Are you focused on the right products or services?
- Which products/services generate 80% of your revenue? What is the value of the others?
- What are you still offering because it seemed like a good idea a few years ago?
- If you could only sell 3 things, what would they be? Is this your central lineup today?
- Which products or services cost you more in complexity (ops, training, inventory) than they produce in margin?
Are you selling them right?
- How many ways can someone buy from you? Honestly speaking, which of them would you want to use, if you were a customer?
- Which channel would you miss the least if it disappeared tomorrow?
- Which channels drive less than 10% of your revenue? What are they costing you: in time, support, attention?
- Which channels are truly helping your business grow? Which are detrimental?
Are you connecting with customers?
- How many different messages are you sending about who you are and what you do?
- Which marketing activities are driven by competitive rather than business objectives?
- Which message and channel do you think best represents your brand? Would a customer have the same answer?
- If you had to eliminate one marketing activity, which would it be?
Is support costing more than you’re earning?
- What is the true cost of each product / channel / activity – not just margin, operational costs and complexity, training, errors, time, stress?
- Which products or processes are most likely to confuse employees, generate questions, cause errors?
- What tool, system, or process did you adopt to solve a problem that no longer exists?
- What process or function was created solely to manage the complexity of something else?
- Where has “flexibility for the customer” quietly become “chaos for the team”?
Are you working to eliminate complexity?
- Are you holding onto complexity 1) because it’s working, 2) because it’s the way you’ve always done things, or 3) because you don’t have time to simplify?
- What’s one thing you could cut this month that would make everything else easier?
Is complexity hurting your profits?
- What’s the true cost (not just financial) of your most complicated product/service or channel?
- What’s the worst that could happen if you aggressively simplified your product lineup, sales, marketing or support? Where are the biggest risks?
- What would you build if you started today, knowing everything you know now?
Want more information on growing your business?
Read the full post about the challenges of complexity and how to fix it
Complexity hurts growth: read our post about what real growth looks like; or ask yourself our growth-related questions
