What is the Balanced Scorecard?
The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a methodology designed to implement the strategy of the company. It acts as a measurement system, a strategic management system and a communication tool, under four key perspectives: financial results, customers, internal processes and organizational learning.
The BSC helps translate strategy into action.
Its main stages are:
- To make the vision of the organization.
- To formulate the strategy.
- Define the value offer.
- Establish objectives according to customer prospects, financial, processes, learning and growth.
- To establish indicators and targets in terms of cause and effect.
- Establish action initiatives.
If we implement the BSC we must first make it more important to define the strategy of the organization.
Having defined the strategy, it is essential to the decision to direct all resources toward it, demonstrating a strong commitment throughout the process. The success of the process we will have when the strategic initiatives are implemented.
One of the main challenges that we face is the definition of clear strategies, to give us the direction of where we want to run the organization and a good mission statement and vision.
Initially the BSC can be implemented without a computer, but to go aligning all areas of the company, use appropriate software for data management, the advantage is that you can align and evaluate all these initiatives, identifying their impact and relationship with the company strategy.
Companies that have used the BSC as a guide to follow their strategies, obtained very high returns on investment and enabling them to focus all resources on what truly had a positive impact of the business.
In conclusion, the BSC helps us achieve the targets by investing where really necessary.
Competing against The Status Quo
For those who are dedicated to sell complex products to business customers is sadly often alleged that the "opportunities" to make sales because they eventually lost by the prospect makes the time pass without taking a decision or explicitly decide to do nothing.
This means that the winner is not a competitor of ours or a replacement or alternative option or a solution developed internally, but the status quo, inertia of leaving things as they are. This option is to eventually rival the numbers of any one product, but unfortunately many do not insist on marketing strategies to take this into account.