Guide to building your strategy

Read time: 4 minutes

Hey there 👋 - it's Brian.

In today's issue, you'll learn build a strategy to accelerate your revenue growth and keep your customers safe from competitors.

Here's a backstory.

A few years ago a global car company asked if it made sense for them to launch a SaaS product. And if so...

• Which customers do they target?

• What geographies do they launch it in?

• What distribution channels should they use?

• How do they build it so the know customers want it and competitors can't steal it?

This car company positioned their product to solve customer pain better than anyone else, and launched the product to targeted customers around the world.

Today, I'll help you develop your strategy so you can grow with confidence too.

Let's get into it:

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What is Strategy

The goal of Strategy is to decide what your business will do differently than your competitors that give you a competitive advantage.

This means we need to have a clear vision for what our future business will look like, where we choose to focus, and how we'll be better than our competitors.

For a detailed refresher on what strategy is, check out last week's issue (What is Strategy? - Click here).

Envision your future business

First things first, we need to know what we want our future business to look like. The rest of the strategy is focused on what we do to get there.

This vision will guide your strategy process.

In your vision, make sure to include:
• What's your purpose (examples:. sustainability, solve a customer problem)
• What does it mean to “win” (examples: more revenue, customers prefer you)
• Include customers and competitors (examples: solutions better than competitors)
• Be measurable (examples: know you're winning after a certain customer survey score)

If your goal can't be measured, then your aspiration is too vague and you need to be more specific.

Where will you focus?

Next, you'll need to determine what specific markets you'll focus on.

Choose a narrow slice of the market where you can solve the customer's problem better than anyone and you can maintain a competitive advantage.

Here it's critical to be clear on where you won't focus.

I get it. It's hard to say what customers you won't serve, but it's critical. This way, you better focus your solution to solve specific customer problems and better message your solution to improve sales.

Example categories of where you'll focus (and not focus):
• Customer types (examples: income levels, age ranges)
• Geographies (examples: countries, regions, states)
• Offerings (examples: services, products)
• Channels (examples: social media, email)

For details on how to choose where you'll play, check out my previous issue on determining your Go-to-Market strategy (link here).

How will you have a competitive advantage?

Your goal is to find the winning combination of what markets you'll focus on and how you'll win in those markets.

Here's how you choose to win:

A competitive advantage means doing something that your competitors can't or don't want to make.

2 ways you can build a competitive advantage:1) Customer-facing advantages2) Behind the scenes advantages

Choose to beat competitors in ways that focus on the customer (examples):
• Service: Faster installs, better guarantee, better replacement
• Distribution: Better product placement, wider partnership
• Marketing: More promotions, larger sales team

Or you can choose to beat competitors behind the scenes (examples):
• Operations: Lower downtime, faster response rate
• Inputs: Bigger databases, better insights
• Talent: Better training

Common mistakes:

1) Individually choosing where you'll focus and how you'll win in that focus area.Your competitive advantage will be different for each focus area so you need to choose them together.

2) Choosing advantages on their own and not considering how they work together.It's important your advantages fit together like a puzzle piece and create a much more powerful effect working together.

3) Choosing a market because it’s big or growing fast without a way to win.If the market is growing quickly your business will grow at the same rate as the market. But... when fast growing markets slow down, you'll be stuck without an advantage and have to drop prices to keep customers.

Let's test your strategy

Here are some questions to ask yourself to test if you have a strong strategy.

Test 1: What does this strategy assume would have to be true about...

After you've drafted your strategy, make sure it makes sense by testing assumptions:

What would have to be true about...
• How your competitors will respond?
• Your current abilities? How much time/money will you need to invest to make it a reality?
• Your cost of doing business?
• Customer desires?

If you make assumptions that are highly unlikely, then it's time to re-adjust the strategy until it's doable.

Test 2: Narrow/broaden your choices

Try narrowing and broadening your choices to see what the results would be. For example, target more or less customers.

Does narrowing your choice focus your resources better so you can win?

Does broadening your choice give you more money that you can use to win?

Adjust until you find the choice where you're most likely to win.

Test 3: Is there a choice where the opposite is stupid?

If so, remove it since it's a best practice, not a strategic choice! See the previous section on "Choices" for an explanation.

Ready to act on what you learned?

Great!

You're ready to build your strategy.

If you want help, reply to this email with "I'd love help with my growth" and I'll point you to resources to help.

I read every email and will answer your questions in future content.

Clickworthy Resources

• Book: Read this book for an actionable simplest explanation of how to build a strategy (Playing to Win - Click here)

• Blog: The author of "Playing to Win" wrote a blog to answer follow up questions from the book. Recommend starting from his older articles as they build on each other (Roger Martin Blog - Click here)

• Template: I made a simple template to keep your strategy organized (Click here)

None of these are affiliate links, though with content this good I wish they were!

Hope it's been helpful!

If you enjoyed it, please forward this email to friends looking to grow their business.

See ya next week,

Brian