How Do You Grow Sales Revenue?

When we recently surveyed a diverse group of business leaders about the greatest challenge facing their organizations in the near term and long term, we heard from most that by far the biggest challenge was to grow revenue.

Many of them have accomplished great productivity improvements, but until demand increases, the additional capacity cannot be put to profitable use. In fact, throughout the world, economies are suffering from excess capacity which leads to high levels of unemployment.

When we don’t have enough sales, our tendency is to cut jobs, cut capacity and lower costs. But, as many of you may know, this approach does nothing to grow sales revenue and often results in some dire circumstances.

Clearly there are alternatives... and we plan to present additional information on this subject going forward. In the meantime, maybe you'd like to share some success stories about how your organization has grown sales revenue?

Motivation for Improvement

In order to make the kinds of improvements in business that we all aim for, we need to motivate people to engage their brains to the fullest, examine the current work processes critically, think deeply about root causes, and think expansively about possible solutions. We want them to consider alternatives, anticipate and minimize risks, implement planfully, and measure and evaluate results. And we usually want people to do all this while keeping up operational responsibilities as well.

So the challenge of motivating our team becomes very important.

In his recent book, Drive, the Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink explores the impact on performance of different approaches to motivation. His research might surprise you!

For more details, we highly recommend his book. You might also read more on the subject in one of our recent newsletter articles.