Bridging the Gaps

One of the main questions a business and its advisors needs to ask is, “what do we need to do to achieve the desired level of growth?” In other words, how do we get where we want to from where we are now. The answer is gap analysis.

Gap analysis involves the comparison of actual performance with potential or desired performance. There are several clearly defined steps to a typical gap analysis.

  • Identifying the current state of the business and its use of available resources
  • Setting growth and profit goals and other measures that may be important to the organisation
  • Analysing the gaps between the current state and the ideal future condition of the business
  • Establishing a plan to close the gaps between the present and future states, and move the business into a place where it can achieve its goals

As with many things in business, understanding what different terms mean is important. Gap Analysis and SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis are sometimes seen as the same thing. The key difference is that SWOT looks outwards to clients, suppliers and the wider marketplace. Gap analysis looks inwards, focusing on improvements in internal processes and systems. While it is true that some gap analyses do look at external forces, the focus eventually turns back to what the company can do to improve internally. You can see SWOT Analysis as the wide screen view, where gap analysis turns a microscope on finding the areas for improvement.

Establishing a clear strategy and actionable objectives is the expected outcome of any gap analysis. When it comes to improving your sales enablement, evaluating the solutions that the first three steps identify and building them into a winning sales strategy is a process that Your Business Development Team are ideally placed to support. We use our unique gap analysis system to identify bottle necks and other blocks in your sales process. We then help you create a tailored sales process to support the outcomes of the gap analysis and work with you to train your team to ensure consistency. Analysing current and past performance enables us to help you create the measurements that will guide your business in the short, medium, and long term.

Having a sales process that works and replicated by the whole team is at the heart of a successful sales operation. Whilst the key steps in the sales journey are the same regardless, each company develops its own unique journey which works for them. A gap analysis can help identify the strong areas in your sales journey and the areas that will benefit from improvement thus helping you to create your sales success blueprint.  

YBDT’s long experience in business development and sales makes us the ideal partner for businesses looking to grow in 2022. We can help you create your ultimate sales process to secure more revenue going forward. For one month only we are now offering a free gap analysis meeting to start your journey.  Get in touch to claim your free meeting.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

code