Customer relationship innovation
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There are many ways to innovate, but one of the most reliable is in the customer relationship. It’s reliable because you can quickly measure the impact of changes in the way you manage the relationship with your customers. You don’t even have to have a brilliant idea—your customers will often provide it for you (if you ask!).
Nordstrom’s is a great example of a retailer that has achieved differentiation through a unique approach to their customer relationship. Not only do they establish a customer-centric approach to doing business, but they specifically empower their salespeople to go ...
Innovation is not optional
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Most people would agree that innovation is important. But not every company takes it seriously. Innovation is what keeps your business relevant as the needs of your customer change, and as your competition evolves.
It’s tempting to believe that in a cost-driven, mature market, efficiency is the key – that close management of costs and efficient and predictable processes are what makes the difference. But this is a mistake.
Of course, efficiency and cost management are part of every company’s operational plan, and in the environment where there’s not a lot of overall market growth, cost overruns can ...
Pragmatic steps to strategy development
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Strategy is about making informed choices with limited resources, in ways that strengthen your business. There’s no easy way to be sure that you have the right strategy, but there is a process that yields consistent results. In this post I’ll summarize a proven process for strategy development. Then I’ll describe each step in turn.
The seven key steps are these:
- Problem definition – what’s the scope of the strategy? Who is the end customer for the information? What are the success criteria?
- Environmental scan – get hold of every piece of information that’s easily available. Talk ...
Strategy: Making your recommendation
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Once your strategy hypothesis has been presented and validated, it’s time to get on to implementation. But implementation in any organization requires buy-in and understanding from a lot of people.
The recommendation phase is the process of establishing common understanding and buy-in, so that implementation can proceed.
The good news is that you have gone through a thorough process already, if you’ve followed the seven steps have a good audit trail of information and ideas all the way from the original problem definition, and you’ve also taken the time to keep others involved along the way. If ...
Strategy: Validation completes the picture
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A strategic hypothesis lays out your view of the market, the opportunity, the risks, and a prioritized set of options. Once subjected to internal review and discussion, there are bound to be a number of additional questions raised, and perhaps some preferences expressed.
The purpose of validation is to test the preferred options with friendly customers and internal stake-holders, and to find answers to the questions raised in the hypothesis review process.
Validation can be short or long, depending on the scope of the strategic leap proposed, and upon the style of the organization. I always try to keep the ...
RSS Feeds are the quick way to keep up to date
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If your web site doesn’t use RSS, you’re missing out on a great way to increase your visibility. This technique makes your content available in a customized way to every reader who wants to stay up to date with what you have to say.
RSS stands for “Real Simple Syndication”—which may not help much. But it’s a powerful technique for publishers and consumers of information. With an RSS feed you can make information available to your audience so they can keep up with the latest changes—articles, offers, information, news and more. RSS feeds are formatted ...
The Hypothesis - where analysis meets action
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In Seven Steps to a Sound Strategy we outlined the phases of strategy development. This is the point at which the rubber meets the road. You’ve developed a problem statement, collected information, developed a research plan, carried out the research, and now you have to decide what it all means.
The goal of this phase is simply to build a logical argument that connects your problem statement to a comprehensible explanation of the market and the opportunities available to you, via the research data you have collected along the way. In other words, a good hypothesis takes your audience ...
Web 2.0 and technology
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I wrote a while ago about Web 2.0, and the connections between people that it enables. I still think that’s perhaps the most important social impact of Web 2.0, and the real difference from a user standpoint. But there’s another angle, which is the development side.
When I moved beyond static web pages I learned about Content Management Systems, which are typically a combination of software systems that allow the separation of the content of a website from its presentation, and indeed from the infrastructure that manages all the content and presentation. I’ve built sites ...
Strategy: Effective Market Research execution
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Market research is the foundation of great strategy. Knowing more about your market and your customers than your competitors gives you an advantage when it comes to identifying new opportunities and capitalizing upon them.
There are many kinds of market research, and a wide range of expert services to help you apply them. In this article I will therefore focus on the kinds of qualitative research that is most helpful in strategy development. By now you will have developed a research plan that describes your chosen research methods and plan. In that you will have identified the key questions you ...
Research planning drives new insights
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Having defined your strategy problem and completed an environmental scan, you’re ready to plan the research. One of the key outputs from the environmental scan was a set of questions. It’s worth documenting the unanswered questions carefully, because they are the primary input to your research plan.
Questions represent gaps in your knowledge that you’d like to fill through research, in order to develop a strategic hypothesis. The sources of those answers will be the research sources you need to tap.
Here are some of the best sources of research data – which ones you choose will depend ...
