Solicit feedback
To effectively implement and measure a strategic plan, you also need to receive feedback from the ground level — your customers and the employees who interface with your customers.
Flood likens it to being a military leader on the battlefield, as opposed to someone poring over maps in the war room.
“The circumstances on a chalkboard can often differ from the circumstances on the battlefield, just like the circumstances on a spreadsheet can differ from the circumstances in a customer’s office,” he says. “That’s why the feedback loop is incredibly important.”
Flood gains customer feedback through three main avenues: scheduled events, sales calls and executive liaisons. At the scheduled networking events, Flood has a chance to personally meet customers, which helps to build familiarity and strengthen relationships. During sales calls, Flood will sometimes sit in and gain a firsthand knowledge of the problems and issues facing customers and how Logicalis can refine its plan to better meet those needs.
The executive liaison program is the most hands-on approach for the senior leaders at Logicalis.
“What we’ve done is taken a look at our key customers across the U.S. and found an executive sponsor for each account,” Flood says. “There are some accounts where I am responsible at the highest level for communicating with the customer and doing quarterly reviews to see how they’re doing and what their new needs are as a business.”
Customer feedback helps keep Logicalis focused on its core competencies and helps to ensure that any thrust into new territory has been well researched and planned.
Strategic plans frequently need some type of tweaking as the market changes and new opportunities arise. But you don’t want to lose your focus on what made your company successful in the first place.
That is the biggest caveat when it comes to weighing your strategy against a new opportunity. Your strategy needs to be adaptable, but it can’t let you get too far off course.
“The key is to make sure you have cross-divisional executive stakeholders so that you are evaluating the opportunity on a macro level as opposed to subsets of micro issues,” Flood says. “A secondary key is to make sure it’s not onerous. The team needs to be able to get quick turnaround and reactions on ideas that they’re working on. You need to be able to review ideas very quickly, have a standard approach in place, and understand the capital and skill sets that will be needed. You put processes in place and educate your sales team about how this will benefit them in the long and short term. You don’t want to overpromise things to customers.
“You need to ask yourself some of the normal strategic planning questions: Is it repeatable, is it something that is a core competency for us, is this something that it makes sense to develop a core competency in? Because, over time, you can find that your business has become a collection of nonrepeatable, one-off opportunities, and it’s very hard to build a business based on that.”
How to reach: Logicalis Inc., (248) 957-5600 or www.us.logicalis.com
