The Big Ten: Competitive Business Strategies

What is Strategy?

Simply put, strategy is the way in which you plan on matching what you do best with the customers you plan to reach.

At CultureSparq, we believe team work is the most essential factor to winning the strategy game.  Creating an environment for teams to immerse themselves in a collaborative culture of getting business done is a good start.  Plus having diverse opinions should be encouraged especially when the population of the workforce and customers are increasingly shifting.

Competition 

As a leader it will be important for you to create a competitive synergy where each team member can learn different ways to compete at becoming better assets to the organization. 

Mobilizing a winning culture requires a level of precision which can only be achieved when your leaders are pushing the same strategy across the organization while promoting teams to achieve its desired results in an unpredictable environment. 

Contrary to what "everybody knows," strategy is not about achieving results in a known and foreseeable environment, but in an environment that is unknown and unforeseeable. So it’s best to have a team with a high emotional IQ and the skills to deliver your strategy. 

To position your strategy to win for you and your customers —  we want to share some key principles you should consider in developing your strategy

Key Principles 

1.   Commit Fully to a Definite Objective

The objective must be precisely defined, and you must commit fully to it. This commitment is not only important for yourself, it is important to gain and maintain the commitment of those you lead. 

2.   Seize the Initiative and Keep It

You must get the initiative and keep it until you achieve your goal. Don’t emphasized on theory, or even planning, but more on action. It’s not enough to have a great idea you must take action on it for it to mean anything.

3.   Economize to Mass Your Resources

You can’t be strong everywhere because your resources will always be limited. Consider time. The idea is to economize where your efforts and resources are not critical and concentrate them where they are more important. 

4.   Use Strategic Positioning

To achieve any strategic objective, you will need to be agile due to environmental or other unexpected changes. You may need to modify your approach and positioning, even as you continue to work toward an objective. 

5.   Do the Unexpected

When you have competition, it is most effective to surprise your competition and do the unexpected. This principle can also be profitably applied with customers and prospects, so long as the surprise is pleasant. 

6.   Keep Things Simple

The more things that can go wrong, the more will go wrong. If you want less to go wrong, keep your strategy simple where fewer things can go wrong.

7.  Prepare Multiple Simultaneous Alternatives

Since some actions inspired by your thinking are going to fail, you should always have an alternative action, even an alternative intermediate objective thought through and ready to be implemented.

8.   Take the Indirect Route to Your Objective

Moving directly against any human thought or endeavor always arouses opposition. People hold on all the more strongly to their previously held notions. So moving indirectly, perhaps using an incentive desired by those you want to persuade or influence can work well. 

9.   Practice Timing and Sequencing

There is a time for every purpose. Implementing the “right” strategy at the wrong time or in the wrong sequence can be just as ineffective as if the strategy was all wrong.

10. Exploit Your Success

Don’t stop or slow down when you are winning and achieving your objectives. Not staying continually ahead of your competition is simply giving your competition another chance to stop you.

We Build The Culture to give your customers a better experience.  CultureSparq can help you get started.   

Let’s get on a call.

Are Your Customers Leaving?

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Why You Need Customer Success

WHAT IS CUSTOMER SUCCESS?

Simply put, it’s a business strategy ensuring customers achieve success, their desired outcomes while using your product or service.

If you are an executive looking to boost revenues or a sales rep looking to give your customers a better experience so they can become loyal customers — this quick read is for you. 

KEY ROLE

Customer Success Managers are critical to your business success. They will work to improve customer happiness and loyalty by helping customers succeed.  We suggest your Customer Success Managers tie their objectives directly to your bottom line by measuring the outcomes and hold them accountable for reducing churn rates, improving renewal and customer satisfaction.

CUSTOMER SUCCESS

We need to understand the benefits of what “Customer Success ”does for your business. Customer success has the power to help you grow your base of advocates and promoters. Customer success is linked directly to your customer satisfaction and when your customers are thriving, everyone wins. 

How do you get this done.  We do this by focusing the customer journey by giving a remarkable or memorable experience.  We believe this is best done by building a customer lifecycle structure using these three stages — Pre-Purchase, Purchase and Post-Purchase which we will cover in another post.

This type of structure allows you to not just focus on customer acquisition but also on retention - an area most companies spend little time doing.  The Customer Experience includes all aspects of the customer journey, from the moment they first become familiar with your company and its products through the actual sale and beyond.

One way to be effective in this structure is to establish your objective and key metrics to learn where you can increase customer success. Let’s take a look at a few areas to keep from losing your customers.

3 KEY AREAS

To begin building your customer success framework, we encourage you to set three key metrics to get customer data to measure your success throughout each stage.

1. Customer Health Score, this can help you determine if customers actually seeing value from your product or service.

2. Customer Churn Rate, this is great metric to measure if your Customer Success Managers are maintaining a healthy relationship with each of their clients. 

3. Customer Satisfaction Score, this will give your business a high-level idea of how customers feel after completing an interaction with the Customer Success team. 

Implementing these three metrics for increasing customer success can proactively lead to better retention rates and greater customer experience. Keep in mind, to create the most impact, an effective customer success management structure will be base on customer data.

We Build The Culture to mobilize your customer success team to thrive at giving your customers a better experience with your products/services and brand.  CultureSparq can help you get started.  Don’t lose another customer - reach out today to learn how. 

Let’s get on a call. Schedule a 1-on-1 with Chris Campbell to learn how we are mobilizing a winning culture.

The Anti-Retail Retail Club

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What is the Anti-Retail Retail Club?

The Anti-Retail Retail Club consist of shoppers unwilling or unable to associate in a loyal way with other retailers that don’t provide a seamless digital experience. But they increase brand awareness and loyalty with retail brands that do.

Data Fact

• 20%-70% of newly acquired customers defect in the first 100 days of the relationship

Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is about attracting the customers to your product or service, getting them to buy and finally who in return can bring you even more customers.

More than ever, customers are seeking a memorable or remarkable experience they can share with their network.

Your loyal customers are the ones who are going to buy your products even if they aren’t on sale and recommend your offerings to friends, and you always want that audience to be large enough to keep you afloat.

How are you increasing customer loyalty?

Today’s consumers have more access than ever to the best products, the latest technologies, and the coolest brands for pretty much any need. 

However, they don’t always have access to a seamless shopping experience, in part because retailers been slow to embrace Sparq Worldwide Unified Commerce strategy.

At CultureSparq we help brands deliver a Unified Commerce Experience to increase that brand loyalty and stays out of the anti-retail retail club.

No matter how or where your customers are shopping you should have a combination of e-commerce, mobile commerce, order fulfillment, inventory management, customer relationship management (CRM), and other technologies working together on a single platform.

Here are a few insights to help you stay in the loop with what customers are going to be looking for in the coming year. 

1. Use a Simple Points-Based System: Put a loyalty program methodology in existence so your frequent customers can earn points that offers some type of reward such as a discount code, freebie, or other type of special offer.

2. Pop-up stores: Get your customer attention with Pop-up shops.  This is a great method for building an organic brand awareness and recognition. To put some respect on your brand name, you can form partnerships with another company to provide all-inclusive offers.

3. Get Personal: Don’t ignore the customer emotional journey. Get intimate and make your customers feel special by creating a personalized experience with your product to generate customer feedback loops which creates special interaction for customers when they feel they are being heard.

Our Digital Transformation Journey in retail reimagines how a retailer uses Culture, Data and Technology to pursue new and improved revenue streams and new business models. 

CultureSparq is removing significant obstacles faced by retailers that embark on a digital transformation journey. 

Take some time today to contact us so we can share how we can transform your organization and keep your customers loyal.

If you need deeper insights, please schedule a 1-on-1 with Chris Campbell to learn how we are mobilizing a winning culture.

We Build The Culture!

Why You’re Not Done With Digital Transformation

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The Journey continues towards building a foundation of Systems.

WHAT IS A SYSTEM?

Simply put, a system is a combination of People, Process and Tools all trying to achieve an outcome.

BUILDING YOUR SYSTEM

We need to understand the benefits of what “building your system”does for your business. One benefit of this often unifies the problem solving and decision making of the organization to building a system — it allows you to figure out what is the first brick you will need to systematize in your business (e.g., on-boarding, deployments, content distribution, tools, etc) so you can optimize effectively.  

A second benefit is having the ability to connect all of your organization's intricate parts and interrelated steps to work together for the achievement of the business strategy.

How do you do this?  We like to share a few insights with you, on how CultureSparq will work with your brand to help build your systems to accelerate your Digital Transformation Journey. First, let’s look at how we approach building System in regards to areas that can help your business deliver quick wins.

We start with a proven framework that’s essential for any Digital Transformation Journey to achieve success. We then design and launch proof-of-concepts so you can learn, validate and scale your investments quickly. 

To begin building your system , we encourage you to start doing these three simple POCs:

1.  MOBILIZE PEOPLE

DELIVER AN AGILE DEPLOYMENT PROCESS

You want to turn great plans into great realities. There is a proven way to build agile teams (i.e., DevOps Teams or Product Teams) so your strategy deployment doesn’t feel like an uncharted journey through the wilderness.  Agile allows you to manage complex projects and focus on collaboration, customer feedback, and small, rapid releases. And, we grow it organically. 

Data Point: Most studies show that organizations are adopting Agile as the main solution to fix all their problems — thus the reason why so many agile transformations fail. Agile doesn’t solve every problem.

We are helping CEOs use Agile to develop software better, faster, and cheaper.  For more information on our managed service model check out SparqWorldwide.com. 

2.  AUDIT PROCESS

DELIVER AN INSTANT PROCESS/ SOP

This is the Process for creating alignment.  You have a specific way things need to be done and many times it feels faster to just do it yourself. This is an easy way to get your thoughts out of your head for others to follow. 

Our Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) audits your current documented processes your company has in place to ensure that services and products are delivered consistently every time.

Data Point:  Organizations that don’t optimize their SOP process will make slower decisions.  Which limits the enterprise to grow further—faster, in every aspect of the business.

3.  CONSOLIDATE TOOLS 

DELIVER A CONSOLIDATED AND AUTOMATED BI PLATFORM.  You want to consistently measure and improve customer satisfaction.  This is achieved by addressing simplification, standardization and governance processes holistically with the end result being a BI platform that is flexible, extensible and customizable.  The advantages of our tool consolidation POC can strengthen your core infrastructure by modernizing your legacy operating systems to drive efficiency.

Data Point: Studies show that organizations with low BI tool consolidation have fewer employees (~12%) using BI tools vis-a-vis organizations with high BI standardization and consolidation having more employees (~25%) using BI tools.

When it comes to creating a digital business, Culture, Data and Technology are the change blocks that must be addressed to bring about the changes you desire throughout your digital transformation journey. 

If you need deeper insights, please schedule a 1-on-1 with Chris Campbell to learn how we are mobilizing a winning culture.

Let’s get on a call.

What's Your Culture Worth - A Popup Webtalk with Chris Campbell

Digital Transformation Journey

Digital Transformation Explained

Digital transformation is about modernizing your infrastructure so your organization can evolve and thrive in all aspects of your business — what it offers, how it interacts with customers and how it operates.

Simply put, Digital Transformation is how to sustain a business through constant change.

Here's how CultureSparq works with brands all over the world to become digital enterprises. 

Mapping The Journey

Before we dive in, we need a little context. We need to understand the notion of “mapping the journey” from end-to-end and executing it iteratively via our Sparq Model; a lean framework concept that is essential for understanding the connection between enterprise agility and digital transformation. “Mapping the journey” is comprised of three perspectives: Culture, Data and Technology.  

1. Culture

Reimagine your digital workforce

Companies that build a culture to embrace agility and executes change management principles can reduce risk and ensure business continuity.

Our data shows digital transformations continue to fail due to the lack of talent and a disconnect between C-Suite and the rest of the organization.  We are helping companies reimagine their digital workforce by mapping and clarifying people skills to develop a world-class team of digital transformation experts who can both design and implement the solutions needed for scale.  

Leaders must mobilize a winning culture by focusing on elevating People, Process, Strategy.

How: This requires knowing the Emotional IQ of your workforce. 

2. Data

The role of data

By making data quality management and governance the currency of digital transformation initiatives, organizations can leverage the value of their data to unlock new opportunities, including support for new business models, improved customer service and use artificial intelligence and machine learning to discover new insights. 

We find data quality can be maintained at high levels by driving ownership of the data to the people who use it most frequently and understand it the best -- typically at the business level. 

Leaders must use data to dominate every step of the journey towards a digital enterprise. 

How: Bring Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to solve business problems.

3. Technology

Identify, Automate and Deliver

Digital leaders set themselves apart and create a clear competitive advantage by implementing the right technologies at the right time with a specific strategy and clear roadmap. From selecting a private or hybrid cloud strategy to adopting tools that make it easier to plan, track, and report across all teams, programs, software portfolios, and the enterprise. 

Our research shows digital technologies must support the overall business objectives and compliment the transformation goals companies are working towards.  Digital technologies exists to help organizations take the next step in their transformation processes by automating processes so the workforce can focus on more important, high-level tasks. 

Leaders must integrate digital technology into their business operations to identify new revenue opportunities, increase customer outreach, and deliver better value to their customers. 

How: Strengthen your core infrastructure by modernizing your legacy operating systems to drive efficiency.

When it comes to creating a digital business, Culture, Data and Technology are the change blocks that must be addressed to bring about the changes you desire throughout your digital transformation journey.

Let’s get on a call.