Strategy is about making choices. If you’re not stopping some activities or choosing to not do something then you’re not being strategic.
Easy to say, less easy to implement, particularly when the organisation wants “More leads, more leads, more leads!”. How do you say “I want to do less”?
Almost everything in the world of strategy can be shown in a 2×2! I use the following simple model to help me decide what I need to stop doing and what I need to start doing more. It categorises activities into one of four groups:
Opportunities (top left)
The place where 90% of the discussion takes place. What else can we do? What are we missing? What new things can we do to fill the gap?
There’s a good reason why most time is spent here. Most earlier stage companies are in an aggressive growth phase – they’re not yet trying to cut costs and optimise the organisation. They just need to grow by any means. And this generally gets translated into “What new things can we do?”.
But you only have finite resources. Given that most new activities don’t work, the skill is in choosing the right things and I’d argue that’s the difference between success and failure; between good leadership and poor. It’s better to do nothing at all than everything! At least you’ll still have a team at the end of the endeavour.
Secret Sauce (top right)
These are the things that are working for you right now and making you money. Be very careful before you start reducing effort here, particularly if you’re not sure. For example, it may be that there are a number of review sites that are writing rave reviews about your offering. You may be completely oblivious to this but you’ll know soon enough if the product quality goes down and the reviews start getting worse. And by then it might be too late to stop the decline.
The difficulty is being very honest about why customers buy or don’t. You may wish for example, that it’s because you have the greatest user experience on the market. But that might not be true! It might be that 80% of your sales have come through simple reliability, perhaps for quite a dull product. Not much fun, but if you move resource away from the wrong team It might be hard to get that good reputation back.
The Past (bottom right)
The market changes. How you got here might not be the best way of moving forward. This can be a very hard pill to swallow, and can lead to some difficult decisions. But as I say, the world changes. In marketing there are activities that were very strong 15 to 20 years ago but do you now rarely see. An obvious example is print advertising. Yes there’s still some going on but it’s definitely not the business it was. I would also put an activity like cold calling into this category – It worked in the days of Glengarry Glen Ross but that was a long time ago!
To stop some of these activities takes teamwork, trust and bravery. It’s far easier to keep spending the money, than tell someone you don’t want to do their favourite activity anymore. But that’s the job I’m afraid.
Sirens (bottom left)
Sirens are activities that seem oh so tempting, but you need to resist. For example, most marketing departments want to do publicity stunts. They’re fun and the employees will love it! but they can be very expensive indeed. What seemed like a quick brainstorm decision can turn into months and months of graft with little return.
Sadly as a marketing leader, your job is to say no, however tempting the idea. Again, I believe decisions here demarcate great leadership from poor leadership. If a member of your team comes up to you and says “I want to spend the next three years engaging with Gartner, when should I start?”, and you don’t think it’s the right thing to do, then you need to ignore that particular siren.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning again, my examples above are specific to a particular company at at a particular moment in time. These will obviously be different for you! But the process – listing the hundred things that you could do next and pushing them into one of the four quadrants – Is crucial if you want to hit your goals without completely burning out the team.