In the medical field, diagnosis relates to identifying and understanding the nature of a disease or disorder, while a prognosis is a prediction of the probable outcome of a disease or disorder.
If the diagnosis is, your sales are decreasing, surely the prognosis is, if you don't react, you will be out of a job or a business.
What is it that stops companies from obtaining a different perspective and opinion on their business SOP’s? Is it simply the insecurity of middle or senior management, not wanting to appear to be incapable of resolving the issues that they face (or possibly helped to create).
Surely the secure employee would research all opportunities and remain secure that their diligence could in fact help to get the business back on track?
Sadly the latter mentality and course of action is unusual in our experience.
Any good manager should see the early signs of a downward turn in business, lower sales volumes, reduced efficiencies, closing %’s dropping and also staff engagement stuttering, we are always told prevention is the best cure, these symptoms are early warning signals signifying that this the time to take action, don’t ignore these signals and wait for them to develop into a full blown crisis.
You would think that’s good advice and should be standard best practices in business today, how many times do we see companies ignore the warnings, attempt to raise funding to stay afloat while continuously failing to adapt and eventually closing down with unmanageable debts.
Surely it is better business to invest early in resolving your challenges and to maintain a constant equilibrium than to attempt to fire fight.
We constantly try to get this message into senior management and yet they simply see a cost, which is “outside of current budgets”, one bad quarter is all it takes sometime for a situation to become irretrievable.
Earlier this year we had one client who decided to take our proposal and attempt to Do it Themselves (to save cost) 6 months of continued decrease in sales volume, highlighted what an expensively bad decision that was.
Hindsight is a wonderful gift, and surely trying something different is more palatable than attending a receivers meeting to explain the insolvency of your business, or trying to explain to your Chairman why you allowed things to become so bad.
The one good thing with using an external sales strategist for example is measured results, you should be able to quickly see or feel a difference in figures, enagagement levels and increased efficiencies, this will assist in making the fees more palatable until such time as you appreciate the fees as a valuable investment in your business, and kudos to you for making the decision.
So don’t be insecure listen to the diagnosis make the correct decision and reflect in the glory when it helps turns things around, bringing in external assistance is not a sign of weakness or desperation, it is a sign of great and wise leadership.
Pro-active or Re-active - Prevention or Cure.
Which do you align with?