Be Different or be dead

April 12, 2021

5 easy ways to adapt to and survive cataclysmic events

Source: Pexels

We’re not talking about a ‘minor inconvenience’ to an organization such as having a bad month when costs outrun your plan or when you lose a significant client.
No, we’re referring to a major event that can and will kill your business unless you do something about it NOW.

COVID-19 is a good example where public health restrictions had a devastating impact on, among others, the hospitality and travel sectors of the economy. Restaurants shut down and planes stopped flying. Existing business models were destroyed in an instant.

What is the appropriate response when a business is hit by a catastrophic event? It’s one thing to say they need to adapt, but the decoration is hollow unless it is followed up with how to do it.

Intent, without action to transform it into results, is not helpful at all.

But let’s recognize that there’s no prescription that will fit every type of business exactly; each one is unique in its own way, be it in the type of leader they have or in its risk profile. So a universal solution is not just impractical, it’s downright dangerous to suggest.

That said, however, there are a number of ‘possibilities’ that should be considered by leadership because there’s no such thing as a bad idea, it’s just that some are better than others.

So in no particular order, here is a list of possibilities that you may wish to consider if your world gets rocked.

1. Define your special sauce

Everyone’s an entrepreneur, you just need to find the spirit in you and unleash it. Your success up to this point hasn’t been serendipitous; it’s resulted because you have something special going on.

It’s possible that you’ve never thought about it up to now because your business has been doing ok and you’ve never met surprises of the cataclysmic variety.
Well, now the time to really think about what’s worked for you in the past and what your ‘special sauce’ is that customers love about you and that your competitors don’t have.

It’s critical that your special sauce forms the platform of how you adapt to the body blow you’re absorbing. Without understanding it, you don’t have any context to determine the possible entrepreneurial actions you can take.

2. Chunk your business

Rather than look at your business holistically, break it down into its component parts and explore each piece for nuggets that can be exploited in these devastating times.

A helpful method to do this might be to construct a process flow chart that isolates in detail how you deliver your product or service to a customer. This simple process defines everything from what the customer engagement moment(s) look like to how their request is satisfied.

Look for ‘chunks’ that you believe contain your special sauce and that could be leveraged as new sources of income. You may discover, for example, that how you fulfill customer orders is effective because of the unique way you do it, and that other businesses might be interested in it as a solution.

You might decide that your marketing or manufacturing capabilities are special and can be deployed into new markets. Or, you might decide to go into the order delivery business until the storm passes.

The point is to look at every element of your business as a stand alone opportunity to generate sales.

3. Make the call

Now is the time to ‘rub shoulders’ with the people who have shown you loyalty and have contributed to your success (I trust you know who they are and that you have been connecting with them regularly).

It could be a ‘digital Zoom rub’ required in a pandemic or a physical face-to-face rub in normal times, it really doesn’t matter the method used.
The important thing is that you reach out and ask your loyalists how you can help them and whether they have any suggestions for you to improve your business, and use the input you receive as fodder for your response.

Adaptation in a crisis needs a healthy dose of reality which customers can candidly provide.

Also involve your current suppliers or other business partners in your ‘rub’ deliberations. Ideas for your possibilities funnel lie everywhere so spread your web and spread it fast.

4. Put everyone on the frontline

When you think about your new business form, think about it as a frontline organization where the role of every employee is to deliver services to customers.

You don’t have the luxury of support or supervisory staff; you need everyone, everyday out taking care of customers and earning new sales.
As the leader, you need to assume the entire back end of your organization; a one-person show who does nothing but keep the lights on and support your customer facing team.

Source: Pexels

5. Think @home

The good news (always look for the pony that created the CRAP) is that there is much that can be done with technology to enable organizations to function in different ways.

We’ve witnessed ‘virtual everything’ during the pandemic and it foreshadows well the type of pivots that will work going forward.
In fact the predominant view seems to be that we will never return to the pre-pandemic office model; working from home will be the new normal.

And the @home model will extend more deeply in other life activities such as entertainment, shopping and where necessary family engagement.

To the budding entrepreneur this is extremely promising: changing customer behaviour around @home enabled by technology that will only get better.

So think about what you can do in the @home environment in cataclysmic times. Explore how you can exploit one of your ‘chunk’ opportunities by assuming your customer will want to do it from their home. “How can I deliver my service flawlessly if my customer wants to get from @home?” should be the relevant question you pose yourself.
And brush up on your technology expertise because you are going to need it.

Final word

As leaders, I believe we need to be vigilant in the face of random events that impose their will upon us.
We need to take the position that the unexpected force will be catastrophic and take the desired response rather than assume the unwanted intruder will inflict only minor pain on us and react therefore incrementally.

You’re much better off to plan for the worst and have a more modest plan as your backup if the assumed disaster doesn’t occur. Assuming the best is a risky and deadly position to take.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 4.12.21 at 05:02 am by Roy Osing
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April 5, 2021

Why ‘planning on the run’ is important for business survival

Source: Pexels

Why ‘planning on the run’ is important for business survival.

‘Planning on the run’ describes the process of creating a business plan for your organization in the moment you experience and react to unexpected forces bombarding it and forcing it from its intended course.

Your business plan was finalized in January and here it is April, and you find yourself in a pandemic with restrictions imposed on you that render your current plan obsolete.

You absorb the body blow and then it’s time to create a new future given the new times you find yourself in.

COVID-19, unfortunately, is just one example - albeit an enormously serious one - of the continuum of random events that have impacted organizations for the past several years and will likely to continue in the future.

There are other examples ‘acts of randomness’ that have had serious impacts on businesses:

— a surge of online shopping.
— the growth of digital media.
— the rise in popularity of streaming video services.
— overnight job losses due to COVID-19.
— competitor consolidations increasing business vulnerability.
— changes in regulations that put business models at risk.

Random, unforeseen change is the new normal for businesses, and planning on the run is the only way they can adapt and survive.

In our new world everything is temporary:

▪️ Opportunities are here today and gone tomorrow.
▪️ Business continuity is gone; it’s a thing of the past.
▪️ Trend lines are meaningless.
▪️ Extrapolation is a waste of time.
▪️ History is not a teacher of what will likely work tomorrow.

Organizations that do not learn how to plan on the run are destined to be victims of stochasticism; they will die at the hand of discontinuity.

Planning on the run is an art form, it is not a science based on algorithms that try to connect independent variables to predict an outcome. It relies on leadership who understand that a number of human factors determine how well an organization responds to the unforeseen.

Source: Pexels

These 5 actions will launch you to plan on the run.

1. Business plan — when you construct your business plan, establish a short term planning horizon. The days of 5-year plans are over.
The 5-year plan worked when relative continuity of those factors that influenced organizational performance prevailed.

Your business plan should reflect discontinuity, which argues that brief truncated planning periods be used.

My suggestion is to think about your plan as having 24 X 30-day plans. The emphasis on days as opposed to years will force you to closely monitor the execution of your plan and to be able to pivot when things aren’t working out the way you planned.

2. Precision — Get your plan ‘just about right’. There is no such thing as a high degree of precision when you’re in the middle of a storm, so why try to get your plan ’perfect’?
In times of crazy change, any plan is out of date soon after it’s published in any event.

Let’s ’head west’ should be the principle that guides your strategy development when you’re up to your waist in alligators.
Your plan should be notional in terms of strategic intent; define a vague idea about where you want to go and refine it as you discover whether or not it’s working in the chaos that surrounds it.

3. Results — monitor and measure the key results of each 30-day plan period as soon as the month is over.

It is essential when organizations are squeezed by overwhelming pressure that success or failure be tracked in real time; in this world you can’t afford to wait another 30 days to have results reported — your reaction time to any pressure is compressed and you may be dead by then.

4. Values — Look at your organization’s values. If they don’t cover the critical importance of reaction  to unforeseen events, they’re incomplete.

About the only thing that can be accurately predicted by organizations looking decades forward is disruptive change, so if nimbleness and reaction competencies aren’t an integral element in the culture of the organization it is not likely to survive.

This requires that all people-functions be recreated in the image of reaction: the people recruited and trained for every function in the organization must have the inclination and ability to react to the unexpected in a way that leans forward into the opposing force to produce a positive outcome.

In the new normal, individuals who are reticent to reacting to ‘body blows’ pose a risk to organizations; they cannot be tolerated.

5. Customers — Invest any resources you may have available in activities that impact the customer.

Maintaining loyal customers in the face of chaos is critical. Make sure you are paying enough attention to the elements that are critical to providing great customer service — good service is not good enough when customers are experiencing the pain of change just like your business is.

And redefine sales to be service with the emphasis of ‘taking care’ of people rather than pushing your products at them. Being sensitive to their pain will earn you the right to have their business which they will give you unabashedly.

Planning on the run is the new business planning process. It’s the only model that will work in the kind of world we’re now in.
‘Planning in motion’ is replacing traditional approaches buried deep in business management pedagogy.

Those organizations who take leadership of this new mode of orchestrating their business will succeed; those that do not will fail and likely die.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 4.5.21 at 06:24 am by Roy Osing
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April 1, 2021

Why goosebumps should tell you the best one to hire

Source: Pexels

Why goosebumps should tell you the best one to hire.

A key element of the business plan that many organizations use to separate themselves from their competition is to create memorable experiences for their customers.
To blow ‘em away and leave them breathless with how they’ve been treated.

The problem is, however, is that these same organizations haven’t figured out precisely how to do it. They’re excellent at declaring the aspiration but fall short when it comes to delivering on their intent.

And as a result their customer service intent is no more than a helium-filled shallow promise with no evidence to back it up and their performance is unaffected.

Typically memorable experiences are created by people, notwithstanding the relatively unsuccessful attempts - in my view - that many organizations make using technology to do it.

Hire the right person

The most important and basic way of achieving this objective is to recruit people who ‘love’ human beings. People that have the instinctive desire to serve their fellow homo-sapiens. To take care of them. To satisfy them regardless of what they want.

Hire the right person into a service position if you want to dazzle the customer or leave them breathless from the service experience they’ve had with you.

I’m not impressed with the quality of some people recruited into customer service positions because many of them are incapable of delivering even a mediocre service experience.

Why? Well, many of them have been placed in the position because of their seniority in the company, or because they are looking for a career move and they want to try customer service.

And as a result, these people find that they really don’t ‘like customers’ with all the complications they bring and they would really rather be doing something that didn’t involve interacting with other humans (and the customer who engages with this person suffers).

How does this happen? How does an individual who would rather be writing code, taking inventory or preparing financial statements ever get a job in customer service?

The decision making process to select people for service jobs is imprecise and severely flawed and in too many instances unqualified and unwilling people are let loose with your most precious asset — your customer.

So how do you fix the problem? How does an organization ensure they are hiring individuals who are not only capable of delivering mind-blowing service, but also look forward to doing it with every fabric of their body?

Can you train someone to like a human?

Many would say that you can train people to do it; certainly that’s what many human resource managers generally believe — why else would they use seniority as a criteria to place people in customer service?

The fact is, however, despite all the good intentions of cross-training, you simply can’t train someone to like someone else.

You can give them ‘how to have a smile in your voice’ training and teach them how to grin at others and use other tools intended to deal with customer better, but you can’t train a person to bring all the honest emotional energy to the table that is required to create a memorable experience for another person.

People who love people are born to do it, and so the challenge is to discover them and embrace them in your organization as they truly are the custodians of the loyalty moment when a customer decides to continue doing business with you (and to tell others how great your organization is) or to leave for another service provider.

So how do you spot these people who naturally care for — ‘love’ — other humans?

You have to start with the usual task of filtering through the profiles of potential candidates, looking for content that relates to serving customers as opposed to merely stressing academic achievements or other hard accomplishments.

Most people avoid what they believe is the soft stuff as it relates to their background, but for the delivery of remarkable service, the soft stuff is absolutely essential.
And check their references to see if others commented on the candidate’s capability to effectively deal with others with care and affection.

Source: Pexels

The interview

But the critical element of the hiring process is the personal interview and I discovered an effective tool to separate the individuals who could really create magical experiences for others from those that talked a good game but who didn’t have the attitude or inclination to do it.

Ask two simple questions

Here’s a rather simple but so effective way of separating the human being lovers from the ‘fish’ who may have been through some type of customer service training program.

▪️ First, ask the prospective employee “Do you love human beings?”.

They will realize that this is a bit of a trick question but will not know where you are going with it. It’s a fun question to ask as the interviewer to say the least.

Most people will say ‘yes’ in varying ways, ranging from the declaration ‘absolutely’ to the positive inference ‘sure’ and the questioning ‘of course’.
However, to satisfy the real intent of the question, you need to dig deeper.

▪️As a follow up question, pose this: “Tell me a story that will show me that you love and care about your fellow humans”.

The responses you get from this question will define two types of candidates: one, ‘The Intellectualizer’’ and two, ‘The People Lover’.

The Intellectualizer has figured out what you are up to with the question and conjures up a story with their mind that leaves you cold.
Their answer draws on logic — what they believe you expect to hear from them — and therefore it’s dispassionate to the point of being superficial and phoney.

Those that don’t have the innate desire to move people emotionally with their answer should be ushered out of the interview.

The natural-born People Lover, on the other hand, thrills you with a story that leaves you warm all over.
Their story paints a vivid picture of someone who cares about other people and who is creative at finding ways to deliver unforgettable memories for them.

This was the question that separated the people who really got what it took to serve others from those who had only a theoretical understanding of what it too to be a caregiver.

Do you feel the goosebumps

Those that were born to serve leave you with goosebumps while they tell their story. Their story is rich with detail and the threads that bind it together were all about the importance of connecting with people on the emotional level. And their authenticity pours out with every word.

These individuals were the real deal. I hired them with minor interest in their other qualifications. And they always did me proud the way they dealt with our customers.

And many eventually found their way into higher level positions in the customer service organization to provide the leadership necessary to sustain this strategy that was extremely effective is gaining and maintaining a competitive advantage for our organization.

So if you really want to achieve a service strategy based on remarkable and memorable experiences, hire the People Lover who will leave you with goosebumps.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 4.1.21 at 04:39 am by Roy Osing
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March 8, 2021

How the best business plan is made for high performers

Source: Diggity Marketing

How the best business plan is made for high performers.

Every organization is faced with the challenge of creating a business plan that will result in high performance and growth. Where do they turn for help? Business planning templates are plentiful and can easily be found on the internet.

They are all pretty similar in content and format and generally follow accepted principles of academics and consulting pundits.

A good business plan should be built to execute.

But I think most traditional planning approaches miss the mark because they don’t recognize the common challenges facing most organizations, that:
— are not able or willing to invest substantial financial resources (as is often the case when hiring strategic planning consulting firms) in building their plan;
— have good ideas on what a good strategy looks like, but have difficulty implementing it;
— are under pressure to create their plan quickly or risk losing their market position to the competition.

A business planning process must recognize these realities and should meet these critical requirements; my strategic game planning process does.

1. It must be simple — Long winded strategy documents may satisfy the academics’ thirst for exhaustive analysis and theoretical completeness, but it won’t enable professionals to implement their new ideas very quickly.

I have seen people spend way too much time grinding out a plan just to feed the prescribed content and format rather than produce a simple strategy that tells their story with only the relevant chapters in it.

So, toss out the parochial planning boilerplate and adopt my proven strategic game plan process that produces the right business plan by answering three critical questions:

— HOW BIG do you want to be?
— WHO do you want to SERVE?
— HOW do you intend to COMPETE and WIN?

More detail on each of these three questions later…

2. It must be inexpensive — My strategic game plan can be created in just 3 days or less because of its simplicity. Time is not wasted on feeding the template with information you don’t require to produce a business plan that will perform well in the markets you serve.

The strategic game plan is created in a workshop mode with the leadership team responsible for launching the new idea. It generally involves the leadership team including other players who have an important role in implementing the plan. In under 3 days your game plan is produced — with minimum paper damage to the environment — at minimal cost.

3. It must be action oriented — You won’t produce any results if your plan is theoretically pristine, follows all the prescribed planning rules but doesn’t drive action; nothing happens, no value is created, potential customers won’t notice you and you will fail. It’s as simple as that.

The reason I call it a ‘strategic game plan’ is that it is totally focussed on what has to be done to achieve the inches of progress needed to move towards your strategic goal.
It’s the appropriate balance of strategy and tactics which results in the right stuff getting done to progress your new idea.

4. It must be focused — This is where the discipline of the mandatory replaces the art of the possible. You don’t achieve real progress by chasing a myriad of possibilities.

The strategic game plan uses Roy’s Rule of 3 to focus energy and priority on the critical few (3) things that are likely to determine 80% of the outcome you intend to achieve.

Trying to achieve ‘the possible many’ will waste your time and energy and will likely kill the success of your plan; Roy’s Rule of 3 as the filter, is effective at controlling scattered thinking.

It is in this area that most planners fail in the development of their strategy. They have too many things to accomplish in order to succeed. The opposite is actually true: the more you attempt, the greater the likelihood you will fail.

5. It must define your uniqueness — If what you have to offer the market isn’t different from others competing with you, why should you attract interest?

If your offers can’t be distinguished from competitive offers why would potential customers be interested in them?

This is the most critical element of your business plan and I have developed a concept called the ONLY statement (more on ONLY further on) to address how to declare the distinctiveness of your organization, product or service.

“This is the ONLY product that…” is a claim that is binary: it is either true or it isn’t and it is backed up with proof points that legitimize it.

Most strategists love to use words like ‘better’, ‘best’, ‘leader’ or ‘number 1’ in their differentiation claims but they don’t work; no one believes these words and they can’t be measured and proven in any event.

The best business plans produce early financial returns which depend on how fast the plans can be implemented to grow revenue. My strategic game plan process was designed with speed, simplicity, cost effectiveness and competitive advantage in mind.

Now let’s explore in detail each of the three questions that will create your strategic game plan.

HOW BIG do you want to be? — HOW BIG is the first question to answer in building your strategic game plan.

Traditional strategy-building methodology has definite limitations. It typically begins with an analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It then moves on to developing an overall strategic direction.

Objectives and action plans are struck. Finally the expected financial results are produced. They are the output of the strategy-creation process.

In my experience, the financial results get scrutinized by the top executive and often get modified because they simply aren’t aggressive enough. For example, cash flow doesn’t turn positive soon enough so revenues and expense assumptions are revised to produce positive cash flow earlier in the planning period. Sound familiar?

As a result, higher growth and a better financial projection are driven out of the strategy by changing input assumptions to the plan, rather than by adjusting the strategy to deliver more aggressive financial results.

This is a huge mistake. Assuming that the drivers and assumptions behind the plan are reasonable and acceptable, forcing more aggressive numbers from a strategy without changing the inherent nature of the strategy is a fool’s game; the improved financial performance will not happen.

The strategic game plan process treats growth and financial expectations as inputs to the strategy-building process. Do you want to grow top line revenues 25% over the next 24 months? Or would you be satisfied with growing at 10%?

This is the first question the planning team addresses after considering all underlying factors such as the economy, market growth, competition and other variables influencing how quickly you may be able to ramp up revenue.

Your growth expectations should determine the character of your strategy.

Clearly a 25% growth target would require more resources and would entail greater risk than the more modest 10% growth scenario.

In addition, the character of the strategies would be different. The 25% growth strategy would require a different set of actions than the 10% incremental option.

For example, bolder growth expectations will incur higher expenses to fund them in order to increase awareness of your product or service and create demand for it as opposed to a more modest growth plan — advertising and social media costs increase with higher revenue expectations.

Declare up front the growth and financials you intend to achieve and THEN develop the strategy to deliver them. And if you have been growing at 10% don’t expect doing more of what you have been doing will be good enough to deliver on a 25% plan.

It won’t happen. You will have to be more creative, more aggressive and be more accepting of more risk. If not, suck it up and be prepared to stay with your 10% strategy.

Source: Pexels

HOW BIG rules — Creating HOW BIG is a challenging task. Here are the guidelines to keep in mind as you do your work.

▪️ Your growth goal should be bold enough to drive you to be innovative and creative. If you don’t have to stretch to create the tactics and programs to achieve your revenue target, your growth goal is too modest.

Think about HOW BIG as your declaration of intent without knowing specifically how to achieve it. A good HOW BIG should force you out of your comfort zone;

▪️ Use revenue as the growth metric as it is the best expression of how the market is responding to your new idea. And it’s easy to measure.
Avoid using other higher level financial measures like EBIT and net income as they are ‘too far from the market’ and are too easily manipulated;

If you believe your HOW BIG is ‘realistic’ — which means you already think you know how to achieve it — it’s not bold enough. Pick another number;

HOW BIG should make you perspire; yes, it’s risky but worth it;

▪️ Your growth goal should disrupt market trends not continue them; it’s the way of reflecting the amount of innovation your new product is bringing to the market and the way you intend to sell it.

If the general market for the type of solution you are providing is growing at 5%, for example, your HOW BIG target should disrupt that rate and be somewhere north of that rate. If not, you’re fooling yourself by believing your growth goal requires innovation.

And furthermore, trend lines imply predictability, and who thinks performance and goal achievement can be predicted in a world of uncertainty and unpredictability?

Trend line thinking has no place in an uncertain world. HOW BIG detests extrapolation.

▪️ Choose a 24-month business plan period. It better aligns with execution and allows for faster response to unforeseen events.

The problem with long planning periods is the mistaken assumption that you can put off action to the later planning years and not have to worry about doing something now.
It’s the classic ‘hockey stick’ mentality that suggests that you will be able to make up for underperforming in the early years of the plan by overachieving in the latter periods of the plan.

HOW BIG is the lynchpin of your business plan; it describes the risk profile of your plan, and the amount of innovation required to achieve it. Everything in your plan is connected to it.

A successful plan requires action NOW, in the moment, not 4 years from now.

WHO do you want to SERVE? — The second question to answer in building your strategic game plan is ‘WHO do you want to SERVE?’ — which customers do you intend to target to deliver your growth goals — the HOW BIG?

Your challenge is to select customer groups that have the capability to generate the top line revenue you are expecting.
You may have the products and services your current customers want, but if they don’t have the latent potential in the longer term to get you the revenue you need, and the wealth you expect, you shouldn’t be chasing them.

HOW BIG you want to be should determine WHO you choose to SERVE.

If you have existing customers and decide to stay with them even though they can’t deliver you growth, they will suck up your precious resources with little return.
Don’t get caught in the trap of staying loyal to old unproductive customers; it may make you feel good, but it won’t deliver the growth you want and will jeopardize your entire plan.

There’s no such thing as a bad customer; it’s just that some are better than others.

WHO to SERVE rules — Choose customer groups that have these characteristics:

▪️ They are groups where your customer share — wallet share — position is low but growth potential is high. If you currently have a small percentage of their total business there is good growth potential for you if you are easily able to gain a better foothold in it.

▪️ They are currently growing in the double digits and where you have an advantage over others. Look for clusters of customers who are already showing the desire to buy your products in healthy volumes.

▪️ They can be sold quickly. Customers you can get to fast with your current selling methods. If you have to build new sales channels, it will consume energy and precious time that you can ill afford without generating additional revenue.

In addition, as I’ve said elsewhere, it is critical to focus your efforts on the things that matter; those activities that you believe have a good chance at helping to grow your business. Stick with what you know. Bear down on what you’re good at. Concentrate on customers you know. Ask yourself ‘Is this consistent with fast-and-easy?’ when considering chasing new stuff.

Look for fast-and-easy opportunities that will give you the revenue run-rate you need.

▪️ They can give you quality referrals. Again, a short planning period requires closing as many high value deals as possible which generally means getting to deal closure without a lengthy sales preamble. High quality referrals should mean that your brand comes recommended and you can get to the solution presentation quickly.

▪️ They don’t need much selling. Where closing a sale can occur relatively quickly and revenue realized soon thereafter. An opportunity requiring a 12-month sales cycle won’t be terribly productive when you only have less than half the 24-month plan period left to enjoy the revenue. Work with clients who will give you at least 18 months of revenue if you want to hit your revenue targets.

And avoid customers who ask for proposals. Responding to the request and waiting for a decision will gobble up precious time you don’t have. The formal sales process is a time consumer; focus on people who are willing to deal you their business based on trust and past success with you.                   

▪️ They are ‘close to home’. In a geographic sense, explore the territory immediately around you before trying to exploit distant ones. If you have a good online presence, stay with the market focus you have. Exploring new virtual or physical markets — probably with the need to establish new sales channels— can gobble up your time with questionable short term results. Penetrate and dominate your current markets before you wander afar.

This is an area where I’ve seen small business leaders fall flat on their face. They spot something new to do that is interesting and at least theoretically is a good idea and they decide to chase it, reducing the energy that is applied to fast-and-easy activities. They lose on both accounts: the new stuff doesn’t materialize and the current stuff suffers.

▪️ They represent high lifetime value to you. These customers show a propensity to pay higher prices in exchange for good value, so resource investments in them will likely provide healthy returns.

▪️ They have been loyal to you in the past and will likely continue to buy from you with less effort than those who will have to be convinced of the value you offer.

▪️ They are segments where your competitive position is strong and where your advantage is clearly defined. This is the nirvana WHO to SERVE tactic. If you are fortunate to have customer segments with high growth potential and where you dominate in the market, pour your resources on ‘em.

▪️ They are few in number. Choose the minimum number of customer groups that will generate the revenue you want.
The more you choose, the more diluted your efforts are likely to be. Choose the critical few groups rather than the possible many.

What do you do with customer groups you currently serve but who are unable to generate the revenue growth you need? Be prepared to walk away from them. You have to let them go.

Source: #RoyOsing

How will you COMPETE and WIN? — The third and final question to answer in developing your strategic game plan is a critical one and the answer to the question drives a stake in the ground in terms of how you will differentiate yourself from your competitors and beat them handily.

HOW to WIN follows the WHO to SERVE question. Just as the choice of which customers to target follows the revenue goals you have, the competitive strategy you develop must follow your selection of customers to serve.

Your objective in this question is to create your competitive uniqueness relative to the customer groups you have chosen to target and as opposed to the market generally.
You may have capabilities that stand out from your competitors in the mass market, for example, but the challenge now is to focus on those strengths that relate to the particular customer groups you have chosen to serve.

Your task is to extract goals from a selected number of discrete customer segments, not the broader market.

This is extremely important and critical to having a successful strategic game plan. If you have chosen customer groups ‘A’ and ‘B’ for example, then you need to differentiate yourself from others vying for the attention of these two groups specifically.

You will be searching for ways to deliver what these two groups want in a more compelling and special way than anyone else attempting to attract their attention.

Answering the HOW to WIN question involves in-depth competitor analysis: Who are they; what are their strategies? How do they differentiate? What is their value proposition?

The most practical and compelling way to determine your one-of-a-kind competitive position is to create what I have tagged the ONLY Statement for your organization.

‘We are the only ones that…’ will definitely separate you from the herd If you can complete the sentence!

You don’t want merely to be the best of the best. You want to be the only ones who do what you do — Jerry Garcia, former leader of legendary rock band, The Grateful Dead

This is not a task for the faint-of-heart. Engage your team in the task. It involves looking at every nook and cranny in your organization for opportunities to separate yourselves from the pack: brand, service, product, product support, and how you leverage technology are some examples of where you can look.

Here’s an example of an ONLY that I helped create for a client. It’s simple, clear and compelling and makes a hell of an elevator speech.

‘We are the ONLY team that provides integrated safety solutions that go beyond the needs of our customers ANYTIME, ANYWHERE. We are committed to growing our customer’s business. We ONLY serve safety.’

ONLY rules — Your ONLY must speak to the experiences and benefits created by a product rather than on the product itself. Declaring, for example, that you are the ONLY ones who offer the XYZ product says little in terms of what unique value you are creating for people which is the key for any differentiation statement.
And don’t include low prices in the statement or you will have a rude awakening;

Never use a comparative word like ‘better’ or a superlative word like ‘best’ in your ONLY. They are lazy, subjective words that you can’t prove — how can you prove you have the ‘best’ communications network in Canada? — and customers don’t believe them in any event;

Keep it brief. Your ONLY is a sound bite that consumes a few lines, not a narrative consuming a page. If it looks like an essay it isn’t a viable claim;

As stated earlier, your ONLY must speak to the specific customer group you are targeting not the market in general;

Test your ONLY with customers and employees to ensure it is relevant — does it address the high priority wants and desires of the WHO — and true — do they believe you actually deliver on the statement consistently?

Consider your ONLY a draft; it is highly unlikely you’ll get it right the first time. Take your almost-there only statement and start working with it. Refine it as you go. And stay alert for a response by a competitor who may suddenly come awake when they see your move.

Strategic game plan statement — Once your team have answered the 3 questions you are now ready to pull your answers together into your overall strategy statement which is unlike others which tend to be general and helium-filled.

It could look something like this:

“We will grow our top line sales revenue by 3% over the next 12 months (HOW BIG) by focusing our scarce resources on the retired couples segment of greater Seattle (WHO to SERVE). We will compete and win by providing personalized transportation services to assist them in getting around the city. (HOW to WIN)”.

Once you’ve crafted your ‘elevator speech’ business plan statement, the even tougher work starts, building an action plan with specific objectives and accountabilities to execute your new plan. Take the time required to get this piece right, otherwise you won’t achieve your strategic intent.

Here are a few execution planning points to consider:

▪️ Select as few objectives as possible. Avoid the brainstorming tactic where the tendency is to define as many things to do as possible. All brainstorming does is dilute the number of resources available to do the real work necessary to advance your plan.

Find the critical few objectives that will yield 80% of the result you’re looking for and get them done.

▪️ Assign accountabilities for each objective with a specific timeframe to deliver the expected results.

▪️ In the objectives portfolio, emphasize marketing, sales and customer service more than other more internally focused functions like finance and business development. Customer-facing objectives are critical to revenue generation and loyalty and should be given the priority.

▪️ If your plan includes building customer loyalty, have a specific objective to create a service recovery strategy.

▪️ Include a Cut the CRAP objective to free up resources from unnecessary work to the new tasks required to execute your new plan.

If you follow the methodology I’ve described here, you will not only have a business plan like no other, your organization will also have the superior market performance that goes along with it.

Cheers,
Roy
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• Posted 3.8.21 at 05:43 am by Roy Osing
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