Waterfall Graphs Communicate Strategy

In an earlier posting I showed one of my favorite pictures for motivating  creative initiatives to increase revenues.  This translates into the levers you control:

• Product or service coverage
• Channel coverage
• Hit-rate with customers touched
• Price, and
• Market Size (although you rarely control this)

Strategic planning is all about coming up with prioritized initiatives.  Execution involves clearly and repeatedly communicating that plan throughout the organization.  A very powerful way to depict revenue objectives and strategy is with a waterfall chart.

Here is a simple illustration showing the expected revenue impact for these strategies in a plan.  You might choose to look at each business unit this way, as well as the company as a whole.  In this example, the outcomes for all initiatives relating to product/service are lumped together, as are the channel initiatives, price initiatives, etc.  The same concepts could be applied to individual projects.

Also note that this example shows growth initiatives in a shrinking market -- a strategy that would be growing market share.

These are easily created using standard Excel charting functions.  If this might be useful to you, drop me a note and I'll send you some tips about how to create these.

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[terracotta warriors]

Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet .