Business Throughput matters. Throughput tracks, measures and assesses the rate of production from input to delivery of the finished outcome.
In terms of business throughput, input includes developing customers and business and closing sales. Your team sets the customer’s table with the promise of high quality design, engineering and manufactured outcomes.
Your customers anticipate that you have their backs from business development to order to cash (theirs and yours).
Your business throughput process matters. It connects the dots between customer expectations and their realistic assessment of your company’s deliverables. And whether or not they want to come back for more.
How frequently do you measure the impact of business throughput? How do you assess the impact of your company’s throughput capabilities on new business development and customer loyalty and retention?
- When a sale is consummated is your business model still structured in discipline-driven silos?
- When a new project is awarded, does your Project Management Group gain sole possession of implementation? Do they include or marginalize the sales team responsible for landing the deal?
- When a new project is won, and comes in house for implementation and execution, does it enter your company’s Business Throughput Black Hole? While your internal team gets busy, what type of light do your customers see?
Do all of your internal customers have each other’s backs from business development to order to design and implementation to cash?
Your sales team still is responsible for continuing post-outcome relationships. What is their role in your internal business throughput processes during and after the contract is won? Your project manager’s focus is walking that contract through the plant and out the door. What about your account manager’s?
Would it make more sense to consider a business throughput model which strategically aligns these traditionally segmented functions?
Throughout your organization, one team’s input provides throughput for the next team. Each team’s role isn’t finished at that hand-off. Everyone has to “live with” design decisions make in between input and output.
The quality of business throughput brands your company.
- Are you a nimble and flexible innovator or an assembly-line order-taker?
- Even though you might be producing customized deliverables, are you focused on connecting the dots for your internal customers as well as your external customers?
Business throughput evaluates the impact of customer experience throughput the entire input-to-output process. Business throughput has always been there for you to define and observe, measure, analyze, improve and control. It’s just that your focus was on outcomes and accounts receivables, and justifiably so.
Something for you and your team to chew on?
Babette N. Ten Haken, President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers®, LLC, is a business coach and management consultant. She remodels startups and small-to-medium size manufacturing and service companies experiencing unpredictable revenue streams and inconsistent growth and expansion initiatives. Babette was named a Social Selling 2015 Top50 Influencer and a 2014 Top 50 Marketing & Sales Influencer. Babette’s blog won the 2014 Bronze Medal, Top Sales World. Babette’s book on horizontal business development and collaboration strategies, including tools, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com.
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