3 Powerful Insights to Transform Your Business
As we approach the final weeks of the year, I want to honor all of your efforts in 2016 by showing you how to get outside our comfort zone and achieve more in 2017, with access to valuable free training resources. We’ll use the easy-to-remember acronym P.R.O.F.I+T for this 6-part Roadmap.
Conventional thinking suggests that the P in the P.R.O.F.I+T Roadmap should stand for P&L. But it doesn’t, because a P&L reactively measures results against the best of intentions. It’s a lag measure of what’s leftover after all-too-often lower than expected revenues and higher than expected costs.
Instead, P stands for three Powerful Insights that will push you outside your comfort zone and change the way you look at your business forever.
Your First Powerful Insight is Provocative
People. They’re your greatest asset when you’ve got the right ones. Your greatest pain in the neck when you don’t. They’re one of the biggest expenditures of time, effort, and money in your organization. And the only asset that walks out the door every night.
Each year I produce the Return on People Benchmark Report based on 500 of the largest companies in the world, and you can get a complimentary copy using the link above. Use it to see exactly how other companies in your industry are performing – when I share this in speaking engagements most leaders in the room are shocked to see themselves ranked a D or an F… do YOU know where you rank?
Your Second Powerful Insight is Penetrating
You measure revenue by customer all the time (another lag indicator that’s impossible to influence after the fact), but up until now measuring profit by customer has been a complex, cumbersome time-consuming, expensive, after-the-fact accounting exercise. Some leaders look at Gross Margin instead, however, all the profit leaks that turn a great top line into a mediocre or non-existent bottom line happen below the gross margin level.
There’s a better way to get a snapshot of the profitability of your 100 biggest customers in less than an afternoon, and get back in the drivers’ seat by using the ‘good-is-good-enough-for-good-decision-making’ insights that result to finally get proactive about managing customer profitability. Watch this complimentary training video to see how its done.
Your Third Powerful Insight is Proactive
One of the most popular topics in any speaking engagement I deliver is the ACRES of Opportunity Sales and Service Plan, which is a scoreboard for proactively improving customer profitability. It’s about identifying the behaviors that drive or destroy profitability (yours AND your customers) and then engaging everyone in your organization making small shifts for big impact. by sharing what I call “CPR for Your Business”. You can learn about CPR – the Customer Profitability Ratio – in the complimentary video above.
The Biggest Surprise: Often Your Own Self-Inflicted Wounds are the Profit Problem.
It’s tempting to write off unprofitable customers as “bad”, but few leaders want to “fire the customer” because they don’t want to lose much-needed volumes. Here’s the good news. When you see Who’s Who as a result of going through the 3Ps, you’ll find that half the time, customers are unprofitable for you NOT because of THEIR behaviors, but because of self-inflicted wounds on the part of YOUR company that are completely within your control to fix! That realization empowers your employees to be accountable and to proactively take steps to heal those wounds.
Watch the video, share it with your team, and let me know how I can support you to make it happen.
You now know the P’s: Provocative, Penetrating, and Proactive Insights.
Next week we’ll explore the R in the P.R.O.F.I+T Roadmap.
Which were the most powerful insights you had from this article?
