Achieving Breakthrough Performance

Purpose of this article
- What are the factors which can lead to achieving "Breakthrough Performance"?

Defining "Breakthrough Performance"?
- Achieving performance disproportionately higher when compared to investment or effort input.

How can it be achieved?

A new venture or an existing company can achieve breakthrough performance by following at least some of the following:
· Dramatic improvement in performance of their own teams, which is typically achieved
- better processes, communication,
- through Better HR
§ higher inspiration level / sense of purpose (employees as stakeholders)
§ better recruitment
§ the above however are only contributory factors and will not directly result in achieving breakthrough performance

· Sales & Marketing Innovation
- Finding new customers in existing markets (such as new applications for existing drugs)
- Significantly reducing cost of sales or customer acquisition (think network marketing) (eg – Dell)
- Finding and developing newer target markets / customer segments
- Better Advertising / Brand Building
· Product/Service Innovation
- significant improvement in reducing wastage (could be of time, material, other inputs again)
- through discoveries in newer processes or materials
- Solving new problems by tweaking existing products (eg – mobile banking)
- Solving new or existing un-addressed problems (eg - blackberry)
- Significantly reducing delivery time / order servicing time (eg – Macdonalds)

· Financial Innovation
- Think low cost funds for bank/ FIs / high CAPEX industries

· Better PR
- An overlooked domain, but extremely important to achieve breakthrough performance (not to mention correspondingly higher shareholder rewards, achieved by share price commanding higher PE ratios) (eg - think Infosys)

· Servicing & Customer retention
- Especially in industries marked by high customer churn, breakthrough performance could be achieved by achieving high customer retention through better service delivery


Can you think of others? Contributions invited..

Product Differentiation & Frequent Software Updates

How often do you check a company’s news release section to check the current activity (& energy level of the organization). It is much the same with software. Frequent updates provide a multilevel assurance to customers. It reinforces the view that they are buying into something which is growing, healthy and will evolve with future. It also creates an impression that at least some of changes must be driven by existing or potential clients. This helps reinforce a view that a customer eco-system already exists for the product/service.

Optimal update frequency
The frequency of updates however will depend very much on the life-stage of the product and industry itself. For essentially a bug-fix-release cycle multiple updates in a week should be acceptable. Whereas for a software upgrade release cycle, a once a month or once every two months could more practical. This creates enough deadlines (&milestones) to achieve optimal productivity and to ensure that the product is not much out of sync with the requirements.
Projects/ Product Relevancy
Internal IT applications, utilities, ecommerce projects, small protocol software development projects
Critical Success Factors
The requirement gathering and prioritization is the most important aspect. A practical market / user driven approach is the most beneficial to ensure product success. Ensuring completion of test-cycles is equally important.
Further Questions
Should a software release be primarily bug fix or new feature only?
Should you combine releases, which address different customer-segments?

ROI on discount offers

How far will discount offers go in triggering customer interest in an otherwise languid season? Fence sitters are clearly excitable set which can flow in your direction based on offers of Addons/Discounts. With several competing offers of add-ons & discounts from online retailers, the ROI keeps becoming more difficult to achieve. The going rate for a customer to be acquired in an online space is anywhere between USD 30 - 100 for a product sale price of between USD 100 - 500 with a gross-margin of between USD 5 - 50. So you need between 2 - 6 sales of each product to sometimes justify an initial customer acquired. In turn each customer may also provide 1-2 additional referrals, which will further help drive down the number of sales required to create a +ve ROI. The lesson perhaps is then to deliver a +ve brand experience which results in referrals and helps create a serial customer chain to lower your overall customer acquisition costs. Effective metrics on conversion / customer acquired can then help you in taking the decisions on what can be offered in terms of discounts.