Know Your Business Pressures, Trends And Actions For Big Breakthroughs

Have you ever wished to work through a step-by-step process to help you innovate your enterprise, create competitive advantage and build your business? Well, such a process exists.

Since 1990, I’ve taken dozens of clients through it, and one of my greatest joys is watching the birth of revolutionary breakthroughs just from following the steps. Pull together a small team of innovative and strategic thinkers familiar with your business and market, and ask a facilitator to guide you through three dialogue areas: pressures, trends and actions. 

Pressures 
1. Competitive Pressure:

• Identify significant competitors, and assess their capabilities.
• Determine whether your products or services offer distinct advantages or are relatively equal to the competition.
• Strategize ways to present and prove your advantage over competitors, and begin innovation efforts where needed. 

2. Vendor-Supplier Pressure:

• Evaluate the ease of vendors driving up prices and the uniqueness of key inputs.
• Assess the abundance or scarcity of quality suppliers.
• Explore partnership opportunities with vendors and strategies to leverage power.

3. Customer Pressure:

• Analyze factors influencing customers’ ability to drive prices down and their propensity to switch to competitors.
• Determine the size of the potential market and strategies to capture untapped customers.
• Develop initiatives to enhance customer loyalty.

4. New Alternatives Pressure:

• Assess the ease of new competitors entering the market.
• Evaluate the level of protection you have around key technologies and strategies and where you could increase market barriers.

5. Employee and Talent Pressure:

• Consider demands from employees, unions or human resources that could affect vulnerability.
• Evaluate the ability to attract and retain talent, and identify strategies for talent development.

6. Substitution Pressure:

• Assess the likelihood and ease of customers finding alternatives to your offerings.
• Explore strategies to become the preferred provider and enhance customer loyalty.

7. Technology—Information Pressure:

• Evaluate the impact of technology and information changes on your business.
• Consider opportunities to protect or own key technology or information, and develop strategic advantages.

Trends
Past Trends: 

• Consider recent trends and shifts in your industry. What have been the specific trends in each of the seven pressures areas? 
• Has competition become more intense?
• Do vendors or customers have more power? 
• Have you seen an increase in alternatives or substitutes threatening the value you deliver? 
• Have new competitors been entering your industry, or have they been leaving? 

Current Trends:    
Trends change. Although any of the seven pressures may have shifted in one direction in the past three, five or 10 years, what is the current state and trend of those pressures? 

Anticipated Trends: 
Consider and list what future developments are likely. Include problems that could arise. Discuss these and prospective threats and constraints during regular dialogues.  

Actions
Within each pressure, you can find myriad potential opportunities and objectives around which your team could take action to improve profitability and create more value for you and the customer.

By using the above and other strategy dialogues I share in “High-Growth Levers,” you can begin leading with profit-improving innovation that also derives ever-greater value for your customers and the market. 

This is a significant abbreviation of my approach. Reach out for a fuller version and a pro bono one-on-one test flight to assess how much potential there may be and how to best take action.