The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Hyper-Growth Organisations

There is no blueprint for establishing and running a successful company. However, even in the tough economic times we have faced over the last few years, there have been a number of organisations that have set themselves apart from the competition. Going from strength to strength these organisations include well-known brands such as Hailo, Orlebar Brown and GoPro. In this blog, I will share some insights into the approaches and actions of today’s most successful, fast-growing organisations and the seven habits that you should consider when mobilising your business for hyper-growth.

1. Offer Value and Spot Emerging Trends
Customers want true value from you – not perceived benefits. Customers are also continuously redefining their needs and wants, so the market is continually changing. This means that you have to build a product or service that adds consistent and compelling value to your customer beyond that of what competitors can offer. You have to spot opportunities and grasp them. Hailo, the online taxi booking service that matches taxi drivers and passengers through a mobile app, has done this incredibly well. It spotted a gap in the market and built an entirely new type of service around it – which has led to immense disruption in the industry and great success in a very short period of time. They were agile, audience focused and were able to scale rapidly once they hit a rich seam of success.

2. Identify Growth Opportunities
Companies can grow in two fundamental ways. They can grow their existing customer base organically – leveraging new products and services or they can acquire new customers, move into new markets or diversify their portfolio of offerings. The key to your organisation’s hyper-growth lies in your ability to identify the largest growth potential and then support that strategy across business divisions, sectors or even countries. Will you follow GoPro’s example: continuously developing new products to sell to customers as add-ons to their existing purchases? Or will you set yourself up for entering new markets like fashion retailer, Orlebar Brown, when starting to sell to the US market from the UK? Identify the opportunity and set the strategy (bearing in mind that you must continually reassess performance and market).

3. Hire Leaders with Focus
Little can be achieved without having the right leadership in place. Even if you have a great value proposition and you know where growth may come from in the future, you need a leadership team in place that can execute to your company strategy and objectives. True leaders will not only buy into the company vision but will drive it forward and help it to adapt to an ever changing market environment – spotting trends that can affect your business, sometimes even before they happen. To paraphrase Peter Drucker: ‘management’ is doing things right, but ‘leadership’ is doing the right things. You can’t have the former without the latter.

4. Create Effective Processes
Brilliant, fast-growing companies are built on brilliant processes. Processes must be efficient and scalable – linking the back and front offices in ways that enable decision makers to make the right choice at the right time for the benefit of the organisation, its employees and customers. Today, the majority of these processes are driven from within technology platforms such as ERP systems. It is therefore critical that any system you purchase sets you up for growth by offering you the scalability and flexibility you need at the drop of a hat.

5. Engage Brand Ambassadors
Nothing is as powerful as your customers telling the world about your great product or service. From the outset of developing your growth strategy you have to identify your brand ambassadors – whether they are employees, customers or wider influencers. Whether they tell your story through social media engagement, word of mouth or through interviews with media, you need others to tell your story to support your marketing.

6. Measure Your Success
Success is not luck. You constantly have to monitor what’s working within your business and what is not. You cannot control external factors, but you can measure and react to success or failure. Data-driven companies invest in technology that enable them to have the real-time information visibility, flexibility and response mechanism their organisations require, no matter the time, place or company structure. Big data leads to big advantage – if you can harness it more quickly and with more insight than your competitors.

7. Be Agile And Keep Innovating
Once you have built a fast growing organisation, the temptation may be to take your foot off the gas. But the world rapidly changes – and today’s winners can fast become losers if they do not continually reassess their position, customers and market opportunities. After all, the thing that many of the companies I have mentioned today, including my own company NetSuite, are doing so well is continuing to strive for innovation. Customers have more choice than ever before, and your competitors will spring up around you. Always be one step ahead.

I hope these seven drivers of hyper-growth organisations provide you with some food for thought. My question to you and your management team is, are you currently applying any of these habits? Do you agree? What is your recipe for success? We’d love to hear from you.

Independent Distributors Can Take Key Steps to Compete with Larger Rivals

Posted by Ranga Bodla, Senior Director of Industry Marketing, Manufacturing & Wholesale Distribution

It’s not easy being an independent distributor these days. They face constant competition from large national distributors, most of which have the advantage of multiple locations, more capital to support investments and the purchasing power to get volume discounts. That allows them to compete with wider inventories of products and lower prices, both of which are very appealing to business customers.

Even loyal customers may feel obliged to move to a distributor who can offer more products, for less money.
However, independents have some advantages the nationals don’t—especially in terms of expertise and services—and by operating more efficiently and making strategic partnerships; independent distributors can compete against the large discount providers.

That’s the message from a panel of experts who spoke at a recent webcast on “The Future of the Independent,” which highlighted ways in which distributors are challenged today, and how they can fight back.

Operating a successful distribution business requires keeping pace with changes in technology, workforce demographics, customer needs and pricing models, as well as in the overall economy and U.S. manufacturing industry, noted Jennifer Murphy, president of NetPlus Alliance, a buying group for distributers of industrial and contractor supplies. These challenges are harder to overcome when a distributor lacks the resources and networks of a national or international distribution company. Specifically, independents often suffer from weaknesses such as poor inventory management, outdated technology, insufficient finances to support growth, a lack of strategic planning, ignorance of best practices in pricing and a general fear of change.

Given all of the above, you might wonder how independents are surviving as well as they are. Fortunately, many are led by savvy business people who can identify the unique opportunities within their markets and align their business to maximize those opportunities.

Organic Spices is one distributor that has realized bottom-line gains by updating its business management software and operating more efficiently. An importer, manufacturer and distributor of hundreds of quality natural organic herbs, spices, seasoning blends, organic teas and organic chocolates, it has grown its business an average of 50 percent a year since upgrading from QuickBooks to NetSuite in 2007. The 50-plus person company, based in Fremont, Calif., has gained transparency across its business with NetSuite supporting key functions such as financials, inventory, packaging and distribution. Maker of the Spicely organics brand, Organic Spices has grown its wholesale channel, distributing product to leading food industry manufacturers. NetSuite’s manufacturing capabilities support custom packaging at the company warehouse, while lot tracking helps ensure compliance with FDA and other regulations, replacing what had been a time-consuming manual process. NetSuite purchasing and inventory capabilities help Organic Spices manage the lifecycle of more than 800 SKUs, with many products imported from across the world.

Additionally, an independent distributor can also leverage its goodwill with suppliers to get better pricing, or join a buying club to pool purchasing power with other independents. Small companies with knowledgeable employees can leverage that expertise to provide customer services that differentiate it from large discount distributors that may have little or no expertise in a specific area.

Murphy advised independents to begin diversifying their product line by attending trade shows to evaluate likely products to add and to begin expanding even if it’s just one or two products at a time.

To diversify services, Steve Short, president and CEO of Updike Supply, an inventory management solutions specialist and distributor of industrial MRO supplies, recommended adding services that will offer the greatest value to their customers and then educate customers about those services.

Networking is also critical. Short has expanded his network of contacts by talking with partners, customers, even competitors, to cultivate relationships, get referrals and ask for discounts and other extras from suppliers. He also shared his expertise and ideas, joined trade organizations and local groups.

His advice in a nutshell: Become an expert with customers, be dependable, and do a lot of networking.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Hyper-Growth Organisations

Posted by Pete Daffern, President of EMEA and EVP of Verticals, NetSuite

There is no blueprint for establishing and running a successful company. However, even in the tough economic times we have faced over the last few years, there have been a number of organisations that have set themselves apart from the competition. Going from strength to strength these organisations include well-known brands such as Hailo, Orlebar Brown and GoPro. In this blog, I will share some insights into the approaches and actions of today’s most successful, fast-growing organisations and the seven habits that you should consider when mobilising your business for hyper-growth.

1. Offer Value and Spot Emerging Trends
Customers want true value from you – not perceived benefits. Customers are also continuously redefining their needs and wants, so the market is continually changing. This means that you have to build a product or service that adds consistent and compelling value to your customer beyond that of what competitors can offer. You have to spot opportunities and grasp them. Hailo, the online taxi booking service that matches taxi drivers and passengers through a mobile app, has done this incredibly well. It spotted a gap in the market and built an entirely new type of service around it – which has led to immense disruption in the industry and great success in a very short period of time. They were agile, audience focused and were able to scale rapidly once they hit a rich seam of success.

2. Identify Growth Opportunities
Companies can grow in two fundamental ways. They can grow their existing customer base organically – leveraging new products and services or they can acquire new customers, move into new markets or diversify their portfolio of offerings. The key to your organisation’s hyper-growth lies in your ability to identify the largest growth potential and then support that strategy across business divisions, sectors or even countries. Will you follow GoPro’s example: continuously developing new products to sell to customers as add-ons to their existing purchases? Or will you set yourself up for entering new markets like fashion retailer, Orlebar Brown, when starting to sell to the US market from the UK? Identify the opportunity and set the strategy (bearing in mind that you must continually reassess performance and market).

3. Hire Leaders with Focus
Little can be achieved without having the right leadership in place. Even if you have a great value proposition and you know where growth may come from in the future, you need a leadership team in place that can execute to your company strategy and objectives. True leaders will not only buy into the company vision but will drive it forward and help it to adapt to an ever changing market environment – spotting trends that can affect your business, sometimes even before they happen. To paraphrase Peter Drucker: ‘management’ is doing things right, but ‘leadership’ is doing the right things. You can’t have the former without the latter.

4. Create Effective Processes
Brilliant, fast-growing companies are built on brilliant processes. Processes must be efficient and scalable – linking the back and front offices in ways that enable decision makers to make the right choice at the right time for the benefit of the organisation, its employees and customers. Today, the majority of these processes are driven from within technology platforms such as ERP systems. It is therefore critical that any system you purchase sets you up for growth by offering you the scalability and flexibility you need at the drop of a hat.

5. Engage Brand Ambassadors
Nothing is as powerful as your customers telling the world about your great product or service. From the outset of developing your growth strategy you have to identify your brand ambassadors – whether they are employees, customers or wider influencers. Whether they tell your story through social media engagement, word of mouth or through interviews with media, you need others to tell your story to support your marketing.

6. Measure Your Success
Success is not luck. You constantly have to monitor what’s working within your business and what is not. You cannot control external factors, but you can measure and react to success or failure. Data-driven companies invest in technology that enable them to have the real-time information visibility, flexibility and response mechanism their organisations require, no matter the time, place or company structure. Big data leads to big advantage – if you can harness it more quickly and with more insight than your competitors.

7. Be Agile And Keep Innovating
Once you have built a fast growing organisation, the temptation may be to take your foot off the gas. But the world rapidly changes – and today’s winners can fast become losers if they do not continually reassess their position, customers and market opportunities. After all, the thing that many of the companies I have mentioned today, including my own company NetSuite, are doing so well is continuing to strive for innovation. Customers have more choice than ever before, and your competitors will spring up around you. Always be one step ahead.

http://blogs.sap.com/innovation/cloud-computing/innovation-the-one-force-that-really-matters-01253689

Last year, Forbes columnist Steve Denning (I’m a big fan) ran an article with the headline “It’s Official! The End of Competitive Advantage”. What his article was actually saying is that sustainable competitive advantage is dead – a concept with which I wholeheartedly agree. Competitive advantage today is transient. It’s all part of our brave new world where big no longer beats small, where seemingly disparate markets are now interconnected, and where those with the ability to innovate and execute the fastest will trump the competition.

Technology has always had a traditional role in supporting business, but even this role is now changing. Take cloud computing, for example. The primary driver for cloud adoption was once all about lowering costs, and reducing total cost of ownership. Today, there’s a marked shift from economics to innovation as the primary driver for moving to the cloud. Leading-edge companies are figuring out pretty quickly that by investing in cloud services as the very foundation for their new competitive offerings, they can innovate and execute faster, fulfilling the Holy Grail of delighting customers profitably

I believe we are sitting smack bang in the middle of an unprecedented time of innovation. Thanks to Big Data, Cloud, Mobility, and Social, low cost go-to-market models are fuelling growth. New interlinked ecosystems of suppliers, customers and industries are blurring what were once traditional corporate borders. It’s everywhere you look. Music, technology, communication, travel, consumer electronics, automobiles, and even education are facing competitive new situations in which commercial advantages are quickly copied. The industry giants taking profits from a deep well of long standing, loyal customer relationships are a dwindling minority in the context of wider commerce.

By changing the way companies consume and use technology, cloud computing is playing a crucial role as an actual foundation for innovation. The exponential growth in computing power, data storage and networking capabilities is the result not only of a new delivery model that lowers total cost of operations, but of new innovative engagement models for the business itself. That’s a huge shift, and I think we’ll start to see some really interesting advances in the way we do, use and consume things.

In fact, IDC predicts worldwide spending on public IT cloud services will reach $59.5 billion this year, and is expected to be more than $107 billion in three years’ time by 2017. That’s a public cloud CAGR of 23.5% – five times that of the IT industry!

Whilst cost undoubtedly remains an attractive driver, innovation and competitive advantage is the real prize. IDC’s latest report, ‘Innovation in the Cloud’, delivers a quick and easy read if you’re looking for a short synopsis on the role of cloud computing as an innovation platform.

Innovation is not an option: it’s an imperative. The only question for your organisation is how you’re going to support it.

Steve Hurn Senior Vice President and General Manager Cloud and Line of Business, SAP

Competing with Amazon in B2B Commerce IS Possible

The decision to sell online is no longer one of “IF” or even “WHEN” for B2B suppliers. The decision distributors need to make today is “HOW FAST” – because the new arena for competition today is in B2B ecommerce and—just as we saw happen with B2C ecommerce—the B2B market is rapidly falling under the dominion of Amazon.com.

The traditional model of distribution is rapidly changing. It’s a whole different ballgame than it was 10 years ago. Today, B2B customers increasingly act like consumers with the desire for self-service tools and instant access to product information through their mobile devices. Many consumers are beginning to buy directly from wholesalers and manufacturers with easy to use ecommerce sites. Additionally, both manufacturers and distributors are looking to cost-effectively increase market share and reach new customers.

In order to more effectively compete, companies need to consider ecommerce as not just an afterthought but an integral part of their strategy to survive.

In just two years, the expectations of B2B customers have rapidly evolved to match those of B2C customers. Much of this it is due to the arrival of Amazon’s B2B marketplace AmazonSupply.com, which launched two years ago as a digital hub for buying equipment, parts, raw materials and supplies of all sorts for corporate buyers. AmazonSupply is encroaching on a growing number of industrial and business supply markets. Research from the Acquity Group found that close to half of business-to-business (B2B) buyers have bought from AmazonSupply and that 25% of B2B purchasers use AmazonSupply “frequently.”

While distributors are struggling to compete with Amazon, however, they would do well to learn from Amazon’s approach to distribution, marketing, customer service and R&D. In the webcast “AmazonSupply: Two Years Later,” a panel of experts shared their insight into how Amazon has done so well, so fast, with B2B distribution and how distributors who run up against Amazon can compete more effectively. Here’s what these experts see as the critical takeaways from Amazon’s rapid success in B2B:

Make ecommerce the hub of your business. Bob DeStefano, online marketing strategist for SVM E-Marketing Solutions advises that distributors must realize that B2B buyers are increasingly tech-focused Generation Y (Millenial) buyers moving up into procurement and management roles vacated by retiring Baby Boomers.

They shop online on their iPads or cell phones and expect to go online for corporate supplies. They want highly informational, content-rich and fully functional ecommerce sites that let them do everything in one place. They have little patience for suppliers who make online purchasing difficult and will most likely move to their competitors. This generational shift is happening now and will pick up speed over the next five years as the last of the Baby Boomers retire.

So distributors must treat their ecommerce sites as the hub of their marketing efforts.

That’s advice that more distributors need to follow. A survey sponsored by NetSuite in partnership withModern Distribution Management showed that distributors are concerned that their own sites lack advanced features. “The 2014 State of E-Commerce Distribution: The Maturing E-Commerce Channel” found that many had low levels of satisfaction with more advanced features such as live chat, price quotes and product suggestions.

Share your expertise with content. Along with rich functionality and communication, buyers want information. They do a lot of online research and price comparisons and appreciate credible content to help them make decisions. It also pays to be involved on search engines, which is how the majority of customers find out about products. Social media channels, as well as email marketing, should also be important methods of pushing out great content and building a reputation as a source and a resource of credible information.

Serve the supplier as well as the customer. Amazon knows how to create opportunities and nurture relationships with its B2B customers and partners. As Chuck Bennett, president of Business Data Links in Pomona, Calif. observed, Amazon has created programs beneficial to wholesalers and manufacturing. For instance, its Seller Central provides a vehicle for wholesalers to easily create a presence on Amazon in exchange for a small percentage of the gross sale. Being able to sell via Amazon is a big boost for many firms. Another program lets companies fulfill their products through Amazon, using its pick and pack capabilities and forecasting to keep inventory stored with Amazon at just-in-time levels. Amazon, as well as Google’s Shopping for Suppliers marketplace offer suppliers opportunities to communicate with and connect to their end customers. Everything they do is aimed at making business better for their suppliers.

Push the envelope of new ideas. Amazon is known for testing promising new ideas for services and programs. Amazon was an early pioneer in the web services market in 2006 selling storage and computing power to end-user organizations. It introduced “anticipatory shopping” or a just-in-time shipping arrangement that forecasts product needs and prepares products to ship immediately upon order. It recently expanded into fresh grocery deliveries, and has talked of delivering orders via drones. That constant quest to find better, cheaper, faster methods of delivering a wider array of products ensures Amazon is a market leader in new services and generates great media coverage as well. While Amazon has a lot more money to pour into experiments then most distributors, there are plenty of great ideas waiting to be tried and even one can make a significant competitive difference.

Learn more by viewing the webcast AmazonSupply: Two Years Later.