Strategy execution: Timing matters
Dieter Weisshaar • August 1, 2020
Photo by Erik Witsoe on Unsplash
Timing is more important than you thought
You have been given a challenge, a special project or starting a new leadership role. Timing matters
more than you may have thought. Let's assume you have been taken a new leadership role on restructuring a loss making business. Stop the bleeding may be determined by the amount of cash, bank debts or shareholder commitments you have before you run out of cash. Or you have got a new assignment to turn a business into a growth mode. Depending on your industry and sector hiring and sell cycles
are long, hence if you do not start now, there is no impact this quarter, year etc.. You can do the right things but when timing is wrong you will not succeed in the timeframe expected and suffer.
Different scenarios where timing is crucial:
- Loss making businesses need funding to turn them around. Determine the time is needed to stop the bleeding on a monthly base and have a good understanding on the funding you may get from existing cash, bank debts or other stakeholders. You measures in e.g. top-line growth, cost cutting or bank negotiations or capital increases may set your priorities. Everything else is less important as this can become a tipping point like zero or one.
- Growth cases require products or services ready to sell, a marketing execution which hits the ground and a sales team that is ready to close deals. You are in January and your boss has approved investments into marketing and sales which need to pay out before year end. You need four campaigns to generate leads and five more sales reps to qualify the leads and close opportunities. If your hiring time is three to six month, you need to put your job posting out there before you even start developing your marketing campaigns or sales playbook because you have a team ready to execute in July at best and your ROI within one year is now solely depending on the sales cycles of your business and the readiness of your portfolio. If the portfolio isn't ready yet, get this done second and prepare trainings for the existing and new teams, right after you look into the marketing execution and how to accelerate the lead generation e.g. by an agency to have a pipeline when your sales team is ready for execution. Automate your proposal and order taking processes as a next step that your sales execution is not suffering from administrative overload.
- External events determine your timeline, e.g. the key fair or a legislation topic such as GDPR compliance. In this case you need to consider what you need by when to be ready to address the challenge and in case you can't make it, think about a plan how you can avoid a negative impact for the business.
There may be more scenarios which will impact your planning, strategy and execution. But timing may significantly change your priorities on doing things. It can jeopardize the best practice cookbook doing things in sequence. That makes the significant difference between strategy creation and strategy execution. The second is the more difficult one and there are far less people in the industry who can do the execution part properly.
From my business experience you need to evaluate the following topics to do a quick check if your timing is right or crucial to succeed:
Ressources
that determine timing:
- Do I have cash, investment funds & headcount, authority to develop the business or is there a limitation which determines the timeline and priorities?
- Is the limitation on ressources a hard stop (go / no go) or something which is manageable?
Time to execution (readiness):
- Do I have the product and services
to sell to generate top-line if not what is the mitigation strategy or the timeline to get it fixed?
- Do I have opportunities to change e.g. cost structures if needed as long term contracts on spending run out or a loss making customer contract is up for renegotiation? What does it take to implement other measures?
- Do I have the processes and skills
within the business to execute the plan? If not, what does it take to get ready for execution. Hiring cycles, process changes and IT implementation take time. Do not underestimate ramp up time for your teams in training and communication.
- How long is the time that the measures will make an impact such as marketing lead generation, sales cycles, cost cuttings? E.g. software license sales has an immediate impact on top-line while cloud subscriptions have a larger impact on the next fiscal year. Lease agreements may only have an impact when the contract period is over while other spendings have immediate impact.
KPIs to measure:
- Do I have a financial modeling on the impact on a monthly base which is realistic to predict and measure the impact?
When you take all of this into account and you have a good plan which can change on its way as the world has become more agile but the good plan needs a few more things
to get you to succeed:
- Experience and skills
on your team are crucial. Diverse teams can master challenges better. Always have a look if the team has the ability to execute
- Communication and empathy
is a key success factor. Great plans suffer if the team does not understand the why and how.
- Expectation management is most important. You always have stakeholders in your business and they need to have realistic expectations on your plan. Do not overpromise and underdeliver that will reduce trust and harm your reputation. Be realistic, clear and communicate frequently even on deviations to your plan which can happen if you are in a changing environment.
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you need to get a job done that includes courage and expertise.
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