Accelerating Growth: Adopt, Integrate & Scale

What an amazing time for entrepreneurs, startups and small to medium sized businesses. Digital marketing and social media are true game changers because they enable anyone to find their audience and be heard. However, while the price of getting in the game is extremely low, effectively harnessing the power of digital and social requires a commitment to continual learning and a lot of hard work. Let’s take a look at steps to get your business on track, whether you’re start-up or established small to medium sized business or enterprise (SMB or SME). Vision and Purpose Regardless of size, every business needs to have a driving purpose and a clear vision of where they want to go. As an entrepreneur myself, it's having a purpose that drives to do all that I can everyday and then just a little more. However, I can fall victim to easily losing sight of my purpose, so I build in practices like meditation, dream boards, and continually refining a detailed plan to achieve my goals and objectives. As the CEO of a business it's imperative that I'm able to articulate a clear vision and purpose to inspire employees and build greater trust with customers. As the famous TED Talk by Simon Sinek so profoundly declared, people follow leaders because of what they believe: WHY we do what we do matters. Alignment & Mindset I am continually amazed at how organizations continue to struggle with alignment across the organization. Nowhere is this more perplexing than "silo-ed" mindset between marketing and sales. This is just crazy, especially because the lines are more blurred today on where marketing "ends" and sales "starts". McKinsey, Deloitte, and most other major business consultants stress that in a world where the buyer is in control, every business must deliver relevant messages at the right time, to the right people, and through their preferred communications platform. At one point in the journey your buyer may want lots of product details directly from someone in IT. At another stage they may go to your blog or website to get what they need. They journey IS NOT linear, so if every part of the organization is not aligned to serve your customers you will lose new business opportunities as well as your current customers. Think "Repeatability" Bain & Company has built an entire business practice based on global research to top performing companies they call the Great Repeatable Model. The prevailing message from this research is that in a world of complexity, winning companies focus on simplicity, clarity and adaptability. Top performing organizations build a "repeatable business model" that produces continuous improvement and allows them to rapidly adapt to change without succumbing to complexity. To build your repeatable business model you'll need to establish agile, adaptable processes to adopt and integrate digital marketing and social media into the business development process across the entire organization. Instilingl repeatability thinking stems from a simple mindset; we continually strive to organize and codify actions that are teachable and repeatable. Scalable Resourcing Most businesses struggle to have enough time and resources to reach the next level of growth; they are successful enough to stay in business but capital and people limitations can seem to be insurmountable barriers to growth. It's no secret that big companies scale their growth and manage costs through outsourcing, whether it's to a local creative agency, IT development, or across the globe with experts in back office support services. Now small to medium sized businesses can increase capabilities and capacity without capital outlay because of the cloud. Think of "Outsourcing as a Service" as a new platform that can enable your growth. Imagine the impact on your small business if services to fill specific business challenges can be seamlessly integrated into your business. [In an article I recently wrote for Shared Services & Outsourcing Network, I introduce how COEs and the cloud work to empower SMBs and SMEs – see "BPaasS and Centers of Excellent".] Each day brings with it the opportunity to grow your business by serving the needs of others, but we all need to follow sound practices to get our businesses launched and take our businesses to the next level. I'd really value hearing what you think of this article and learn what you're doing to accelerate your business growth. [inlinead] [Note: if you liked this article, please use the buttons on the left side of the screen to share it across your LinkedIn groups – and contribute to this discussion by posting your thoughts in the comment section, below. It does require – annoying, I know – registration with Disqus, but this is one-time only and actually quite useful! Thank you for being part of SSON's community - Barbara Hodge]

Accelerating Growth: Adopt, Integrate & Scale

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