Most of us know the strategic use of the Balance Scorecard. We use it or at least a variation of it, to run our business. If it is good for your business, would it not be something that is simple and straight forward for your customer. A quick overview of the four areas of the Balance Scorecard:
- Financial: How do we look to shareholders?
- Customers: How do customers see us?
- Internal process: What must we excel at?
- Innovation and Learning: Can we continue to improve and create value?
Balanced Scorecard aligns organizations to new strategies: away from the historic, short-term focus on cost reduction and low-price competition, and toward generating growth opportunities by offering customized, value-added products, and services to customers.
All this sounds pretty good so why don’t we just reverse the strategy and make our Sales and Marketing presentations accordingly?
To measure your product or services value to your customer organizations:
- Financial: What increase in revenue or decrease in cost are they going to achieve?
- Customers: What will allow them to leapfrog or succeed more than their competition?
- Internal process: What will change and how do you minimize the worst case scenario?
- Innovation and Learning How easy is it to implement and who is involved?
If we continue on and follow the best practices for using the Balanced Scorecard. Our approach would continue by keeping objectives simple, use others(most specifically our customers) to help develop specific objectives, link objective to revenue increase/cost reductions and clearly state and communicate objectives.
This may not be totally encompassing of a good presentation but if these four scorecards areas were accounted for in every presentation, would you improve your likelihood of success?