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    • Action plan

    How to identify core products to scale

    High effort

    High impact

    Developing your understanding of the competitive landscape and getting feedback from staff and clients generates a constant stream of new ideas. This causes companies to add new products and develop the existing offering.

    Identifying when you’ve found a standardised, simplified and repeatable product or service allows you to improve processes and lower costs – and gives you a core product that can scale.

    • We’ve designed our action plans to be completed in the order of steps laid out and explained why each step is important
    • Customising your action plan lets you set your own completion dates, assign tasks to others and get notifications
    • Helpful tools are provided for certain steps while a tracking metric at the end will help you determine the long-term success of your effort
    • A downloadable PDF version of each action plan is available if you’d like to compete it offline
    What's involved? Ways to use this action plan Measuring impact
    1

    Create a SWOT analysis for each of your key products

    Impact: medium

    Why will this help?

    Analysing your products’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats shows the potential for scale and what aspects need developing.

    Creating a SWOT analysis for your own business

    Use our free SWOT analysis template to define your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
    2

    Run workshops with employees in relevant departments to hear their ideas on products you could scale

    Impact: high

    Why will this help?

    Employees have first-hand experience of selling and marketing your products and dealing with customer service queries. They can help you standardise delivery and spot an opportunity for scale before it shows up in your financial reporting.

    How to run an employee feedback workshop

    Workshops are an effective way of solving problems and getting feedback from employees. Use our step-by-step checklist to run your own successful workshop.
    3

    Incorporate customer feedback into your business planning, including monitoring online reviews

    Impact: high

    Why will this help?

    Monitoring customer reviews is a great way to measure how a product is performing. It highlights tweaks that can be made to your offering, which help you build towards a standardised, simplified product.

    4

    Use sales KPIs to identify sustainable sales processes that have predictable conversion rates

    Impact: medium

    Why will this help?

    Scaling a product requires investing in marketing and sales. Before committing additional investment, you need to be confident there’s a repeatable sales process that’s ready to scale.

    How to design key performance indicators

    Use this free template to set robust key performance indicators (KPIs) for staff and determine whether your business is moving forward.
    5

    Identify which core product you will scale, or determine that none are fit for scale, and think about what your business needs to do to support the process

    Impact: medium

    Why will this help?

    Taking time out of the day-to-day operations of working on a growing business and creating a strategy forces you to analyse what’s needed to move forward.

    Preparing your business to scale

    Looking to scale up your business and take it to the next level? Follow these tips to assess if you’re ready.

    What can I do with this Action Plan?

    Start this Action Plan

    Add some extra information to this plan and we’ll help you get it done.

    • We’ve designed our action plans to be completed in the order of steps laid out and explained why each step is important
    • Customising your action plan lets you set your own completion dates, assign tasks to others and get notifications
    • Helpful tools are provided for certain steps while a tracking metric at the end will help you determine the long-term success of your effort
    • A downloadable PDF version of each action plan is available if you’d like to compete it offline

    Download and print

    Get a printable template for this Action Plan, fill it in with some target dates, and share it with your team. Pin it on the wall where everyone can see it.

    Get the printable Action Plan

    Learning Groups

    We also run Learning Groups on these topics where you can join other leaders tackling the same challenges.

    Find a Learning Group

    How will I know if my action plan is working?

    Revenue by product

    The amount of sales generated by particular products

    Why this metric?

    The ultimate measure of scaling a core product is the amount of revenue it generates.

    How do I start tracking?

    Add sales of core products to your KPIs and look at them alongside overall revenue numbers.