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Strategy

Six Fundamental Growth Strategy Questions

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“Progress consists only in the greater clarification of answers to the basic questions of life.” – Leo Tolstoy

Developing a growth strategy for any organization is challenging even in the best of times. In today’s disruptive VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) business environment, it has become exceptionally more difficult.

One proven approach for dealing with difficult problems, especially those situations where there are many unknowns, is to go back to the basics. If we revert to a few fundamental strategies, and ask some simple questions, we are often in a much better position to start problem solving.

Tackling the challenge like a reporter would, asking basic questions first, is a great way to quickly get clarity. It helps provide valuable perspective and a solid platform from which to develop robust strategy and formulate comprehensive plans.

I like to call this the “start simple” approach, and it is a proven way to begin developing an effective growth strategy.

KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid!

When it is time to think about a new growth strategy and developing a go-to-market plan the best advice is always to start simple. A good place to begin is to make sure your organization is ready for growth in the first place.

There is always a tendency to over-complicate things. This can be a huge time sink, and sometimes a fatal mistake for leaders and their teams. The concept of starting slowly, walking before you run, is a great way to avoid complexity.

Next, you will want to do some investigation, ensuring you have good situational awareness of your market. While there are a many questions that could, and ultimately will, be asked, it is always a good idea to start the strategic planning exercise by answering fundamental questions first. You can layer in more depth and complexity later.

The Only Four Ways to Grow Sales

The very essence of growth strategy for any business organization is to drive growth. Without selling something (to new or existing customers), there can be no growth.

As a reminder, there are only four fundamental ways to increase sales:

  • Increase the number of clients – turning more prospects into paying customers.
  • Increase the average transaction – getting each client to buy more at each purchase.
  • Increase the frequency that the average client buys from you – getting each customer to buy from you more often.
  • Improve the efficiency and effectiveness of each step in the marketing and sales process – driving greater “funnel velocity” and higher conversions.

At least one of these four drivers will be part of any growth strategy.

Focus on Blocking and Tackling

In the game of American Football, blocking and tackling are often called the fundamentals of the game. In the game of growth strategy, I think there are also two fundamentals:

  • Where-to-play – Which specific markets and prospects to target in order to sell your products and/or services.
  • How-to-win – How to create and deliver a compelling value proposition for those prospects so that they choose to buy your products and/or services over any other option.

At first glance, these seem straightforward. However, there is a lot of detail there. To make things a bit easier, these two fundamentals can be broken down into six fundamental growth strategy questions.

Six Fundamental Growth Strategy Questions

The six fundamental growth strategy questions are modeled after a time-tested and proven formula. Journalists, researchers, and police officers learn this basic investigative formula often referred to as “The Five Ws and How” (or, 5W/1H):

  • Who
  • What
  • Where
  • When
  • Why
  • How

Many people consider the answers to these 5W/1H questions as the basic starting point for information gathering or solving any problem. This line of basic questioning is certainly not new…as it turns out; the origins of this line of inquiry go all the way back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle!

In the context of growth, answering these six fundamental questions is a great starting place that will help frame up your strategy and approach:

  1. Who is the buyer? – What is the Ideal Client Profile (ICP)? Their profile with demographic, firmographic, and psychographic details (persona).
  2. What is their need? – What (problem/pain/challenge) does our product/service fix for the buyer?
  3. Where do we find them? – What specific markets, industries, and/or organizations will we target?
  4. When are they likely to buy? – What internal and external influences cause prospective buyers to take action? Are there calendar or market triggers?
  5. Why will they buy? – What is the value proposition of our product and/or service? How is it better and/or different from any alternative solution (including doing nothing)?
  6. How will we win? – What is the repeatable process and tactics that enables a consistent stream of qualified prospects and convinces them we are only logical choice?

The best way to get answers to these questions is to interact with your market. Get out of the building, either figuratively or literally, and talk with your prospective buyers.

Next Steps…

Your answers to the 5W/1H questions above is a great starting point for creating a new growth strategy.

This vital work should be sponsored by the CEO and/or board of directors and is most often led by the Chief Marketing Officer (or an experienced fractional CMO!) in partnership with the head of Sales.

Even though the structure is simple, it provides a great framework to build out a solid growth strategy. With more time and analysis, it can help you define your targeting, messaging, optimal marketing and sales structure, go-to-market programs, and the team to get it done.

-Onward

How to Avoid the Efficiency Trap

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“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” – Peter Drucker

Many business leaders put in long hours and are always “busy” at work. However, this frenetic level of activity does not necessarily mean they are working on the right things.

How can this be?

In a turbulent and disrupted business environment like we find ourselves in today, it is very easy for time-starved executives to fall into “firefighting” mode – spending their days jumping from one urgent issue to the next. While it may be psychically rewarding to always feel needed, to cross off many to-do’s each day, and come home exhausted after a hard day at work…it is also a dangerous trap for leaders.  

I call it the efficiency trap.

Why is it a trap? Because if you are not careful about how you spend your time, it becomes very easy to spend all your time efficiently working on the wrong things. By their very nature, urgent items tend to beat out important ones, and consume all our valuable time in the process.

The key takeaway: Being efficient at addressing urgent but less important issues does not necessarily make you more effective in the long-term.

Use the Eisenhower Matrix to Direct Your Focus

In the world of time management and productivity improvement training there is an old framework credited to General Dwight D. Eisenhower. The aptly named Eisenhower Matrix is a helpful management tool to help prioritize activities by considering their urgency and importance. It looks like this:

The logic behind it can be interpreted from various public speeches, where Eisenhower explained how he prioritized issues: “Especially whenever our affairs seem to be in crisis, we are almost compelled to give our first attention to the urgent present rather than to the important future.” He went on to clarify, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”

Following this logic, many leaders incorrectly interpret the framework as prioritizing Urgent/Important. In effect prioritizing quadrant I (the green box in the graphic below) over all the others:

Unfortunately, this is exactly how most leaders spend their days. In crisis mode. Putting out fires. While they may be very efficient in solving immediate problems for their organizations, they may not be very effective in addressing long-term strategic challenges with what little time they have left.

As Stephen Covey went on to explain in his famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People book, we spend most of our time in quadrant I and III because they are “urgent” and thus steal our attention. We also tend to spend more time than we should in quadrant IV, because these are easy distractions and allow us to procrastinate hard things while appearing busy.

All of this activity effectively leaves no time for the most valuable and important quadrant of all, quadrant II.  Quadrant II is where we plan, reflect, strategize, are creative, nurture important relationships, and prepare for the future.

Effective leaders should spend most of their time in quadrant II:

Ironically, when leaders spent more of their time in quadrant II (the strategic planning frame) they can also anticipate and prevent many of the distracting quadrant I crises from occurring in the first place.

We Are Attracted to the Urgent

As humans, we are naturally attracted to bright shiny objects. These can take many forms. Sometimes they look like a neon billboard, a provocative advertisement, or an urgent crisis. In either case, it is interesting to note that science backs this up.

The Journal of Consumer Research recently conducted a study to examine how individuals decide what to work on when faced with tasks of mixed urgency and importance. The researchers discovered an interesting pattern: the test subjects paid more attention to time-sensitive tasks over tasks that were less urgent, even when the less urgent tasks offered greater rewards.

This quirk of human psychology – called the “Mere-Urgency Effect” – helps to explain why many leaders struggle with prioritizing their tasks. We have a natural inclination to prioritize tasks with an urgent deadline over tasks without any urgency regardless of the long-term payoffs or negative impact.

The Connection to VUCA Strategic Planning

We know that a strategic plan is useless unless leaders and their teams focus on execution. This bias to action is critical. By developing a robust VUCA Strategic Plan and following an effective Management Cycle cadence, leaders can stack the odds in their favor and help drive successful outcomes.

Sadly, many strategic plans fail. There are many reasons for this, but one of the most common is leadership distraction. By focusing on immediate urgent issues, they shift attention away from long-term strategic execution.

Does this mean the effort to produce the strategic plan was a waste of time? Not necessarily.

Since a well-thought-out strategic plan has articulated what is most important for the future of the organization and how to get there, it provides a great filter for leaders to evaluate how they should spend their time each day

The strategic plan ensures a focus on doing the right things. Being effective instead of just efficient.

Strategic Questions to Ask

So, how do we know if we are spending our time on the right things?

The place to begin is by examining the work you are doing, and the work of each of your team members across the organization. For each activity, ask questions around the value delivered, and if it has any impact on moving the organization forward. A few suggestions:

  • Why are we doing this activity?
  • Is it going to move us towards one (or more) of our strategic objectives?
  • Is this in line with our Mission, purpose, values?
  • Does this activity fit within our stated strategy and plan?
  • Are we neglecting quadrant II activities at the expense of more urgent, or less important activities?
  • Bonus questions: If it truly is a necessary activity? Could we do it more efficiently? Could it be outsourced?

Focus on Effectiveness

The next time you tell yourself “I was so productive today…” be sure to consider if you spent your time on the right things.

When it comes to strategy execution, effectiveness beats efficiency every time. It is much better to be 1% effective at doing the right thing than 100% efficient at doing the wrong thing! Over time, you can work on improving the speed of execution.

Effectiveness in doing the right activities will bring us closer to achieving our strategic objectives, and bring the organization closer to achieving its vision of success.

-Onward

Is Your Organization Ready for Growth?

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“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” – Socrates

It is a safe bet that almost any leader you ask will say they want to grow their business.

That makes sense, right? Of course it does. Everyone wants to have a role in a thriving and growing business.

However, once you get past the desire for growth, I have noticed things tend to get a lot more challenging.

Not every leader is prepared for the hard work of developing a growth strategy, and not every organization is ready or equipped to execute. While there are a number of detailed tactical questions one could ask to help diagnose an organization’s readiness for growth, I have found it useful to start with some big picture, strategic questions first.

Change is the Only Constant

We can summarize the underlying challenge in this discussion with one word: change. High-end management consultants would use two words to describe the process: business transformation!

No matter your word choice, accelerating business growth inevitably requires change. This is the crux of the problem for many organizations. Not every leader, or organization, is prepared to disrupt themselves. To drive new growth they will have to change their old approach to the market. They cannot continue doing only what they have always done. They have to change their activities. Sometimes they may even have to change people, process, structure, or systems. This kind of change can be painful.

Change is the only constant in our disrupted VUCA world. Despite that fact, embracing change is hard work. The natural state of most people is to resist difficult or uncertain things. Many will choose to dig in and resist change, or run from it instead of running towards it.

Yet, business history teaches us that the only way to survive and thrive is to adapt. In fact, adaptability is a key ingredient for effectively dealing with change. The willingness and ability to pivot as new circumstances present themselves and embrace something different is vital for creating business growth and success. We also know that great teams are the ones that will show up and do the hard work required to adapt.

Fundamental Growth Strategy Questions

Once leaders have embraced change, they can begin to ask fundamental questions to assess the readiness of their organization for growth. Here are a few that I have been using:

  • Is the value proposition of the organization’s product/service sound? In other words, is your product or service any good, or is it crap? If it needs work (and it is okay to admit that it does) then do that before you invest in growth. Your customers, and your team, will thank you!
  • Is the leadership team, the board, and ownership aligned around the desire and need to grow the business? If not, then clearly this needs to be a priority conversation.
  • Are you prepared to invest time and money in growth?
  • Is there a growth leader who is able to rally the team and prepared lead the charge?
  • Is there a cultural willingness and ability to confront reality? In strategic planning exercises, it is a requirement to put everything on the table: the good…the bad…and the ugly. This can sometimes get very personal for leaders and their teams who take great pride in the business they have built. Are you willing to call your baby ugly?
  • Related to the questions around confronting reality – is there a willingness to challenge all assumptions? Are you willing to admit the old ways of doing things may be outdated? Are you willing to consider new approaches? To challenge sacred cows?
  • Asking questions like these can often quickly lead to difficult discussions around making structural changes to the business. Are you prepared to revisit and possibly make changes to the people, process, and technology that will help drive business growth?

Where Do You Go From Here?

Business growth is great to have, but never easy to deliver. It requires leadership, change, investment, and a lot of hard work. The questions in this article should provide some insight to the readiness of your organization for growth.

Now the hard work begins…

Strategic leaders who decide to proceed with a growth initiative should first focus on getting situational awareness about their marketplace. They will gain valuable insights by getting out of the building and making sure their teams do this important learning exercise. Some of these insights might lead to developing alternative strategies or plans to address other scenarios.

Casting a wide net of inquiry, asking questions, listening, challenging, and learning provides great perspective and becomes a critical foundation for creating a VUCA Strategic Plan for growth.

With growth strategy and plan in hand, it is time to execute. The most successful leaders will inspire their teams with a bias to action. In the growth mode, leaders need to quickly triage issues, make aligned decisions, and push forward.

Being a leader in times of transformation is challenging and difficult, but driving growth for the organization is a great reward.

-Onward

Slow is Smooth and Smooth is Fast

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“Take time for all things: great haste makes great waste.” – Benjamin Franklin

The saying “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” originated in the US Special Forces, but the fundamental principle behind it has been around for much longer, often shared with the expression “haste makes waste.”

The underlying principle is that it is more efficient to do things right the first time. When we rush into doing something, we run the risk of making mistakes and producing inferior results. An added benefit of being deliberate is that with enough practice you can actually become quicker and more efficient at doing the task.

This is an important concept for leaders in any organization. There is a fine line when strategic planning between taking decisive action, and moving too fast. As it turns out, there is great benefit to taking enough time to think about the challenge first. This allows time to assess the situation, develop a strategy, plan, think of different scenarios, and then take purposeful action.

A risk in moving too fast is you do not think things through. You miss clues. Opportunities pass you by. Risks hit you head on because you never anticipated them. Sloppy execution exposes you to a better-prepared competitor.

Military Origins

Special Forces operators carefully prepare for military operations. For example, US Navy SEALs train for missions slowly at first. They walk through the plan and rehearse responses to different possible scenarios. They rinse and repeat until they have a smooth cadence. They practice at slow speeds to build up their comfort level and “muscle memory”, which allows them to execute quickly in combat.

When you consider that modern infantry combat centers around mobility, there is a lot of logic to this approach – there are four typical scenarios in urban combat:

  • Don’t move – you risk getting pinned down and surrounded.
  • Move too fast – risk of being exposed to enemy fire with no cover.
  • Move too slow – risk of being outflanked.
  • Move too hastily – risk of losing situational awareness and running into a trap.

Movement is very important. Clearly, nothing good happens if you are not moving. However, you cannot move too quickly or slowly, you must move with purpose. Of course, there are situations where moving fast is necessary and potentially lifesaving for soldiers – the goal is to move as quickly and perfectly as possible. This is where preparation, practice, and leadership comes in.

For military operators this is a critical way to prepare for difficult challenges, and ensure successful outcomes. With this diligent preparation behind them, they can then perform the operation quickly and efficiently out in the field.

This approach applies equally well to the world of work.

In the World of Work

We live in unprecedented times of unpredictability and disruption. This VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) environment can sometimes make it challenging to know what to do next.

Many business leaders fall victim to the dangerous assumption that the only way to win in this environment is by running full speed ahead at all times. This popular myth has been glorified by business media, and is magnified by our 24/7, always on, society.

Pick any field, and at the highest levels of achievement and performance, you will find professionals who have trained extensively using this principle to prepare. For example, even when they are moving incredibly fast, elite athletes do not look rushed – they appear relaxed, with purposeful but fluid movements. What we do not see without the benefit of slow motion and expert analysis is that their movements have been finely tuned and optimized through a lot of repetitions, hard work and coaching.

The same observation applies to professionals in any field you can think of – surgeons, master electricians, enterprise sales reps, marketing executives…they all reach the pinnacle of achievement through hard work, deliberate practice, and never rushing. They have a strategy, develop a plan, and then execute. Over time, they perfect their craft and become quicker and more efficient.

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

A Sailing Example

When the skipper of a sailboat wants to change directions, it is called tacking the boat. During a race, this critical and carefully timed maneuver can cause the boat to gain or lose position depending on how well it is executed by the crew. There are many variables to consider, including boat speed, wind speed and direction, waves, crew, and proximity to other boats. If you turn too quickly, you shave off speed; turn too slowly and you lose momentum. The goal is a slow but steady, smooth turn with the wind catching the sail at the perfect moment and accelerating the boat out of the turn in the new direction.

Tacking is a skill practiced constantly by sailboat racing crews, and speed is the reward. They know races are often won or lost by a few seconds, and executing this crucial maneuver smoothly and quickly is a critical factor to winning.

Too Slow Can Be Fatal

While slow is smooth, too slow can be fatal.

Leaders must strike a delicate balance between being thoughtful and taking action. The downside to taking a slow approach is that in some organizations it can devolve to “paralysis by analysis.” Teams end up spending so much time thinking and planning that they lose momentum and opportunity passes them by.

A difficult part of leadership is properly designing the solution, but also instilling a sense of urgency to get it done. In this context, urgency does not mean being frantic or that it must be done immediately. Urgency means having a bias for action, but also doing it well.

Movement is the underlying force behind the “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” philosophy – movement that is thoughtful, with a purpose and proper planning, but also deliberate and unrelenting.

Conclusion

A hurried soldier makes a careless mistake and puts their life in harm’s way, an unprepared athlete loses a game against an inferior opponent, and a hard charging executive makes an ill-considered decision. While the stakes are different, the solution to preparing for each situation is the same.

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast.

-Onward

Show Up and Do the Work

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“The only easy day was yesterday” – US Navy SEALs motto

I recently had an interesting conversation with a prospective client. The topic was about updating the go-to-market strategy for their organization. While the concept of the new strategy I proposed was straightforward (the best ones usually are!), the execution was more complex and would require making some changes to their existing approach.

After some conversation, it became clear this CEO was fishing for a quick fix solution without any disruption. He wanted all the benefits of a new, transformative approach to the market. However, he was reluctant to invest the time, money, or resources to get there.

He wanted the benefits of growth, without making any changes to the status quo, and without doing the hard work.

This reminded me of a fundamental business lesson that applies to leaders of any organization.

As Woody Allen famously said, “eighty percent of success is showing up.”

The rest is just hard work.

No Shortcuts

The real secret to success in life is quite simple.

It does not matter if the topic is family, friends, your job, or executing a strategic plan.

There is no magic pill.

There are no shortcuts. (At least not lasting ones.)

The same fundamental rule of effort applies – you have to show up. And, even more importantly, you have to do the work.

You must be in the game, playing the game, in order to have any chance of winning the game. You cannot be on the sidelines and have any hope of success.

Connection to VUCA Strategic Planning

The harsh reality is that many strategic plans fail.

It is not because these strategic plans are necessarily bad, but rather because they are not executed.

Why? There are many reasons. Leaders and their teams get distracted. Competitors make noise in the market. Customers have problems. Employees need attention. Crises and distractions abound. Life interrupts…

As a result, the brilliant strategic plans that leaders and their teams invested a lot of time and money in developing are tossed aside. Hopefully to resurface when “we have more time.”

Sad but true.

A strategic plan is useless unless someone (or some team) shows up, and then does something. This bias to action is critical. By developing a robust VUCA Strategic Plan and following an effective Management Cycle cadence, leaders can stack the odds in their favor and ensure success.

A Dieting Analogy

Like many who have been mostly housebound during the global pandemic I have put on a couple of extra pounds (a good friend of mine, who has also put on some extra weight, calls it his COVID 19!).

After doing some research on popular diets, I discovered a dirty little secret.

Wait for it…

Nearly all diets work!

That’s right. The actual diet is not the problem. The real problem is the dieter. Most of us lack the discipline to buy and prepare the right food, to exercise appropriately, and, more importantly, the motivation to stick with the discipline of the diet.

Much like strategic planning. We have to show and do the hard work. There is no shortcut.

It really is that simple.

-Onward