Over my 25 year career I’ve been fortunate to be the recipient of great sales and business training.  My library has over 60 books written by the best business experts, consultants and trainers.  Even though I’ve read them all, I consistently re-read those that pertain to specific disciplines I’m involved with in helping my clients.

One of the best is “Profitable Growth Is Everyone’s Business”, written by Ram Charan.  Ram has written or co-authored 7 books and I’ve read several.  In “Profitable Growth Is Everyone’s Business”, Ram outlines 10 tools of profitable revenue growth.  “Growth is a creative act, but it is also a social process that is disciplined and links together the moving parts of an organization to achieve a consistent increase in revenues.”

The tools for growth beg a thought process that requires commitment, dedication and a desire to win.

What are you doing to help your customer?
In every customer interaction, how well do your people extract information about customer needs?
How does that information get shared internally?
Is your focus on cost cutting at the expense of revenue growth?
Are you focused solely on one big idea or multiple small ideas?
Can you improve productivity and increase revenue at the same time?

Ten Tools
1.  Is revenue growth part of everyone’s business every day?
2.  Work to hit more singles and doubles, not just home runs.
3.  Seek good growth and avoid bad growth.
4.  Dispel the myths that inhibit both people and organizations from growing.
5.  Turn the idea of productivity on its head by increasing revenue productivity.
6.  Develop and implement a growth budget.
7.  Beef up upstream marketing.
8.  Understand how to do effective cross-selling (or value/solutions selling).
9.  Create a social engine to accelerate revenue growth.
10.  Operationalize innovation by converting ideas into revenue growth.

The implications in Ram’s Ten Tools clearly indicate the need for an open company culture, the importance of teamwork, communications and the overall need for training.

The chapters in “Profitable Growth Is Everyone’s Business” are filled with practical, easy to understand perspectives on how you can create your own high performance customer development strategy.