Align your organization for optimal success/resilience
With so much pressure and so many forces at work on your business it’s easy to come unglued. Consider your customer; supply chain risk frequently represents their number one threat to revenue. How does your list compare?
The better question is how do you keep it all together?
The bond that eludes us
To deal with such marketplace pressure, I used to advise clients to go for consistency at all cost. Not that it was expensive; it was actually cheaper than the alternative. But there was another reason. Increased competition brought with it more options, more clutter and more confusion. The promise of consistency set you apart from the mire. IBM (aka, “Big Blue”) set the bar in the late 80s and early 90s. They demonstrated that clean, consistent communications alone helped their brand to stand out and be remembered. They proved that projecting a sanitized and uniform image (in corporate blue please!) was effective when it was persistent—the age of corporate identity was in overdrive. Today we’ve moved miles from that paradigm. We operate in an age of engagement where measures of how we’re made are as important as what we make. Consistency is mere ante to play. Aim for increased traction, adhesion, agreement and connection—I’m calling it stickiness.
Shift gears for extra traction
Luckily niche industries enjoy a fairly narrow audience. The perspective buds from the second-tier balcony. You can get by with a message that is largely the same from one customer to the next. Being persistent with consistency is (still) important. That said; the marketplace is very dynamic and unpredictable. There are many competitive forces at work—known and unknown—tearing and tugging on your organization like a constant pull off test. If there’s misalignment within your organization, no amount of consistency can save you from penetration and the inevitable tailspin. You have to ask frequently, does our current strategy make us sticky enough? Will our resources and capabilities give us enough traction for reasonable chance of success? The 3 elements of stickiness are not that unfamiliar … but they need your full attention.
3 Elements of Stickiness
- Connection—your “way to play” in the marketplace. Your audience will believe in behavior they see over any words they hear. You make it easy to connect with you—but entirely on your customer’s terms. You create robust internal coordination and communication, which in turn multiplies the power of your focus. When you focus on connections you add efficiency to everything you do.
- Capabilities—your distinctive abilities that enable your way to play. For example, the rise of outsourcing and offshoring, along with the use of strategic alliances, allows you to punch beyond your weight. You connect mutually reinforcing capabilities that cross business unit lines distinguishing your value. You invest in capabilities because you know—in this case—complexity is armor against competitors that enter your space.
- Offerings—value delivered in your product and service portfolio. The right lineup of products and services naturally results from conscious choices about the capabilities and connections needed for a deliberate way to play.
Stickiness is created by everything your business does and says. When you’re sticky you’re un-penetrable; your organization and its sales efforts are less likely to be cheated, forgotten or doubted. Make your Stickiness an essential advantage—it trumps persisting with other outdated paradigms.
HIT Solutions believes the more your business keeps up with important trends, the more you will improve your product, and improve your bottom line.
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