Aligning your business strategy to your market and to your customer is obviously critical to your success. So let’s talk about how it gets misaligned and why people fail at it. One of the biggest reasons companies fail is that you have put together a strategic plan where you know your monthly position, you know who you are going after and you know what your gaps are, but that strategic plan never gets operationalized in an operating plan that has the same intensities and the same drivers as the strategic plan.
So what happens is the daily whirlwind of what is urgent today overtakes what’s important tomorrow in terms of your strategic plan because you don’t have the operating plans, functions and processes that keep you on task with your strategic plan. Customer retention will tell you that you have failed because if you have customers leaving within 24 months of coming, whatever your strategic plan to get them to you was, it was not operationalized and therefore they are leaving.
A good example of a failure is when you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get computer uptime from 98 percent to 99 percent because someone convinced you that it was important to customer retention, but it really wasn’t. If you went back to your strategic plan and the gap analysis, it would tell you that. So you have spent all those dollars doing something that didn’t turn into revenue and retention and money.
At all times you have got to keep the strategic plan and the operational plan in alignment and, by doing that, all your work will go towards growing your retention and your revenue and you will succeed. It’s that exquisite focus between your operational plan and your strategic plan that keeps you on line to growing revenue.