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Successful strategic planning
Building a strategic plan starts by asking a great deal of questions. Strategic planning is successful when those who are attempting to build the plan, can visualize the competitive situation, opportunities for advancement, threats to success and risks of failure.
The only true way to be able to build this picture is by asking questions. While there are several questions to ask, some of the fundamental questions to ask include the following:
- What are the customers’ needs?
- How deep can we stratify the markets that we play in? What can we learn about the drivers/constraints, trends, opportunities?
- What does the past tell us about the future?
- What are our competitors doing?
Customers Needs:
Too often firms become entrenched in what the competition is doing rather than what customers are doing. A strategy based on what the competition is doing will always fail because it will always be reactionary and thus, a step behind the market leaders. Knowing customers buying behaviors, buying personas, change in technology utilization, spending and performance/quality parameters helps to ground the business in the biggest force that drives the market.
Market Information:
Market information that is useful in strategic planning is to understand the Total Addressable Market (TAM) size of a market segment. While a good metric is to know that the biopharma industry is approximately $250 billion in size, this number is too large to be meaningful.
Generalizations in market dynamics provides little to no useful information except that a population of customers in a region or industry are performing a certain way. We need to peel back the layers to better understand the differences among our markets (different states within the US, private vs. public universities, research vs. production).
Businesses need to better segment and stratify the layers of market opportunity in such a manner as for it to be meaningful.
Historical Analysis:
While you always hear that the past is not an indicator of future performance, we don’t believe that. The past is very telling. A historical analysis of spend, performance, response to new technologies, and key opinion leaders all provide critical information on likelihood of success and potential advocates of the new strategy. This historical analysis can also identify beachheads from which to position or launch the new strategy.
Competitors:
One of the final checks to review in strategic planning is the competition. If businesses look to the competition on what to do next, they will always be a step behind. Thus, it is important not to look at the competition for ideas but rather to sanity check where each is in the race and determine how much or how little investment to make in certain parts of the business. Because after all, it is a highly complex game with definitive winners.
FEATURED INSIGHTS
Overcoming pitfalls in strategic planning
