page hits, community sign-ups, support solutions posted etc.
4. These metrics need to be tied specifically to the objectives in number one.
5. Traditional ROI can then be calculated.
6. It doesn’t stop there.  Identified weak points in the system can then be improved.

The process is well-known in general in the corporate world, but is only now just beginning to be applied to social media investments.  New tools are being developed and new metrics are being made available.  As was the case with the PC, I have little doubt that tracking returns on the investment in social media will become well understood and commonplace.

From online classes to virtual campus tours, technology is having a profound impact on higher education. While universities are home to groundbreaking research and Nobel prizes, until recently they were laggards in the adoption of innovative technology to better deliver on their core mission-learning. I most certainly am not the best person to prognosticate on what new and innovative applications of technology we’ll see in the next few years. But, having been involved in higher education in one way or another for over 40 years, I can take a look back at some of the evolutionary changes that have had a profound impact on the delivery of post secondary education. I’ve experienced these changes personally with my own children.

The first is simply a profound change in how students select and apply to Colleges and Universities. Forty years ago it was quite an arduous and time consuming process. Research relied almost exclusively on printed directories and word of mouth. Campus visits were unstructured and time consuming. Applications were typed or filled out by hand. Today College rankings and evaluations are readily available on line. Every University has an extensive online presence with virtual campus tours. Applications are submitted online and the Common Application makes applying to multiple schools a breeze. In the movie How I got Into College, much was made of the daily trip to the mailbox and the high anxiety of waiting for acceptance or rejection letters. The anxiety persists of course, but prospective students can easily track the status of their applications online.

Next, you’ve been accepted and have to register. Course catalogs were thick and often out of date. Scheduling was a challenging manual process. As an undergraduate, I was fortunate that most engineers’ schedules were predetermined. I distinctly remember, however, my first experience as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. For whatever reason, it took 14 separate physical stops throughout the campus to register for the first time. It took the better part of the day. It got a little easier after that but was still a challenge. Today is a completely different story. Programs of study and course catalogs are online, up-to-date, and easily searchable. Potential schedules are easily seen graphically in real-time. Registration is literally a few clicks and done in minutes.

Forty years ago managing your courses was a challenge. The good news, perhaps, was that, if you weren’t physically present, you had no idea what was going on in class or what the assignments were. Everything was a physical piece of paper handed out in class. Today, everything from the syllabus to the class notes to your grades on every assignment are readily accessible online. In some cases even, videos of the lectures are available. I can easily monitor my own kids classroom performance online in real-time. Unfortunately, there is less incentive to show up in class which remains as valuable as ever.

Finally, research has been profoundly impacted. Not long before I started my own doctoral program, dissertations were typed by hand-with the requisite carbon copies. Even minor revisions were often a massively time-consuming effort. Fortunately for me, word processing had become available by the time I wrote my dissertation. Revisions and multiple copies were trivial by comparison. Earlier, statistical analysis of research data was laboriously done with mechanical calculators. While data collection remained tedious, SPSS made analysis of that data a snap. And then there was the literature search. My wife and I reminisce about our day long trips to the library with rolls of dimes to make copies of journal articles bound in often missing dusty volumes. Today, of course, most of those journal articles are readily available online and can be quickly searched and printed from home.

On balance, these technological advances have made learning and research much more effective and efficient. Striking an appropriate balance between the use of this technology and personal interaction with faculty, other researchers and fellow students will be one of the challenges we’ll have to be more cognizant of in the future.