Without strategy implementation, they are blind and blind horses. The faster you go, the more dangerous you are. A series of actions done in the company are all centered on strategic guidance. If the company does not have strategic guidance, then the next series of things may not make much sense.
Editor’s note: This article is from the WeChat public account “Xiao Fei Ge Notes” , author Feng Xianfei.
For companies with To B business, strategy development is a particularly important thing. As an old saying goes:
There is no implementation of strategy, they are blind and blind horses. The faster you go, the more dangerous you are. A series of actions done in the company are all based on strategic guidance. If the company does not have strategic guidance, then the next series of things may not make much sense.
Strategy is like a super word. Words are alive. Words are calling. Words are fighting. Only when we find the guidance of super words can we advance the company’s next series of work.
So, how does To B’s business organize its strategy?
Before combing strategies, we can first define what a strategy is. There are many definitions of strategy. Among them, I agree with the definition of strategy proposed in the book “Good Strategy, Bad Strategy”.
The definition of strategy in the book refers to: Analyze the current situation, develop guidelines to deal with major difficulties, and take a series of coherent activities. There are 4 key points in this sentence:
1. Analyze the current situation;
2. Major difficulties;
3. Develop guidelines;
4. Take a series of coherent activities;
Regarding To B ’s business, we can sort out the strategy from these 4 key points. (In fact, not only To B ’s business,To use these 4 key points to sort out, other types of business can also be). Next, I will talk about them one by one.
Analyze the current situation
What needs to be analyzed when analyzing the current situation? There are several analysis frameworks for your reference.
1. Need to analyze PEST, PEST stands for Political (Political), ECONOMIC (Economic), Social (Social), Technical (Technological).
(1) Politics is about what the country wants you to do. These documents and these systems all reflect the will of the country, and the will of the country is the dividend of policy.
If you study your industry carefully, you will find what the country has mentioned the most. You will find where the dividends of the policy are and you will have confidence in what you do.
Policy bonuses will be different for each industry, and policy bonuses will be different for different time periods. For example, in the rural market, around 2015, the country mentioned the most intelligent tourism in the whole world, then the intelligent tourism in the whole world was the policy dividend at that time; this year, the global intelligent tourism countries did not mention it much, but the most mentioned was rural governance. Informatization, then from now on, the informatization of rural governance is a policy dividend.
(2) Economics means that you see “where in the ocean of the economy where the tide rises and where the tide falls”.
You can find out which tracks of talents and capital are flowing in the time period you care about through some relevant information and materials, then these tracks are where the tide rises; capital and talents are increasing Less places are where the tide falls.
For example, around 2015, a large number of talents and capital are pouring into circuits such as mobile Internet and O2O; in the past year or two, circuits such as peripheral tours and SaaS services have poured a lot of capital. These emerging competitions The Tao is where the tide rises.
(3) Society is about the income distribution and living standards of the people, consumption upgrades, general health, and so on.
For example, in the peripheral tourism industry, the number of consumer groups in peripheral tourism is increasing every year, so the consumer demand in this industry is increasing.
(4) Technology, which is about what new technologies can be applied. The current new technologies are the Internet, mobile Internet, new energy, big data, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, etc.Wait.
Now, like many general-purpose and vertical SAAS products, such as SAAS products that solve agricultural informationization, retail informationization, job informationization, big data services, etc., they are essentially using artificial intelligence , Big data, cloud computing and other technologies to promote the development of various industries.
Can be analyzed by PEST:
Why is the track of To B business the future? Why is there a lot of talent and capital influencing on the track of To B business?
Because: in terms of politics, the state proposes supply-side structural reforms; in terms of economy, there is now an oversupply and fierce competition, and the competitiveness of traditional enterprises needs to be improved; society: new consumer demand is getting stronger and stronger; A large number of technologies can be applied to help traditional enterprises upgrade their operations.
Therefore, only by analyzing the politics, economy, technology, and society from a macro perspective, can you judge more clearly where the future is and where you should go.
2. SWOT needs to be analyzed. SWOT stands for Strength, Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat.
(1) Advantages, you need to clearly analyze your advantages? What are the advantages of your team? Where is your company’s business advantage? and many more.
(2) Disadvantages. In the same way, you need to clearly analyze your disadvantages? What are the disadvantages of your team? What are your company’s business disadvantages? and many more.
(3) Opportunities, you need to know where in the industry chain there are opportunities and which opportunities may belong to you in the entire large market.
(4) Threats, you need to know what threats your business will encounter in the market.
After a comprehensive SWOT analysis, you can fully find out where the opportunities are, and roughly assess the disparity in the comprehensive comprehensive strength of the enemy and us.
In this way, you can be sure of whether you should fight this battle or not. As stated in Sun Tzu ’s Art of War: First win and then fight.
The meaning is that we must first analyze whether we can win or not. We will only fight if we have a winning chance.
3. Analysis 3C is required. 3C represents Company (own company analysis), (Competitor) competitor analysis, and (Customer) customer and market analysis.
(1) Analysis of own company includes: market share; technical capability product capability; Product capability; Market capability; Sales capability; Customer success service capability; Brand capability; organizational ability; financial ability; and so on.
(2) Competitor analysis includes: Rival market share; Rival strategy; Rival business model; Rival product structure; and so on.
(3) Market analysis includes: market size; future growth trends; demand changes ; and more.
The 3C analysis model is basically any business, and any project in each life cycle of development should come up with an important analysis tool to help business analysis.
In the current situation analysis phase, we must carefully collect information, and have multiple people participate in and objectively analyze and draw conclusions. Don’t be affected by subjective consciousness, and end up with results that are harmful to the business.
Major issues
Why to identify problems before developing guidelines. Because strategy guides action and action is to solve problems, the problem must come first. So what kind of problems should we discover?
A To B company has many problems, such as:
Can’t find the customer’s pain point; the product does not meet the customer’s needs; after the product meets the customer’s demand, the customer is unwilling to pay; cannot find a copyable sales model and so on. The origin of all these problems is to help customers solve problems and get a certain profit.
So, The fundamental problem that needs to be discovered is to find customer problems (of course, other existing problems are also very important, you also need to find and find the corresponding solution).
Before discovering customer problems, you must first know who your customers are? When you first started your business, Some entrepreneurs have an idea, and then they develop a product and start looking for customers;
In the beginning, some entrepreneurs entered a market, knew who the customers were, and then discovered what the customers had problems, what resources and capabilities they had, and then designed the product;
Some entrepreneurs want to solve a certain type of problem from the beginning when they enter the market, and then push a solution to the whole industry;
But based on my recent To B entrepreneurial experience and the evolution trend of the To B business, I suggest that you must focus on customers during the To B business startup period. You have to know which market you want to be in What groups do you serve here, otherwise the future product design and marketing work will be very difficult.
After clarifying who the customer is, the next step is to mine the customer’s needs.
How can customers’ needs be tapped? Two abstract ideas are recommended here:
The first thought, in her course “30th Product Thinking”, Teacher Liang Ning talked about the pain points, itching points, and refreshing points of users. Through these three points, you can find the user’s needs.
But in terms of To B business, helping customers to solve the problem of pain will be of value, and solving the problem of itching and refreshing is not valuable to customers.
So you can think about where your customers ’needs are from helping them solve their pain points.
The second idea is that you can find the demand from the perspective of the customer’s gap. The demand comes from the gap. There are three main situations of the gap.
1. There is a gap between now and the future. For example, customers now earn 100 million a year and hope that they will reach 200 million next year. Then there will be a gap of 100 million between now and next year.
How to increase the revenue of 100 million, this is the demand of customers.
2. There was a gap between the past and the present. For example, customers made 10 million last year, and after the end of the year this year, they made 5 million. The less 5 million earned in the middle is the customer gap.
How to pass the 5 million less earned this year through what method, and earn it back the next year, this is the customer’s demand.
3. The customer’s status is OK now, but if no measures are taken, problems may occur in the future, which is also the source of the gap.
For example, some industries have high demands for cloud security, network security, and data security. If they are not resolved now, serious problems may occur in the future. At this time, preventing future security problems is customer demand.
After finding the customer ’s problem, Next, you need to locate your business.
Guidelines
Guidelines, you can think of it this way, that is, your positioning, your business value proposition, What solution does your business solve for whom and what problem? For example: The strategic positioning of a SAAS company is to help the catering company’s performance increase through software + hardware + generation operation services. This positioning mentioned:
For whom: for the catering business;
What problem is solved: solve the problem of business performance growth;
Which solution is adopted: through hardware + software + generation operation service.
Another example: The strategic positioning of a smart tourism integrated service provider in a tourism industry is through the integrated management system (including: smart operation, smart marketing, smart management, and smart service. Aspects), to provide overall solutions for smart tourism. This positioning mentioned:
For whom: Scenic area;
What problem is solved: the problem of the overall solution of smart tourism;
Which plan is adopted: integrated management system (including: smart operation, smart marketing, smart management, and smart service)
After designing the guidelines,
Next you need to design a series of coherent activities.
Design a series of coherent activities
What do a series of coherent activities include?
1.Products 2.Markets 3.Sales 4.Customer service 5.Organization Build 6. Wait
According to positioning, determine what problems your customers want to solve for your business: Design products to solve customer problems; After verifying that the product can also solve customer problems, you must start marketing to get customer sales leads;
After the marketing department obtains the sales leads, the sales department begins to convert the sales leads of the customers; After the customer payment conversion is successful, the customer service department starts customer service to help customers succeed; span> In order to support the normal operation of the above departments, a service organization needs to be established.
The above series of coherent activities need to be guided by strategy, and then continuously adjust, implement and optimize each tactic through the closed-loop thinking of PDCA (plan-do-check-adjust). Achieve strategic goals.
Finally, To sum up, when thinking about how To B’s business is strategically organized, you can think about it from the following 4 aspects:
1. Analyze the current situation;
2. Major difficulties;
3. Develop guidelines;
4. Take a series of coherent activities.
Guidelines, you can think of it this way, that is, your positioning, your business value proposition, What solution does your business solve for whom and what problem? For example: The strategic positioning of a SAAS company is to help the catering company’s performance increase through software + hardware + generation operation services. This positioning mentioned:
For whom: for the catering business;
What problem is solved: solve the problem of business performance growth;
Which solution is adopted: through hardware + software + generation operation service.
Another example: The strategic positioning of a smart tourism integrated service provider in a tourism industry is through the integrated management system (including: smart operation, smart marketing, smart management, and smart service. Aspects), to provide overall solutions for smart tourism. This positioning mentioned:
For whom: Scenic area;
What problem is solved: the problem of the overall solution of smart tourism;
Which plan is adopted: integrated management system (including: smart operation, smart marketing, smart management, and smart service)
After designing the guidelines,
Next you need to design a series of coherent activities.
Design a series of coherent activities
What do a series of coherent activities include?
1.Products 2.Markets 3.Sales 4.Customer service 5.Organization Build 6. Wait
According to positioning, determine what problems your customers want to solve for your business: Design products to solve customer problems; After verifying that the product can also solve customer problems, you must start marketing to get customer sales leads;
After the marketing department obtains the sales leads, the sales department begins to convert the sales leads of the customers; After the customer payment conversion is successful, the customer service department starts customer service to help customers succeed; span> In order to support the normal operation of the above departments, a service organization needs to be established.
The above series of coherent activities need to be guided by strategy, and then continuously adjust, implement and optimize each tactic through the closed-loop thinking of PDCA (plan-do-check-adjust). Achieve strategic goals.
Finally, To sum up, when thinking about how To B’s business is strategically organized, you can think about it from the following 4 aspects:
1. Analyze the current situation;
2. Major difficulties;
3. Develop guidelines;
4. Take a series of coherent activities.