SOURCE: Freepik

In the dynamic and fast-paced environment of today’s business world, it’s really difficult to keep growing at the same pace. But growing at a fast or even at the same pace can prove to be extremely detrimental to your business as there’s a lot of competition in today’s markets and industry. Moreover, according to the experts from a leading market research firm, it’s important for you as a business to keep improving and innovating to come up with new things to take your business to new heights.

But innovating isn’t the only thing to grow your business nor does innovating mean you’ve to come up with new products or services every time. Even improving your current business operations and processes innovatively can help you grow your business. For instance, you’re striving to become a leading firm in your industry. So, to achieve that goal of yours, you need to have the best of everything. Be it your products or your after-sales service, everything has to be the best.

So, in the same way, identifying gaps in your business goals and current state can help you improve your business. So, just to help you out with that, in this article, we’ll discuss what is gap analysis and how you perform it to help your business grow.

What is Gap Analysis?

SOURCE: Freepik

Gap analysis is a systematic process that can help you identify the gaps in your current business to your desired business goals. Taking the same example as above, if you want to be the best in your industry, you need to be the best in everything your business does. 

So, comparing your desired goals with your current state of business will give an idea of where you currently stand and the things you need to improve on. It’ll help you know the areas of improvement in your business processes which could either be your product innovation strategy or your sales strategy so that you can improve on them and reach your desired business goals.

How to Perform Gap Analysis for Business Growth?

1. Define Your Goals Clearly

So, the first and foremost step to conduct a gap analysis is to set your goals. Like every research has a goal, make goals of what you want to achieve with this analysis or research. One of the important things to keep in mind while setting goals is to use a SMART framework to make those goals. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Whether your goal is to improve your customer satisfaction rate or increase your revenue, make your goals according to this framework. 

2. Assess Current State

So, once you have set your goals, now you’d assess your current state for those goals. By thoroughly assessing the current state of your business, you’ll get to learn where you stand, what your performance looks like, and the whole comprehensive review of your business. It’ll also help you learn other relevant metrics that reflect the current state of your business.

3. Identify Performance Gaps

Once you have collected the comprehensive data and other metrics of your business, now’s the time for you to analyze the data and identify any performance gaps. This will help you understand the gap between your current and desired business state. This will let you know the areas and processes where you and your business are falling short.

4. Determine the Causes of Gaps

Once you know the areas with gaps, now try to determine the reasons why these gaps exist. By knowing the reasons for these gaps, you can easily work on them to improve. The gaps can vary from underskilled employees to outdated technology and many more. 

5. Develop Action Plans

So, now that you know the gaps and the reasons why these gaps exist you can easily work on them. But to work on them and resolve all these issues you need to develop a solid step-by-step action plan. This action plan should have detailed steps along with the actions you need to take to close these gaps. Well, it completely depends on the types of gaps and what you’d need to do to close them. But, the most common ways are technology upgrades and implementing training programs for employees.

6. Implement Changes and Monitor Progress

Once the action plan is developed, execute it as per the plan systematically. After the execution make sure to track your progress and monitor all the changes you made closely to see if they improved the processes or not. Regularly assessing your strategies will help you in continuous improvement.

Final Thoughts

Growth is really important for your business to survive in today’s dynamic and competitive environment. But with the help of growth analysis, you can easily identify the gaps in your business where you’re falling short and improve on those gaps to achieve business growth.