Businesses that fail to see the value in communicating their corporate strategy and objectives with their existing customers are missing out on a golden opportunity to develop stronger relationships. Surely, argues Cris Beswick from Let’s Think Beyond and David Gallagher, B2B Copywriter at Chapter & Verse, all businesses should be striving to achieve this in tougher economic times.

You don’t need to read another article about whether we’re officially in a recession or not. Your brain starts to switch off the minute people preface their first sentence with ‘credit crunch’. And quite frankly, you’re sick of seeing the ‘top ten tips to marketing your way to success in an economic downturn’ that appear on virtually every blog, business page and unsolicited email you receive. Like it’s that easy.

So if you’ve read this faar you’ll be pleased to know this isn’t another of those articles. Because we think your time is more important than that. And ours certainly is.

Most businesses we work with, whether in the good times or the bad, are more focused on growing by attracting new customers. Develop the right products, target the right customers with the right messages in the right media and of course that is more than achievable. It’s good marketing practice after all. But few businesses we work with have anything that remotely resembles a strategy for increasing value from the existing client base. And even less have an overall strategic vision that their core stakeholders – employees and customers – can articulate.

Focusing time, effort and resource on your existing client base makes economic sense in any type of economy. By thinking more innovatively and more creatively, businesses retain existing customers, encourage them to cross and/or up sell and protect their revenue streams from the predatory new business activity of competitors. But such thinking doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t happen by attending a residential training course. It fails to permeate an organisation if only a handful of senior people buy in to the concept.

To create the right culture in a business, one that embraces creativity and innovation from the shop floor to the boardroom door, takes time. Done well, however, return on investment is always guaranteed and once a tipping point is reached, the new culture becomes self-perpetuating and sustainable. Business leaders need to be able to understand how their employees think, how they can be motivated, how to develop an entrepreneurial zeal and what will inspire them. By doing this, teams and individuals become more engaged and more productive. They get under the skin of their customers. They develop products to meet the future needs of customers. They develop needs that the customer sometimes didn’t even realise he had.

An innovative and creative culture doesn’t just stop at the factory door. Such businesses actively interact with and engage their customers to help them develop new products or new services. After all, if business leaders can see value in asking staff for their ideas, comments and opinions, it makes obvious sense to ask the same of their customers.

Ok, so we promised no ‘ten tips’ and we’ll stick to that promise. Improving the value of your existing customer database, what we have termed Old Business Development, can be undertaken by sole traders to multi-national organisations. Below is a roadmap for Old Business Development that we use to help our clients. Begin following this framework and your organisation will already be well ahead of many of the competitors in your industry.

1. Define relevant, strategic objectives
2. Get the whole business to engage and buy in to them
3. Begin to work on changing the culture of the business to make it more innovative and creative
4. Communicate internally to align the new culture to the company’s vision
5. Communicate externally to demonstrate how the new culture and strategy better understands and meets the needs of existing customers

Once you are on the journey it is vital to communicate it to both employees and customers. It shows confidence in your business, it shows how you are forging ahead of competitors, it shows where and how the business will grow and it identifies strategic opportunities that will be exploited. we have found that even businesses that have started such a journey, and are making headway, can forget about the importance of communication. In such instances it is often left to an individual or group in the organisation, not expert communicators with the added pressure of their days jobs to contend with. By not prioritising it to the same extent as strategic planning or cultural change, the quality of communication can be poor at best, non-existent at worst. As a result the full benefits of Old Business Development are left unrealised as employees disengage and customers become confused.

With more money and resource required to correct such a situation, isn’t it just simpler to do it right first time?

Cris Beswick is the Principal of Let’s Think Beyond, which helps businesses unlock their inherent creativity and innovation to deliver tangible commercial results.

David Gallagher is a Senior Copywriter at Chapter & Verse, a business communications agency.

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The first, and often only, place many businesses look to boost innovation and creativity is to an external agency. But, argues Cris Beswick from Let’s Think Beyond, such an approach completely ignores the potential creativity and innovation within every business that is simply waiting to be unlocked.

When I was at school I certainly didn’t learn how to think. If asked a particularly difficult question in Maths, and sometimes if I’m honest not even a particularly difficult question, my reply of “Don’t know, Sir” would be met with the retort, “Well think boy! THINK!”. As if by shouting the word louder everything would suddenly become clear and I would instantly have the beautiful mind of John Nash.

And what I’ve found in business is that quite often the same school structures and approaches still apply. The ‘repeated shouting’ method of getting in an advertising or design agency, attending a residential workshop of going on a day’s training course doesn’t fundamentally change how a business can become more successful through harnessing the power of creative thinking by the people who really matter: all those who work in the business.

Looking externally to deliver creativity and innovation can of course work. But if no effort is made to improve creative and innovative thinking by people at all levels within the business, then every time a new problem comes along the business will default externally for help, advice and support. Longer term such an approach means spending more money to improve a market position, or sometimes simply just to maintain it.

Businesses that embrace innovation and creativity know that it is never just a one-off project, nor something only relevant to a particular team or department. Creativity and innovation in business is the adoption of a company-wide mindset wedded to the idea that only through constant questioning, constantly tweaking and constantly improving every aspect of the business can the organisation stay at the forefront of the market.

In Japan, such an approach is known as Kaizen and is synonymous with Toyota, where small improvements at every stage of production were led and delivered by small groups improving their own environment and productivity. The Kaizen methodology ensures that when any changes are made, they are monitored, evaluated and then adjusted. By breaking down the business and the issues it faces into bite-size chunks, the need to suddenly deliver large-scale, expensive improvement programmes is completely negated and the business is kept innovative and dynamic as a matter of course.

When it comes to your own business and your own people, don’t let anyone tell you – or believe it yourself – that creativity and innovation isn’t inside every single one of us. Every time a problem is solved or a new solution is delivered in your business, it’s because someone, somewhere has been creative and innovative. If you’re heading to an important business meeting in the car and on the radio you hear that the route you were following is closed, you will then program your SatNav to find an alternative, get out the map book and do it yourself of find a nearby hotel or business centre and have the meeting virtually through digital conferencing facilities. What I’m quite sure you won’t do is simply turn round and head back home because it’s too difficult to think of an alternative.

And yet, there are still many businesses that constrain their potential by doing nothing to eradicate the limiting beliefs of the people in their organisation when it comes to creativity and innovation. We’ve tried that before and it didn’t work; we did a brainstorming day and it generated little of value; we had an innovation project team in the past but they didn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know. If you can get over that first hurdle of looking, and I mean really looking, at how the people in your organisation think, then you’re already significantly ahead of many of your competitors in becoming a more innovative and creative organisation.

Cris Beswick is the principal of Let’s Think Beyond, which helps businesses unlock their inherent creativity and innovation to deliver tangible commercial benefits.

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