We’ve all heard the saying, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” and we’ve no doubt used it to inspire our troops or ourselves from time to time.
And why not? It’s a tried-and-true, power-of-positive-thinking gem. Even better, it’s versatile. It can be said with a smile or a frown. It throws down a dangerous-sounding non-challenge without placing blame. And it locks us in the cage with all the other “tough” guys without having to be too specific about which of the mixed martial arts we might mix it up with.
But for those of us who think too much it’s also problematical. Once the tough get up to speed, where do they actually go? And, even more important, what do they do to get there? No, we’re not trying to be funny. There’s nothing funny about our slowly recovering economy or about the hazy road ahead. But we are trying to make a point.
Successful business people are nothing if not optimistic. So we often hear a lot of talk about “growth,” as in “We want to grow 15 to 20 percent next year,” or, “If we can’t grow at least 10 percent, we shouldn’t even be in this business.”
We applaud that tough-minded optimism and determination. The attitude is absolutely necessary, especially these days, and can be highly productive. But it isn’t sufficient. What we don’t hear enough of is how companies plan to drive such ambitious growth. They’re tough enough, but where, exactly, are they going and how do they plan to get there?
Smart Business spoke to Philip S. Krone at Productive Strategies, Inc., about supporting your growth by building sales processes, identify leads and setting appointments, and better communicating key messages in a noisy marketplace.
Getting going
At least once a year invest time to take an honest, tactical look at what worked for your company in the past 12 months and what didn’t. Be hard-nosed when you work the numbers, but don’t forget that qualitative achievements often lead to quantitative ones. Did you expand into new markets or begin to build even a few promising new relationships? How can dumping some tactics and ramping up others pay off?
In our case, much of our marketing success came from recognizing opportunity in the solid, though broadly defined, target market of health care. We expanded our original three clients in that field to nine, even adding professional staff to make such growth possible. Our qualitative insight came when we noticed that some of our new clients were in the industry while others served the industry. We realized we had two potential markets, not one, and that we could capitalize on our experience in one to catalyze our growth in the other. All of our new clients were the result of referrals from within one of those two segments.
