Creating Winning Strategies by Changing the Dialogue

In far too many companies, "strategy" has become a euphemism for planning or budgeting. The underlying - and unstated - assumption is that marketplace conditions are largely static: the future will be largely an extension of the past and, thus, all we need to do is optimize our current operations.

This assumption, unfortunately, has proved fatal in industry after industry. Just a few years ago, Motorola and Nokia were major cell phone players, Sun was a significant server manufacturer, Blockbuster was the source for many of us for at-home movie viewing, and Borders and Barnes and Noble were where we shopped for books...

To drive serious strategic discussions, you first need to accurately assess your source of competitive advantage. Here's a framework we've found useful:

Source of Competitive Advantage (worst to first):

1. Commodity with cost disadvantage

2. Commodity with cost parity

3. Commodity with 10% to 20% cost advantage

4. One-year offering development lead

5. Two-year offering development lead

6. Brand, patent, copyright

7. Owning the customer relationship

8. A string of dominant positions (for example, cost advantage + development lead + patent protection

9. Managing the value net or ecosystem

10. Owning the industry standard

Importance of Marketplace Insight

The first two, of course, confer no competitive advantage; unfortunately, a realistic assessment of their true competitive position would surprise many companies... Hence the importance of helping decision makers develop relevant marketplace insight. Answers to these critical questions will help:

• What are customers really buying? How are their preferences changing?
• What new initiatives are current competitors undertaking: operations, innovation, marketing, sales, customer service?
• What economic or regulatory trends will impact the industry?
• Which emerging competitors have the potential to change the nature of competitive dynamics?

Assessing the Consequences

Once the decision makers have grappled with these issues, they'll need to assess the impact on the organization, including:

• Systems and processes: Do we need to change our offerings development or production processes? Which need to be re-engineered? Which can we outsource? What support do we need from IT?
• People and skills: Do we need to retrain our existing workforce? Change our hiring requirements? Restructure the organization?
• Culture: Do we need to change the behaviors? If so, where? Only in specific functions? Or everywhere in the organization?
• Incentives: Do we have the right incentives in place? And how will we align these across the organization?
• Profits: How will we make money in the future? How can we protect our profit streams?

Creating Winning Strategies

With all of the above in hand, decision makers can proceed to the important work of re-allocating resources to create:

• Differentiated value propositions
• Innovation, operational and go-to market initiatives
• Organizational alignment

Challenging work, all this, since it means the nature of the strategic discussion must change, from planning / budgeting to strategy, from past to future and from business-as-usual to new business models. Importantly, it means changing mental models - how decision makers interpret information about the marketplace. And this, in turn, means creating opportunities for dialogue and debate, v. reading reports.

But it could mean the difference between organizational life and death.

Selling trust

At a Meetup group sponsored by I Love Marketing (lots of good tips and videos), we listened to a local entrepreneur who has developed a 6-figure home cleaning business. She has built both a loyal clientele and workforce by delivering consistently superior results and is able to charge a premium - heck, who hasn't gone through multiple cleaning ladies (this tends to be a female dominated profession) and thus is willing to pay for reliable results.

Great sales personnel (and lousy ones)

I love great sales personnel.

As much as I loathe lousy ones.

We were looking for track lighting at the local lighting store, from whom we had bought in the past. Those who've shopped for lighting know this takes some time and, often, in home consultations. After all, it is neither a small purchase, nor one you can easily replace.

Landing that job

In light of Friday's anemic jobs report, it's clear that competition for open jobs is not going to get any easier.

So how do you get an edge?

My parents, who both grew up in the depression, instilled two values in me: hard work, and thrift. While we never felt we wanted for much growing up, there was never a lot of money to spend either, something we were blissfully unaware of. One thing I remember is mom cooking healthy dinners every night, using fresh ingredients bought daily from the supermarket. She was a good bargain hunter, and knew how to stretch her food dollar. We'd splurge occasionally on a hamburger out at the local A&W (remember those?), washed down with a root beer float.

Thus, I was struck by a vignette early on in the film Food, Inc., where a working family of four stops by a fast food restaurant for a dollar meal. The mother explains that because they are so busy, she doesn't really have time to cook, but she does want to make sure her children get a 'good' meal to start the day... She goes on to say that because they don't have a lot of money, they have to look for bargain ways to feed their family. But then we find that the father is suffering from diabetes, for which he is spending $200 a month on prescription medicine...

Do these people want your business?

Once again, I find myself flabbergasted at service levels in the midst of the worst recession most of us have ever seen.  In my post How not to make a sale, I describe how a retailer drove us from a physical establishment after we had committed to buy. But it appears that direct retail operations are also not immune mistakes in organization, job design and incentives that result in lousy service.

How not to make a sale

Have you ever been so put off by bad selling that you simply walked, even when you were really, really ready to buy?

My wife and I did just that yesterday - stunned that the retail establishment drove us do this in the midst of the worst recession most of us have ever seen. But the really sad thing to me is that management wasted all its marketing, branding and PoS advertising investments by cutting investments in its people.