1. What percentage of time and emotional energy does the management team routinely devote to revenue growth?
2. Are there just exhortations and talk about growth, or are there actually a lot of meetings and brainstorming sessions about how growth is going to happen? How good is the follow-through?
3. Do managers talk about growth only in terms of home runs? Do there understand the importance of singles and doubles for long-term sustained organic growth?
4. How much of each management team member's time is devoted to making effective visits with customers? Do they do more than listen and, probe for information and then try to "connect the dots"?
5. Does the management team come in contact with the final user of your product?
6. Are people in the business clear about what the specific future sources of revenue growth will be? Do they know who is accountable?
7. Would you characterise your company or business unit's culture as cost-cutting or growth oriented? If the answer is one or the other, you need to start doing both. Do people in leadership positions have the skill, orientation, and determination to grow revenues?
8. Does the company practice revenue productivity, that is, does it think through whether there are ways to more effectively use current resources to generate higher revenues?
9. How well and how regularly does your sales force - and others in the organization - extract intelligence from customers and other players in the marketplace? How well is this information communicated and acted on by other parts of your organization, such as product development?
10. How good are the upstream marketing skills - that is, the ability to segment markets and identify consumer attributes - in your business?
11. Is the head of marketing in your business an upstream marketing expert?
12. How good is the relationship and information flow between upstream marketing and product development? Between upstream marketing and R&D?
13. Do you have an explicit growth budget in your organization's traditional budget document? How well is the growth budget connected with revenue growth beyond the current fiscal year? Are there funds allocated in the growth budget for medium- and long-term revenue growth?
14. How skilled are the people in your business in creating value propositions for each major customer segment of your business? How effective is your organization in using cross-selling to accelerate revenue growth?
15. How often and how effectively is information shared simultaneously among people who make decisions about resource trade-offs?
16. How good is the flow of ideas in your business?
17. How good is the process of selecting ideas that will be funded as growth projects?
18. How well defined are the steps of the nurturing process in getting revenue growth projects ready for launch? How effective is the process?
By answering these questions, you can confirm if your company is growing, not growing or is in decline.
Start by compiling a list of simple things you could do Monday morning that would lead to "singles and doubles" - steady increases in sales.
Instead of bemoaning the fate of your company, draw upon your inner psychological reserves.
Be determined to lead and adopt a whole attitude and presence that would be 180 degrees from what it had been in recent weeks.
Profitable growth can be everyone's business.
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