Fortune 500 companies spend $500 - 600k at top consulting firms

Just to learn these 3 principles of competitive advantage:

Strategy means choosing what your business will do differently than your competitors to give you an unfair advantage

and win.

Here’s how you win...

1/ Create a vision for your ideal future business

This vision will guide the choices you make for the rest of your strategy

Here's how

1a/ Vision needs to:

• Define your purpose (ex. sustainability, solve a customer problem)
• Define what “winning” means (ex. more revenue, customers prefer you)
• Include customers and competitors (ex. solutions better than competitors)
• Be measurable (ex. customer surveys)

2/ Decide where your playing field is (and where it’s not)

Decide where you'll focus (and not focus):
• Customer types (ex. income levels, age ranges)
• Geographies (ex. countries, regions, states)
• Offerings (ex. services, products)
• Channels (ex. social media, email)

3/ Decide how you'll have a competitive advantage within each playing field

Make choices that competitors can’t or don’t want to match

3 types of advantage:
• Supply (ex. access to information others don’t have)
• Demand (ex. customer rewards)
• Cost (ex. cheaper product)

3b/ Choose your playing field and competitive advantage at the same time

Mistake companies make: choosing a field because it’s big or growing fast without a way to win in that field

There's no good or bad market choice on its own

Combine each market choice with how you’ll win

4/ Done? Now run 3 tests

Test 1: What would have to be true about...
• How your competitors respond?
• What customers want?
• Your costs to make that choice happen?

If any of these answers seem unreasonable, adjust the choice

4a/ Test 2: Narrow/widen your Where to Play

Does narrowing focus your resources to win?

Ex. focus in one region strengthens your brand

Does widening get you revenue you can use to win?

Ex. more products = more revenue to invest in a sales team

Choose the option where you win

4b/ Test 3: Is there a choice where the opposite is stupid?

Ex: we will win by having the best customer experience (CX)

The opposite? We’ll win by having the worst customer service

That's stupid.

Turn it into an advantage by making it a unique (not best) experience

Summary:

To create a competitive advantage:
• Create a vision
• Choose where to play (and not play)
• Choose how to win

Then, test your strategy

That's a wrap!

If you enjoyed this thread:

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