line of sight group | LINE OF SIGHT GROUP

31 Aug

When Listening to the Market, One Plus One Can Equal Three

I was talking with someone recently who wanted to accomplish three specific tasks – gather market intelligence, create competitive profiles and send out newsletters. As we talked further, we discovered that the three tasks were closely related. The conversation then shifted to what intelligence was needed and how would it be used?

In this situation, it probably makes sense to take one step back and conduct a Competitive Landscape Analysis using helpful frameworks like PESTEL and Five Forces. These types of analyses can narrow the focus and yield a specific set of competitors and trends to study and monitor.

Next, a knowledge portal, like Line of Sight Group’s Market-i Competitive Intelligence System, enables a way to organize, relate and contextualize all types of structured and unstructured intelligence. Using this system and the information garnered from the Competitive Landscape Analysis, a team could start gathering competitive intelligence, saving it, and then creating weekly newsletters, demonstrating swift value.

After several weeks or months, competitive profiles could also be created. As soon as these profiles were activated, all of the previously posted articles and artifacts could automatically link and append to the profiles. Similarly, any new intelligence added to Market-i would have immediate relevance and would add to the collective knowledge. The newsletter function could also include tips and techniques for using the intelligence as well as information regarding what to look for and how to capture it.

Knowing what you are looking for, why you need it, and how you will use it will allow you to architect a solution that will provide short and long term benefits. It also becomes more valuable with each new piece of intelligence, report or artifact added. Finally, an approach that includes both a push and a pull aspect helps ensure that there will be high levels of engagement. The total value can indeed be greater than that of the parts.

27 Jul

Competing through Intelligence – The Journey to a More Proactive Strategy

In my observation over the years in leading market research and intelligence efforts within organizations and then supporting them in a consulting role, I’ve observed how organizations tend to migrate along a ‘continuum’, based on their experience and skills in making data-driven strategic decisions.

Phase 1: Surprise! The initial realization that organizations need better knowledge and understanding of their external and competitive environment is when management experiences a significant surprise. This can be the appearance of a new competitor in their space, maybe through a partnership or acquisition. An example is the recent entry of Amazon into the grocery business through the acquisition of Whole Foods. Or it might be the loss of business at a loyal customer to an ‘irrational’ competitor, or simply growing price pressure caused by a value proposition that customers increasingly cannot discern as different from the competition. Whatever the cause, the general response in Phase 1 is to go overboard and ‘boil the ocean’ in an all-out/in-depth analysis to ensure it never happens again. Unfortunately, within months of completing this time consuming and expensive analysis, the external environment has continued to change bringing new potential surprises.

Phase 2. Dedicated Projects. The next phase on the continuum involves the realization that information and knowledge about a firm’s external environment can help manage risk and improve chances of success in its strategic ‘bets’. So instead of relying on gut feel, the organization conducts in-depth research to support and inform a strategic decision, usually related to combating a threat or taking advantage of a specific opportunity. These are one-time efforts designed to support a specific decision. In that way, they are highly valuable and actionable, and many organizations choose to stay in this phase. Again, the primary disadvantage with this approach is that the external environment does not stop evolving and changing. While the ‘snapshot’ analysis is valuable in supporting a specific decision, it gradually becomes obsolete as the environment changes.

Phase 3. Longitudinal Projects. After organizations have been conducting one-off research efforts for a while, they often identify some that they would like to repeat periodically. They may involve ongoing marketing or sales campaigns, for example, or existing products where pricing, features and enhancements change regularly. These periodic updates help managers keep a pulse on the changing external landscape, and make adjustments based on changing customer needs, competitor moves or changes in market or industry-level forces that affect strategic decisions. The primary disadvantage is that these updates generally look backward and decisions are based on what has happened rather than being future-based to include what is likely to happen.

Phase 4: Systematic Intelligence. As organizations see value in periodic updates, some move further to a systematic environment that involves continuous monitoring of threats and opportunities, regular updates, and an ongoing development of a strategic knowledge asset that is leveraged across the organization. Ongoing monitoring of leading indicators and patterns of changes in products and offerings, strategic assumptions, potential opportunities, threats and disruptors, and customer perception of the firm’s value proposition are designed to enable the organization to identify threats and opportunities earlier and to adjust its strategy quickly and effectively.

In order to get to this point, managers in these organizations start to develop a different mindset and an understanding that they cannot control how customers and ‘irrational’ competitors will behave in the future. They acknowledge that strategy is not perfect. They realize that, while their annual strategic plan is valuable for creating initial budgets and a list of important initiatives, they also need to have the capability and discipline to make strategic changes mid-stream and be able to justify them to the board using data. Managers shift their thinking to focus on the risks involved in the strategic choices (i.e.: placing bets) rather than insisting on proof that a given strategy will succeed.

This journey along the sophistication curve from episodic fixes to a data-driven culture of continuous knowledge and insight can be difficult for many organizations, but I’ve observed that those that make it to the systematic program level find a number of benefits:

Faster strategic response and first-mover advantages
Improved efficiency through a continuous process
Better communication and ‘line of sight’ for middle managers and others who support and execute strategic decisions
A knowledge asset that can be built upon and leveraged for innovation across the organization

In general, these organizations become more proactive by developing the capabilities to make hard strategic choices and ‘bets’ even as some things are unknowable and uncontrollable, and to adjust their strategies based on their own continuous learning about their external environment.

29 Jun

Pulling the Sales Intelligence Advantage Levers

One of the major trends in B2B selling over the past few years has been for sales teams to employ a strategy similar to management consultants – challenge, provoke and question clients and prospects about the status quo while building a case for a more compelling future. This approach has proven to be effective and requires a steady pipeline of relevant, specific and timely intelligence to back it up. Depending on the situation, there are a number of levers you can pull to arm the sales force with an intelligence advantage as they engage with executive level prospects.

The first lever is to conduct a Competitive Landscape Analysis – an exercise employing several management frameworks to review all forms of direct and indirect competition, relevant trends, opportunities and threats. This provides the sales team with a thorough understanding of their firm’s value proposition vs. the competition and relative to the market trends.

The next is to allow the Competitive Landscape Analysis to inform an ongoing Strategic Monitoring of announcements, updates and changes in the market. This ensures that the sales team is kept abreast of timely information and will not be caught off-guard when engaging with executive prospects.

Competitor Profiles can provide the sales team with a deep knowledge of the value proposition, positioning, differentiators, offers, customers, partners, personnel, and capabilities. Sales teams can use this insight to contrast themselves vs. their competitors when engaging with executive prospects. Battle Cards are a one page version of the Competitor Profile that focus on how to mitigate competitor strengths and exploit weaknesses.

Win/Loss Analysis gets to the heart of why deals are won and lost. Done correctly, they provide a wealth of objective feedback that the sales team can use to build upon strengths and learn from losses. The loss reviews provide some of the most useful feedback for improving the future win rate.

For sales teams heavily involved with services, Customer Experience Benchmarking can provide meaningful insight about the kind of service that their competitors are actually providing. This provides the sales team with the exact intelligence they need to outmaneuver competitors with customer experience issues.

Validating (or debunking) Competitor Claims in the market by interviewing a wide spectrum of people familiar with a competitor is an effective way to gauge the merit of market claims. Experience shows that many claims are false, putting the competitor on their heels and opening the door for a new approach to solving a problem.

The pulling of one or more intelligence levers will give the sales team a leg up by supporting their ability to approach executive prospects with knowledgeable, specific, consistent insight about their offer relative to the competition. This might turn out to be that slight edge when up against a competitor who might be ripe for the plucking.

23 May

Creating a Clear Line of Sight Through Inputs, Strategy and Execution

Last week Line of Sight Group delivered a presentation to the local chapter of the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) entitled, “The Intersection of Strategy and Product Development/Management.” The event was held at Padilla in Minneapolis and attended by 50 product management and strategy practitioners. Line of Sight Group Founder and President, Steve Schulz, opened with the question, “what do these have in common?” The metaphorical slide had pictures of a dinosaur, a telephone booth and a Blockbuster Video storefront. All are now extinct, disrupted out of existence by stronger competitors that were better informed and equipped to survive. Why?

Doug Hedlund, Participating Faculty at the University of St. Thomas Opus School, offered the first part of the answer, a Strategy Formulation and Execution Discipline involving the capture of key factors (an organization’s vision, mission, core values and strategic goals), internal environment factors (strengths and weaknesses) and external environment forces (competition and trends) as inputs. Next, he walked through how the key factors inform the Strategy (Arenas, Vehicles, Differentiation, Staging and Economic Logic). Finally, he covered the execution levers (leadership, talent, organizational structure, systems/processes, and culture) and scorecard (metrics and dashboards) needed to successfully carry out the strategy.

Next, Schulz presented an interactive case study using the Strategy Formulation and Execution Discipline where the attendees helped to fill in the key inputs that shaped the strategy and execution. Schulz employed three useful frameworks to organize the external and internal data – PESTEL (Political, Economic, Societal, Technological, Environmental, & Legal) Analysis, Porter’s Five Forces Analysis and a Table Stakes Analysis in his presentation of the case.

Finally, Brett Norgaard, Line of Sight Group Principal, bookended the presentation with two stories highlighting the use of timely external environment intelligence leading to successful strategies and product launches under very different circumstances. (See Stealth and Telephone Switch blog entries.)

Starting with external environment research as the first step to creating a clear line of sight, from the inputs to the strategy formation and on through to the execution and measurement, ensures alignment of the strategic and go-to-market functions, including product development/management. Individuals that can identify and understand what is upstream and downstream from strategy formulation will be best positioned to help their organizations prevail and avoid extinction in increasingly disruptive times.

12 May

Identifying and Connecting the Dots at the Product Conf 2017

On Monday, Line of Sight Group attended the Product Conf 2017 put on by DevJam at the History Center in St. Paul. This year’s theme was “Product Chemistry.” There were several tracks of presentations focused on product management, business-based architecture, development operations, customer experience and user-selected topics. We jumped around to take in at least one in each area. Here are a few of the key takeaways:

Beware of lies disguised as statistics
Tell better stories
Look for problems – seen and unseen
Iterative design will take many unexpected turns
Focus on fewer, not more, ideas
Apply systematic innovation techniques to find the white space
Like fire, some products are discovered vs. invented
Construct the product roadmap by looking at problems in the context of customers before designing solutions
Anthropology can lead to sound insight about true behavior vs. asking alone

It was great to get away for a day, network, and think about how and why to connect the dots in the quest to create (or discover) new products.

25 Apr

To Increase CX (and Revenue), This Lender Gave Customers a Blank Check

Line of Sight Group constantly engages in activities to keep abreast of trends in innovation, customer experience, sales methods, service adoption and business model transformation. One trend we have noticed are the parallels in the disciplines of product management, service design and customer experience. Over the past few weeks, we have attended events and sessions in all of these disciplines and would like to share an observation demonstrating this convergence.

Representatives from the Baker Tilly firm shared an interesting Customer Experience (CX) case at the Product Development Management Association (PDMA) local chapter meeting the other day. It was the case of a lender pre-approving customers for vehicle purchases but then realizing that less than a quarter of the pre-approved customers actually returned to the lender to complete the loan. This was very disappointing to the lender as the process to pre-approve customers took time and effort. After performing a journey mapping exercise along with some current and future state analysis, the lender added one crucial step at the beginning of the process that changed everything.

What was the innovation? The lender started sending along a blank check valid for up to the pre-approved loan amount with the customer as they entered the dealership to purchase their new vehicle. This gave the lender’s customers a powerful tool that provided them more control over the buying experience, let them bypass the time in the financial manager’s office where they were subject to every conceivable cross-sell and up-sell tactic, and allowed them to drive away in their new vehicle without returning to the lender in advance.

Thus, a CX initiative impacted the nature of the service/product (a blank check was added), the process (avoidance of a trip back to the lender), a much better customer experience (less effort and avoiding the trip to the financial manager’s office), and a boost in business for the lender (fourfold revenue increase). In this case, the CX started with the sales process, impacted the product and service offer, as well as what the customer experienced on their vehicle buying journey. Understanding the external environment made up of the dealers and competitive lenders along with the customer journey enabled this lender to prevail in several key areas.

20 Apr

Line of Sight’s Competitive Intelligence System Now SCIP Endorsed

Line of Sight Group is proud to announce that our Market-i Competitive Intelligence System has been recognized as a SCIP “Endorsed” product!

Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) is the nonprofit Association representing the Integrated Intelligence industry internationally for over 32 years.

What makes our system unique? Prior to launching Line of Sight Group in 2002, president and founder Steve Schulz conceived the Market-i System when he was running CI programs. According to SCIP, this makes the Market-i system unique and different because it was developed by a CI practitioner, not by a consultant or technology specialist with no background in CI.

The idea behind Line of Sight’s intelligence services offering, including our Market-i System, is that the most effective way for organizations to understand, respond to and anticipate changes in their external environment (not only direct competitors) is to collect and process information that best represents leading indicators in a systematic and ongoing way. It is done in such a way as to identify changes that are significant enough to deserve a more in-depth look. In addition, our intelligence services fit directly with our analysis services – we get to know our clients and their business and are uniquely positioned to help our clients develop deep insight and strategic options.

Line of Sight Group joins other service providers highlighted in SCIP’s (first-ever) 2017 Service Provider Assessment Guidebook – Highlighting SCIP Endorsed and Certified Services in ISCI. The guidebook is aimed at providing its members and potential users of these services some insight into the features and benefits that may be of service to their decision support program.

If you would like more information about our Market-i Competitive Intelligence System, please Reach Out! To learn more about SCIP or to become a member, contact them at www.scip.org.

27 Mar

Cargill Uses Competitive Intelligence to Sharpen its Global Customer Experience Program

One of the ways that Line of Sight Group keeps abreast of key marketplace trends is to attend industry association events. We recently attended an American Marketing Association (AMA) meeting that examined Cargill’s global customer experience model which is deployed to create consistently positive customer experiences despite a wide diversity of customers, products, geographies and markets. This approach is very comprehensive crossing multiple types and channels of customer interactions. One of the most important aspects of the process was to hold up Cargill’s customer experience to that of its competitors across the board. Knowing how you are doing with your customers is one thing, but to also know this relative to the competitive set is one of the elements that makes Cargill a market leader on a global basis. This is another example of a company committing to understanding its external environment and using the gathered insight to make good decisions.

27 Feb

Clarity at the Intersection of Product Management/Development and Analytics

Last Wednesday, Line of Sight Group attended the PDMA MN Chapter Meeting entitled, “The Intersection of Product Management/Development and Analytics.” There was networking, a tour of Optum including their version of the “Big Board” to monitor data and trends worldwide, and a panel moderated by Dave Mathias that included practitioners Kristen Womack, Jasmine Russell, Edward Chenard, David Quimby, and Scott Thomsen. They had great stories and examples drawn from real world experiences.

The final question had the panelists share some favorite resources and tips, which I scrambled feverishly to write down:

Lean Analytics Book
Mind the Product – UK Government example
Edward Tufte – Visualizing Data
Nate Silver – The Signal and the Noise
Analytics Vidhya Articles
Philosophy – there are timeless concepts e.g. Chinese Medicine that can potentially inform the “New Thing” you are working on
Cyberpsychology Topic
LEAN Innovation Topic
Eric Ries and Steve Blank – Customer Discovery
Business Model Generation
Zack Nies – Frame before you Build, Measure and Learn
IDEO – Design Thinking
Look internally for agents of change
Be self-reflective, fix impediments to change and be okay with a dynamically changing environment

You can find these resources and tips at the intersection of deep and practical.

05 Oct

External vs. Internal: The Difference between Strategy and Planning

Woman

As we enter the first days of October here in Minnesota, the leaves are turning, football is back and our clients are diving deep into their strategic planning for 2017.
When the concept of strategic planning arrived in the business world in the mid-1960’s, corporate leaders embraced it as “the one best way’ to devise and implement strategies, according to Henry Mintzberg, the internationally renowned academic and author of ‘The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning’. By the mid 1990’s amidst the dot.com bust, however, strategic planning had fallen from its pedestal and planning departments were being dismantled.

“Strategic planning is not strategic thinking. One is analysis and the other is synthesis.”
– Henry Mintzberg

Mintzberg explained that strategic planning had become, “strategic programming, the articulation and elaboration of strategies, or visions, that already exist.” On the other hand, he wrote that strategic thinking is about capturing what managers learn from all sources (including both ‘soft’ insights from experiences and observations as well as ‘hard’ data from market research) and then synthesizing it into a vision of the direction that the business should pursue.

In his 2014 HBR article ‘The Big Lie of Strategic Planning’ University of Toronto Professor Roger Martin laments that “strategic plans all tend to look pretty much the same.” They have three major parts: a vision or mission statement, a list of initiatives, and a conversion of the initiatives into budgets. While they may produce better budgets, they are not about strategy.

Strategic Planning	Strategy
Internally focused: planning, costs, capabilities	Externally focused: customers and competition
Short-term	Future-oriented
Controllable	Uncontrollable in long-term
Comfortable	Uncomfortable
Accurate, predictive	Imperfect, directional
Risk elimination	Risk management
Objectives, steps, timelines	Placing bets

Strategy is about what we choose to do as an organization (and not to do) and why. It is about where to place ‘bets’. Strategy focuses on the revenue side, where customers make decisions about whether to give their money to us, to our competitors or to a substitute. This is the hard work of acquiring and keeping customers. It is uncomfortable because our customers are making the decisions, not our own organization.

How to escape the comfort zone: embrace the angst

Because the problem is rooted in our natural aversion to discomfort and fear, Martin writes, “the only remedy is to adopt a discipline about strategy making that reconciles you to experiencing some angst.”

How can we stay focused on strategy this planning season and not fall into the trap of planning and cost budgeting? Some tips:

Focus on choices that influence revenue (i.e.: customer decision makers).

Acknowledge that strategy is not perfect.

Explicitly document the logic.

Invest in data-driven decision making.

Alignment

Of course, successful strategic planning occurs when both strategy and planning are aligned. The strategic “sweet spot” is the value proposition that meets customers’ needs in a way that rivals can’t. It must include both the external view of customers and competitors and the internal view of our own capabilities.

When the core elements of strategy are aligned (customers – competition – capabilities – mission/vision), and when decisions are driven by solid external knowledge, organizations can confidently place its strategic bets in a way that both grows revenue and delivers it in a way that is profitable for the company.