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The Six Disciplines of Business Success
Deep consulting is an intensive, but time-limited, consulting program where I work closely with the company to do a thorough analysis of their business and design strategic solutions to some of their most important business challenges. Deep Consulting is offered over a minimum of six months and can last for up to two years depending on the size of an organization. The only variables are size and depth.
The longer the program that a company chooses, the more depth we can explore and the more comprehensive the resulting strategy will be.
Here’s how it works…
Deep Consulting Program
The program consists of three stages conducted across six disciplines of the business.
The three stages are…
1. Inquiry, Audit, and Analysis
We begin with assessing what already exists and contrast that against where we seek to go.
2. Strategy & Process Design
The assessment will inform the plan.
3. Implementation and Training
The plan is then put into action.
The three stages are…
1. Inquiry, Audit, and Analysis
We begin with assessing what already exists and contrast that against where we seek to go.
2. Strategy & Process Design
The assessment will inform the plan.
3. Implementation and Training
The plan is then put into action.
The Six Disciplines
The Program
This is a brief overview of the Deep Consulting Program
Business
To start with, I’m going to look at your business.
- how you make money, what products and/or services you offer, and who your competitors are.
- profit margin, costs of goods and/or cost of labor.
- cost of acquisition of a new customer and your close ratio (leads-to-sales)
- your teams and your team members, roles and responsibilities, superstars and opportunities
- processes and documentation
- salaries and benefits, and how you invest in your people outside of those two factors
- vendors and strategic partners
All of this and more will inform future work in brands, leadership, marketing and sales.
Brand
Your Brand is about more than just your logo, fonts, and colors. Those are just your visual Brand standards. Your Brand should answer an important question: What do you stand for?
Our Brand Work will include the design of a comprehensive Brand Strategy and Messaging Architecture. This will function as your entire company’s North Star. We will cover purpose, vision, values, one-livers and more…
This Brand work is the antithesis of every arbitrary conversation about “which shade of blue should our logo be.” It’s the one where we make consequential decisions that inform every aspect of the business.
Leadership
When you truly come to understand the traits of great leaders, you realize that it’s not a title but a mindset, and it needs to permeate every person in your company. In this phase, I’ll be working with you to uncover how you currently support the growth of leadership skills at all levels of the organization.
I will start with people in formalized leadership roles. I’ll analyze their team performance and learn about their unique challenges. Next, I’ll survey individual team members who are not in formal leadership roles to better understand what their experiences are like with regard to the company’s leadership.
Together, we’ll talk through how leaders are expected to set and manage goals, how they are expected to communicate with their team members, and how leaders motivate their teams.
Throughout this entire process of audit and inquiry, the goal is to find the gaps so that you can build and implement a plan that results in an extraordinary organization of effective leaders.
All of this work is based on my book The Lovable Leader.
Culture
Your culture answers a very basic question:
“What is it like to work here?”
Your culture touches on such a wide variety of things that it would be difficult to list every single one of them. Here are just a few that we will look into in our work together.
- Who gets promoted and who gets acknowledged?
- What behaviors are encouraged?
- What are our values?
- What can I get away with here?
- Do my leaders care about me?
- What does our business care about?
- Do I feel safe here?
- Do I want to stay here for my entire career?
Your culture is a direct representation of your brand and your leadership intersecting. Your culture affects your ability to attract and retain talent. It is the variable that sets the limit of your organization’s true potential.
While culture is not something that can be controlled, it is something that can be influenced. What you encourage and what you allow matter. Who you hire and who you fire matter.
During this phase of our work together we uncover what it is like to work at your company and if what we find is not what we want, then we create the path to get where we want to go.
Marketing
This is where it all comes together. It is only after I have looked at your business, understood what your brand is all about, examined how your leaders guide their team and analyzed how your culture supports your various business endeavors that I can properly look at your marketing. Marketing is not a function separate from the rest of the business, it is the megaphone that amplifies what exists.
In this phase of our work together we will look at every single marketing tactic you have employed over the last three years. We will look at what has worked and what has not worked. We will analyze your customer personas. We will review your analytics data.
Once we are done reviewing every nook and cranny of your marketing function, I will ensure that the work that we have done together to understand your business, your brand, and your culture fit together into a cohesive and persuasive marketing approach the drives the business and it’s mission forward. Today there is functionally no difference between a digital marketing strategy and a marketing strategy. Everything today must include digital and it all must be tightly integrated.
There must be a confluence, the point where every strategy and tactic are tightly woven together. To build this machine is not easy and it requires careful planning and resource allocation. But, if you do it correctly, you can build a marketing machine that over time will drive costs down and increase revenue automatically.
At the conclusion of this part of the program you will know beyond a shadow of a doubt what marketing tactics you should use and which you should avoid, along with how each of them connect to and support one another.
Sales
No business can exist without sales. In this phase of our work together we examine your sales process from start to finish.
- How long does a sale take? Are there opportunities to shorten that?
- What is the average sale price? Are there opportunities to improve that?
- Who is your best salesperson? What makes them so much more effective?
- What is your sales process?
- Are your salespeople using social media effectively?
- What about messaging? Do your salespeople follow the same messaging as your marketing folks?
These are just a few of the questions we need to ask to better understand the potential of your sales function and design a plan to get your solution into the hands of more customers.
I will analyze past performance, and the current process to help you design a more efficient and effective sales function, informed by marketing and brand excellence.
Interested? Let's talk.
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