Get clear on your strategy

 

Over the last few weeks I have helped a number of clients get some more clarity over their business model and their strategy for the future.

This is such a fundamental area for business success. Without that clarity, you cannot determine what your organisation should look like in 3 or 4 years, you cannot determine where to allocate your resources or even how to approach your market.

We are all told we have to have an elevator pitch, so that when you are in the lift with your ideal prospect you can tell them what you do in the time it takes to travel between one floor and the next.

There’s a fundamental flaw in that thinking. Your prospect does not care what you do. Your prospect cares about the result you deliver for their business.

It really doesn’t matter that you write wonderful software, or that you sell the best engineered widgets. What matters is how that software helps your customer or client, what gain they get from deploying it and what pain you are taking away. It doesn’t matter that you manufacture the best widgets, what matters is that you help your customer produce his product that relies upon those widgets.

Take your current marketing information, from the elevator pitch through all your brochures, leaflets, proposals and your website and highlight every time you see the words “We or I” and change them to you. (It’s known as weeing all over the page when you have too many we’s)

Now look at those statements that have a “you” replacing the “we”

See if you can respond to the statement with “so what?”

See if you could put that statement on your competitor’s website and it would still be true.

You may find you have some work to do so that your customer or prospect cannot answer “so what?” and that may take you right back to the fundamental reason why your business exists!