How do you sustain the momentum of your business once it starts to move? How do the moving parts connect to drive the vehicle forward? How do you create continuous momentum?
I’m not sure leaders are explaining to their teams how this works. Let me help by taking the analogy with cars a little further.
The key at first is Positioning. Where are you driving the vehicle? What’s the story of the trip?
The fuel consists of four things: People, Products, Money and Customers.
People: Are the team ready and fit for the journey ahead? Whatever your size now, start up or multi million $ corporation. You need great people.
Your products need to be built to align with the positioning. Your products have to be remarkable for your story to be believable. The story needs to be converted into compelling lead generation activity. This drives leads into your sales teams, and using a great sales process you find customers with symptoms you can improve. This drives customers into your bank account, which drives cash needed to grow.
On the way down this path you use the cash to build out customer support, to measure the right stuff, to build out the operations of the business.
You recalibrate the product constantly based on feedback from customers, opportunities in the marketplace, successes and failures.
This momentum forces you to zoom out occasionally to check your positioning is still on track. Is the vehicle still moving in the right direction? And assuming the direction still looks good we start the cycle of momentum all over again.
At the right time you bring on more talent, you develop more products, you gain more customers, and you generate more cash. But you are constantly aligning the (marketing) story, the sales scripts, the product road map and the balance sheet capacity for growth.
I know it’s a nice analogy but business is far more complicated than that!
Is it?
