Assessment Tools

Accelerated growth comes from understanding data, not a blind faith in intuition or opinion. While most business owners and executives think it is obvious that growth is desired, it can only be achieved or sustained if the organization’s structure and strategies are aligned with each other.

  • Is your desire to grow based on growing market share, customers or blocking new competitors from entering your market?
  • Are you searching for new opportunities, perhaps in retrospect having missed some during the past few years?
  • Have you quantified your best opportunities to grow – e.g. find more new customers, sell more to existing customers, enter new markets?
  • Can you identify the drivers that will accelerate your growth – and why they’re not in place now?

Comprehensive Growth Assessment

BDS SMARTGrowth begins with our time-tested Growth Assessment Survey only to be completed by the owner, CEO and chief financial executive. Reviewing, sales, revenues, profits, marketing strategies, customer segments and trends gives us important information about the organization’s past performance and where improvements can be made. We’ll also meet with key company leaders to discuss organizational structure and leadership hierarchy.

Employee Surveys

We identify a diverse, random group of employees from whom we want to solicit specific information about your organization’s growth opportunities and challenges. These surveys are confidential, written instruments that ask your employees to provide input around critical growth drivers. These surveys are completed confidentially to ensure employees that specific information is never attributed to a department or individual.

Customer Interviews

We conduct interviews (phone or in-person, depending on location) with your organization’s most valuable customers to learn about your key customer relationships and how they perceive the value your’re providing. This is a critical part of our assessment process and it allows us to more thoroughly understand your organization and growth accelerators.

Customer Relationship Management

It seems obvious that successful customer relationship management is an imperative for growth. But many companies need to improve their system for attracting, identifying and nurturing its MVCs (Most Valuable Customers). Too often customers are viewed as the province of Sales or Customer Service. But growing MVCs – and the profit that brings – is not the task of a department – it’s the job of the entire company. Owners and company executives need to understand the critical relationship between customer satisfaction and profits.

  • In fact, a 10% increase in retention typically increases profits by 30%

With such a dramatic impact on an organization’s bottom line, MVCs are a key path to accelerated growth. BDS advisors unleash this potential in several ways:

  • Thorough data analysis of your customer base and MVCs
  • Voice-of-the-Customer Interviews
  • Customer Satisfaction Surveys
  • Sales executive training on the “Relationship Review” concept

Growth Accelerator Process

“Strategic Planning” is sometimes seen as tedious work, perhaps unnecessary or a process only required by large organizations. Not true, especially for companies seeking accelerated growth. In times of change, when people in your company may even be executing their own duplicative or conflicting strategies, BDS SMARTGrowth brings them back into alignment with clarity and consensus on the critical accelerators that drive the business. Our process focuses on leading your team through the change required for acceleration, working with you and your team to co-create a growth vision with actions steps surrounded by a culture of accountability.

“Strategy without action steps for tomorrow is a dream, not a plan.” (Peter Drucker)

Sales & Marketing Audit

Sales and Marketing are truly at the center of growth acceleration, of course. As part of BDS SMARTGrowth, we conduct an audit on the full spectrum of sales/marketing performance:

  • Structure and processes
  • Message and branding clarity
  • Marketing communications effectiveness
  • Sales tools
  • Competitive information
  • Channel strategy
  • Sales automation and metrics reporting

Leadership/HR Strategy

Strategy. Structure. People. We believe these are the essential building blocks to creating growth and a long-term sustainable future for any organization. With the right growth vision in place, we help you focus on the right structure and the talent to support it. We support you with:

  • Talent Acquisition – helping to hire and retain the right people
  • Organizational structure – aligning reporting structures, roles and responsibilities, job descriptions, and performance management tools
  • Performance Incentive Programs – creating support and energy for attainment of company goals
  • Executive Coaching – helping owners and senior executives manage change, transition and growing pains
  • Leadership Development – help develop future leaders and create stronger managerial bench strength across the organization

Succession Planning/Exit Strategies

Who’s on your bench? No growth company is driven by a single individual, no matter how critical the owner, founder or CEO is to the business. Creating true organizational value requires creating a broad group of leaders and a long-term vision for succession that motivates them for the future. For many BDS engagements, we’re working collaboratively with company ownership to plan succession and exits, as well as valuation and objective recommendations on grow-or-sell scenarios.