Launch Your Business - The Big Bang Partnership

Top Tips for Customer Jobs-To-Be-Done Interviews

Jo North — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 09:38:28 +0000

Jobs-to-be-done: An Introduction

Understanding customer needs is at the heart of successful innovation and product development. However, traditional methods like surveys or focus groups often miss the mark, failing to reveal the deeper insights that drive true customer decisions. That’s where the Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework becomes essential. By focusing on the jobs customers need to accomplish, rather than just the product or service itself, JTBD shifts your focus from creating features to creating solutions. This shift from a product-first to a customer-first mindset is what allows you and your business to truly innovate and stay ahead of market demands.

Clayton Christensen, the pioneer behind Jobs Theory, introduced JBTD to help innovators understand the functional job a product performs for its end users. It helps you shift from a product-first mindset to a customer-first mindset. And failing to understand customer jobs leads to missed opportunities or failed products.

Jobs-to-be-done and Your Value Proposition

Getting JTBD right is essential for creating a successful value proposition. A value proposition is all about how well your product solves the job that customers are trying to get done. If you don’t understand the job they need your product to do, you can’t create a relevant value proposition. JTBD helps you pinpoint customer pain points, identify unmet needs, and develop a proposition that speaks directly to those needs.

The value proposition isn’t just about what your product does, it’s about the outcome that your product enables. And in order to define that outcome clearly, you must first understand the specific jobs your customers need to accomplish.

When you get JTBD right, your value proposition will align perfectly with the job your customers are trying to perform. You’ll have a greater chance of creating a product that’s not just useful, but essential.

Jobs-to-be-done and The Big Bang Partnership Innovation Framework

Now that we understand the core of JTBD, let’s see how it fits within the Big Bang Partnership Innovation Framework, a process I’ve developed to help companies innovate effectively.

The Big Bang Innovation Framework

JTBD interviews are a useful tool in the Big Bang Partnership Innovation Framework. They help uncover customer pain points and the jobs customers need to get done, which is key to identifying the right innovation opportunities. The insights from JTBD interviews inform the design of solutions that address both functional and emotional jobs, ensuring your product resonates with the customer. By integrating JTBD into the framework, you can rapidly prototype, test, and refine your innovations, ensuring they stay aligned with real customer needs and deliver lasting value.

Step 1: Understanding the Jobs-to-be-done Framework

The JTBD framework focuses on the job that a customer is trying to complete in a specific context. Rather than looking at a product’s features or the customer’s journey in isolation, it centers on the job executor’s goals and challenges.

You need to see the job map—the entire process a customer goes through to complete a job. This goes from the initial switch event (when they realize they need a solution) to the buying decision (when they settle on a new product). You want to identify the specific jobs they’re buying your product to do and the pain points they encounter along the way.

Pain Points

Pain points are the specific problems, frustrations, or obstacles that customers experience in the process of trying to get a job done. These are the issues that create discomfort or inefficiency in the customer’s journey. They are often the reason why they seek out a new product or solution.

Pain points can manifest in several ways:

Functional pain points: These are issues related to the performance or usability of a product. For example, a tool may be difficult to use, slow, or unreliable.
Emotional pain points: These relate to how a customer feels during their experience. It might be frustration from not being able to achieve a goal, embarrassment from using a product that feels outdated, or anxiety about wasting time and resources.
Time-related pain points: Customers may face issues with products that take too long to use or involve complex, time-consuming processes. In this case, the pain point is the lack of efficiency / requirement of too much effort.
Financial pain points: High costs or hidden fees can create frustration and make customers feel that they’re not getting enough value for their money.

Understanding pain points helps you identify where your product can make a real impact. You can deliver a solution that eases or eliminates the discomfort, making it more likely that customers will adopt and remain loyal to your product.

For instance, a SaaS company might discover through JTBD interviews that users find their onboarding process too time-consuming. This functional pain point could then be addressed by streamlining the process, resulting in greater customer satisfaction and retention.

Step 2: Prepare for the Jobs-to-be-done Interview

The success of JTBD style interviews depends on having the right participants and asking the right questions.

Identify the Right Customers: You need a group of people who have struggling moments and unmet needs in the area your product addresses. These are your job executors. Don’t limit yourself to current solution users—future customers can also offer valuable insights into what could work for them in the future.
Ask High-Level Questions: Your goal isn’t to dive into specific features right away, but rather to understand the decision-making process. Ask about their current way of doing things and explore expressions of pain they experience in their day-to-day lives. This can uncover customer behavior that you can address with new features. Questions like, “What were you trying to do the first time you searched for a solution?” are a great way to begin.
Set Up for Good Notes: Make sure your team takes good notes and documents specific information from each interview. These notes will help you identify trends and create job stories that guide your product development.

Step 3: Conduct the Jobs-to-be-done Interview

When conducting the interview, the key is to follow-up questions that get at the core of the customer’s motivation. These questions help you understand user motivation in a way that’s much deeper than traditional market research. You want to uncover how they felt at struggling moments, how they made their purchase decision, and what aspects of the current solution fell short.

Start with questions such as:

What made you choose this product over others?
Can you walk me through the the steps you took to find a solution?
When did you realize the current solution wasn’t working for you?

It’s important that you draw out the customer’s specific goals and understand the forces of progress that drive customer decisions to get actionable insights rather than superficial feedback.

Jobs-to-be-done Interview Questions

Here are 10 additional questions you can ask during your JTBD interviews to get deeper insights into the customer’s job, their pain points, and motivations:

What did you hope to achieve when you first started looking for a solution?
Can you describe the specific situation that led you to start searching for a new solution?
What was the most frustrating part of using your previous solution?
What made you realize that your current solution wasn’t meeting your needs?
What alternative solutions did you consider, and why did you ultimately reject them?
Can you tell me about the last time you tried to use your current solution? What happened?
What factors influenced your decision when choosing this product?
How do you feel when your solution works or doesn’t work?
How would your ideal solution improve the experience for you?
What would make you stop using this product and look for something else?

Step 4: Analyze the Data

Once you’ve collected your data, look for patterns that reveal the unmet needs and pain points your product can address. Focus on:

Functional jobs: What tasks are customers trying to complete?
Emotional jobs: How do they feel during these tasks?
Consumption chain jobs: What are the jobs that occur before or after the main job, but are equally important?

This will give you a deep understanding of the customer that will help you to build great prototypes and successful products.

The JTBD insights also play a critical role in Business Model Innovation. When you map out these insights, you can uncover new ways of delivering value, which might lead to innovative business models or pricing strategies.

Step 5: Use JTBD Insights to Inform Product Innovation

Here’s where the JTBD theory becomes powerful. Now that you have valuable insights from your interviews, you can use them to guide your product decisions.

Define Your Job Statement: A clear job statement should describe the customer’s job and desired outcome. For example: “When I’m [job], I want to [desired outcome], so I can [end goal].”
Design New Features: Using the insights you’ve gathered, start designing product features that specifically address pain points and improve the customer experience.
Validate Quickly: As you develop a new feature or product, test it early with potential users to ensure it aligns with the jobs they’re trying to accomplish.

These insights can also directly impact your business model. If your JTBD interviews reveal that a customer segment faces a particular problem in a different context than expected, it might suggest a new market or an entirely different value proposition. As Clayton M. Christensen observes, disruption often comes from targeting overlooked customer segments with a unique value proposition that better addresses their jobs.

Step 6: Iterate and Improve

JTBD interviews need to be part of an ongoing process. After your initial product launch, continue talking to customers and refining your features. Continuously gathering feedback helps you stay aligned with customers’ evolving needs.

By constantly validating and adjusting your value proposition based on ongoing JTBD insights, you’ll ensure your product remains relevant and customer-centric. This also helps keep your business model agile and adaptable to changing customer preferences and market conditions.

Next Steps

Understanding Jobs to Be Done helps you move from building products to solving real customer problems. It shifts your focus from what the product does to the outcomes it delivers.

If you’d like to learn more about the Jobs to Be Done framework and integrate it into your innovation and product development process, I’d be happy to help. Whether you’re just starting to explore JTBD, need guidance on conducting effective interviews or would like some hands-on facilitation, we can provide the support you need to drive innovation and create solutions that truly resonate with your customers. If you’re looking to learn more about applying the Jobs to Be Done framework in your own product development process, let’s talk. I’m offering a free consultation where we’ll explore how JTBD can uncover valuable insights for your business. Contact me here to schedule a quick video call.

About the Author

Founder and CEO of The Big Bang Partnership Ltd & Idea Time. Innovator. Author. Business Coach. International Keynote Speaker & Facilitator. Director Technology & Transformation at Port of Tyne. Leader of the UK’s Maritime 2050 Innovation Hub. Non-Executive Director. Associate in Business Innovation and Creativity at University of York.

The post Top Tips for Customer Jobs-To-Be-Done Interviews appeared first on The Big Bang Partnership.

Business Plan Template for Entrepreneurs & Innovators

Jo North — Sat, 09 Sep 2023 05:30:00 +0000

Your Business Plan Template: An Introduction

This article offers a free business plan template, tailored for both existing businesses that want to grow, and lean startups.

Every entrepreneur and innovator requires a solid business plan to guide their endeavors. Whether you’re a seasoned business owner, innovator or new to the scene.

I’ve helped many organizations of all kinds and sizes from around the world to create their business plan. I hope you find my tips, template and guidance useful.

We’ll start with an overview, and then I’ll go into some hands-on activities that you can do to create your business plan outline and content quickly and easily.

DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE BUSINESS PLAN TEMPLATE HERE

Business Planning Overview

Why a Business Plan?

A business plan should be a well-written document that provides a clear understanding of your business objectives, strategies, and the value proposition you’re offering to your current and potential customers.

The First Steps

Starting with an executive summary, a business plan gives an overview of what the business entails. The company description and company overview provide detailed information about the nature and type of business. Before embarking on your venture, understanding the target market is essential. Market research and market analysis reveal market size and the needs of your target audience.

Essential Elements of a Business Plan

Every thorough business plan should cover the following sections:

Sustainable Business Model

This illustrates how the business intends to make money. It includes potential revenue streams and the value proposition to target customers. With today’s climate change challenges, and increasing consumer demand for green, ethically produced products and services, you need to innovate a sustainable business model.

External Environment and Future Trends

The external environment is the world outside your business. It includes everything you can’t control, like economic conditions, competitors, and customer behavior. Future trends are the directions in which these elements are heading.

Understanding these two things can help you spot opportunities or threats early on. It can guide where you take your business and how you adapt.

By including content on the external environment and future trends in your business plan:

You show investors you’ve done your homework.
You prepare your business for what’s coming.
You can make informed decisions.
You stand out from competitors who might not be looking ahead.

In short, it helps your business be proactive, not reactive. It’s a step toward success.

Marketing Plan

Your marketing plan details your marketing strategy and tactics for attracting new customers and retaining them. This section will also cover different marketing strategies for different market segments.

Financial Plan

Your financial plan includes financial statements such as balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements. This plan shows the financial projections of your business and helps secure funding from financial institutions.

Management and Team

Information about team members, the management team is important to give your plan credibility.

Operational Plan

Delve into the daily operations of your business. If you’re seeking a business loan, this section is vital.

SWOT Analysis

It’s essential to understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your business.

Sales Strategy

Your sales strategy guides how you’ll attract new and existing business, including a detailed sales plan. It includes your sales channel and pricing strategies.

Business Plan Formats

There are two main types: the detailed business plan and the one-page business plan template. While both provide a framework, the main difference is the depth of information.

Lean startup business plans are shorter, suitable for businesses that require agility. A traditional business plan format is comprehensive, preferred by business leaders and financial institutions.

Resources for Entrepreneurs & Innovators

This article offers a free template for both types of business plans. There are also sample business plans for different types of businesses. For those wanting to go beyond a single plan, there’s guidance on creating a more detailed business plan.

Tips for Success

Target the Right Audience: Ensure your business idea resonates with potential customers.
Financial Clarity: Your financial data should be clear for potential investors.
Consistency: Maintain a consistent color scheme and format.
Use Professional Help: For legal documents and intellectual property, don’t hesitate to use a service provider.
Have a Business Strategy Workshop with your team.

Creating a professional plan is the best way for small business owners to secure funding, communicate with business partners, and have a roadmap for success. Whether you’re launching a new venture or growing an existing business, this template is a great place to start.

Your Business Plan Template

Every small business needs a business plan. It’s important to create one for your business if you don’t have one already and keep it up-to-date.

Writing a business plan for your company or innovation is not always an easy task, but there is a multitude of reasons that you need to have one, nonetheless. It’s a myth that the only times you will need a business plan are when you’re going to ask for a loan, pitch for an investment or launch a start-up.

This article focuses specifically on how to create a business plan for growth, rather than for investment pitches or finance and loan applications.

Create a Living Roadmap for Growth

A good business plan for growth includes your goals, strategies, sales, marketing and financial forecasts for the future, and is a living roadmap that helps you keep your business growing and developing in the direction you want it to go.

Clarify Your Thinking

The process of writing your business plan also helps you to clarify your thinking, identify potential issues, articulate your goals and decide how you are going to measure and track your progress.

Your Business Plan as a Communication Tool

An appropriate version of your business plan is a great communication tool to help engage the support and commitment of your employees, suppliers or customers.

Business Plan Template

I’ve created a FREE BUSINESS PLAN TEMPLATE in Powerpoint here to help you get started. Strategic planning is something that will aid your business when it needs to grow and expand, which will open up your options rather than keeping you closed off in a small box in one corner of the industry.

Be One of the Few Businesses with a Great Business Plan

I ran a poll a short while ago on social media (nothing statistically robust – just a temperature check) and asked two questions:

In these fast-changing times, do you think it is still important for your business to have an up-to-date business plan? Yes / No
Does your business have an up-to-date business plan? Yes / No

100% of the admittedly small sample answered Yes – it is still important for the business to have an up-to-date business plan.

And 100% also said they didn’t have a business plan for their business.

Create the Time and Work Smart

Talking to my clients I understand how challenging it can be to find the time to sit down and think about your business plan, never mind having to write it all up.

I help my clients to create realistically ambitious, practical, motivational and useful business plans in a time efficient way.

Real Result: 300% Growth in Turnover

Deborah Carr is awesome. She’s the founder and director of Total Spa Solutions. Her business was growing really well and Deborah wanted to take it to the next level and achieve accelerated growth. Deborah joined my Idea Time programme and used our one-to-one coaching sessions and business growth tools to exceed her original goals, achieving 300% growth in turnover.

Here’s what Deborah had to say:

“Jo’s passion for helping businesses succeed and grow was obvious from day one. The support and tools that were provided whilst working through the Idea Time programme are relevant to all businesses, no matter how established they are or the size of the business. Since I have been working with Jo and Idea Time, the results in my business growth have been phenomenal. The approach I have now adopted has resulted in 300% growth in turnover.“
Deborah Carr, TOTAL SPA SOLUTIONS

Work Smarter When Writing Your Business Plan

I wanted to share some quick wins with you, so here are my top 10 ten tips that you can use to work smarter when writing your business plan.

In order to save time and ensure that you are covering all the key areas, download my free business plan template here to get you started. It helps to get you thinking about where you want to take your business, is super easy to complete, takes about 60 minutes, and will give you a head start for the rest of this process.

1. You don’t actually need to write that much!

Because your business plan is for you, you don’t actually have to write that much! I find that the thought of having to write a lengthy, important document is one of the biggest, most off-putting reasons why business owners procrastinate. Use my free, fully editable business plan template here, just work through the questions and it will be a breeze compared with what you might be imagining!

If you would like to develop your writing skills for business, however, there are some great tips here in my article here on Successful Business Report Writing.

Photo: Business planning can be a creative, enjoyable process

2. Be clear on what your business actually does

You may think that what your business does is obvious. In reality, though, when I ask clients to define it very few of them can. Describe your business in a few sentences. Write it down. Keep improving it until you’re happy with it.

3. Look upward, outward and forward before you look inward

My next tip is to begin by looking upwards and outwards rather than diving straight in to your business.

The reason for this is that for our businesses to survive and thrive in the future we’ve simply got be in tune with what’s going on in the world. We need to stay close to what changes are emerging, and how they are likely to present an opportunity or challenge.

This is macro-environmental analysis. which you may know as PESTEL, PESTLE or STEEPLE. It’s important to consider what effects changes in these areas are likely to have on your business:

How are people behaving differently? What are the consumer trends? How is the population changing?

Technological

How is new technology, such as digital, affecting your industry?

Economic

Is a downturn / upturn likely? Could exchange rate changes impact you if you import / export?

Environmental

We have all seen the rapid response to reducing single-use plastics. This an example of how a change in environmental awareness means that businesses need to respond.

Political

Changes in world, national and local politics.

Legal

New regulation development around AI, autonomous vehicles, the environment, employing people. What other changes are expected in your sector?

Ethical

Consumers, rightly, are becoming more demanding about the ethics of the values, behaviors and actions of the companies they are choosing to buy from. What do you need to do differently in the future as a result?

4. Dig deeper into what your customers want

We haven’t even started with your business properly, yet, have we? Creating a great business plan reminds me a bit of a fantastic sales pitch. You ask all the right questions first, this time of yourself. Then tailor your response to meet and exceed the requirements and then seal the deal.

If you haven’t already, identify each of your current customer segments. Segments are groups of customers that share similar needs, aspirations and characteristics. You can develop your products, services and marketing to specifically target them.

Segmenting customers is good practice. It helps you to create a deeper understanding of your clients, their motivations and drivers for decision-making.

Look Ahead

Work out what your customers really need and want now, and in the future. Identify their pain points, which means the aspiration or challenge that the customer is experiencing. Consider the emotion connected with that aspiration or challenge.

Fully understanding customer pain points is essential for your business plan. Pain points provide huge opportunity for successful, commercial product and service development. They inform the language and channels for customer communications.

5. Know the competition

Having a unique selling point or value proposition is always going to be a huge advantage in the business world. This is especially true when you are trying to communicate the benefits of buying from your company.

As the business owner, you need to know the strengths and weaknesses of all your competitors. You will find it a lot easier to stand out from them, avoid making their mistakes, and learn from their successes.

Identify the competition that you face. Make sure that you can explain why you are different and a better choice than them. Be super clear about why potential and existing customers should choose your business over all the others.

If you’d like some specific advice on competitive advantage, read How to create an awesome USP for your business.

6. Take an honest look at your business

The next step is to take a good, honest look at where your business is at right now. What are its strengths and weaker areas? Use this checklist as prompts for your thinking:

Financial performance: sales, costs, profit margins, growth
Customers: retention, acquisition, satisfaction and engagement
People: team, culture, skills
Products and services
Brand
Marketing
Suppliers

Create a clear vision for what you want to achieve in the next 3-5 years.

Take some time to reflect on your answers to these questions below. Write your answers as fully as possible. These questions cover the four Fs: Feeling, Finances, Flexibility and Focus.

Feeling

1. How do you want to feel about your business over the next 3-5 years?

Finances

2. How much money do you want to make in the next 3-5 years? Why is this amount of money important to you? As well as the total, show how much money you want to make each month and each year.

Flexibility

3. What sort of lifestyle would you like to have with regard to your work life and your home life?

Focus

4. Which part(s) of your business would you like to focus on more? Why?

Your Summary

5. Based on your responses to questions 1-4, write a short summary. Describe how you want to adjust your approach now to get even better results in the next 3-5 years.

7. Map out what you need to do, step-by-step

Be Realistic

Think about the amount of time everything is going to take. Compare that to what resources you have available to you.

Give yourself some wriggle room. If you think that something is going to take about 20 weeks, put in the business plan that it will take 24. Give yourself a cushion in case if things go wrong.If everything goes smoothly, you can celebrate being ahead of schedule!

Adding some contingency brings credibility to your business plan and lowers risk.

Focus on Relevant Details

Make sure that you have focused on relevant details.

You need your business plan to cut straight to the point without a lot of fluff surrounding it, so that the people reading it know exactly what they are looking at and what you are trying to propose.

Every piece of necessary information should be included in this plan. Make sure that you don’t leave your reader with too many questions, or attempting to fill in the blanks themselves.

Don’t Overegg the Financials

You want to remain somewhat conservative with your financial estimates.

It is important that you do not overestimate and oversell how well you think your business is going to do.

For example, if you think that your business is going to manage to get around 40% of the market share in the first year, think about toning this down a little and putting 20% in your business plan. Obviously, it is important to sell your business as a success, and I know that this is something that you want to do. But your business plan is far more credible if you remain conservative.

You should also ensure that your cash flow is properly recorded to ensure that you can afford to implement your plans. Keep your financial information as up to date as possible.

8. No empty claims

There should be no empty claims in your business plan.

Everything that you claim should be backed up by some kind of evidence, whether this is research that you have conducted or figures that have predicted a certain outcome. There should not be a single sentence that is not backed up by some kind of supporting information or data.

If you cannot get evidence or data, spell out the assumptions that you have made in your plan, and the basis on which you made them.

9. Why is your plan going to work?

Finally, you need to have confidence that the business plan you have created is going to work.

For example, has another company done something similar and seen success from this? Or, have you already got a prototype up and running that you can show? Any factors that you can think of which could potentially have an impact on why this is going to work need to be included in your business plan.

Showing that you already have plans in place to tackle issues before they become a problem also helps you to create confidence in your business plan.

For additional guidance and resources, see my article here on how to create business cases that helps you to make your decisions with confidence.

10. Seek a trusted, expert second opinion

Get your business plan looked over by a business adviser to ensure that it is the best it could possibly be.

Completing your draft is a great feeling, but now you need to take it to an independent source for review. You could take this to a business advisor or accountant if you prefer. They will be able to offer you the constructive feedback you need to improve your plan where necessary.

Real Result: Confident and successful business expansion

Andy Firth is a talented entrepreneur, with a special flair for all things digital and ecommerce related. He is founder and director of digital agency Ascensor.

Andy worked with me on my Idea Time program to gain clarity in decision-making and to help create a business plan for accelerated growth.

Here’s what Andy had to say:

“We’re having a massive year this year at Ascensor, with legal contracts being worked on for a new building move. It was my BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) to be in that building by September this year and it’s all going according to plan and it’s because I’ve taken the time to properly focus on my goal. Also, my one-on-one time with Jo really looking at the goal has really helped because it is a huge commitment and in my heart 100%, it’s the right thing to do. […] Just by having the confidence, everything has fallen into place. I’ve had month, after month of the best months ever. I’ve recruited amazing people who have hit the ground running and it’s all to do with taking that time out to focus on the business and myself. And with taking that time out, doors often open that you don’t expect. I can’t thank Jo enough.”
ANDY FIRTH, DIRECTOR, ASCENSOR.COM

Next Steps for You and Your Business Plan

I hope that you have found this article helpful, and now have some ideas on how you can write a successful business plan for growth in a time-efficient, productive way. When you use my free business plan template and apply my tips you’ll be able to create your business plan for growth in much less time than you might think.

I am always on hand to help you, so please do get in touch here if you have any questions, would like any help with or an independent, expert review of your business plan. I’d love to hear from you.

DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE BUSINESS PLAN TEMPLATE HERE

About the Author

The post Business Plan Template for Entrepreneurs & Innovators appeared first on The Big Bang Partnership.

Innovation Failure: What Your Business Can Learn

Jo North — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 05:20:00 +0000

Innovation Failure Creates Learning

The theme of wanting to avoid innovation failure and create the “perfect” solution comes up time and time again in my conversations with entrepreneurs and corporate innovators.

Getting it right first time is a great aspiration, and there’s nothing wrong with that in principle. The challenge is that, by definition, business innovation means working towards commercializing a new product or idea that hasn’t been done before. It’s rarely a straight line to success.

You can (and should) use data, market and competitor analysis and get customer feedback. But, if you are launching something new it will be difficult to predict with complete accuracy how the market will respond, and how well your ideas will work in practice. Being comfortable with innovation failure (I prefer to call see it as “learning”) is essential if you want to grow your business.

What is Innovation Failure?

If you ask ten people what innovation failure is, the chances are that you’re going to get ten very different answers.

By definition, failure is “…the state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective.” So, failure is not succeeding in your goals.

The problem is that people see innovation failure as a bad thing, something to fear, something to avoid. But you can learn something when you fail. It’s a critical part of your business’ learning journey, if you approach it with a growth mindset.

In business, failure is a stepping stone to success rather than something to stop you from achieving your goals.
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See Innovation Failure as a Stepping Stone to Success

In business, failure is a stepping stone to success rather than something to stop you from achieving your goals.

The resilience that you show when you learn from your innovation failure and bounce back from it should be enough to give you the courage to continue on your path. You’ll just do it a little differently next time.

You see, failure is what will help you to learn how not to do something. Thomas Edison never believed that he failed to create the lightbulb. Instead, he realized that there were over 10,000 ways NOT to make a lightbulb, and only one way to make it work. If he had given up after he failed the first ten times, the world would be a very different place. Each of Edison’s failures didn’t make him quit and give up; instead, they pushed him to learn and try again continuously.

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Thomas Edison

A big part of growing your business is in experimentation, so there’s no need to quit if what you have tried doesn’t work the first time.
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A big part of growing your business is experimentation, so there’s no need to quit if what you have tried doesn’t work the first time. It’s through failing that you can get to that next step – don’t be afraid to explore what failure means to you.

Good Innovation Failure and Unhelpful Innovation Failure: What’s the Difference?

Not all types of innovation failure are equal to each other. There is a good failure, and there is an unhelpful failure. The key to your success is in knowing the difference, and knowing how to fail well. Let’s take a look:

Good Innovation Failure

Hopefully, we’ve already established that failure is a necessary step towards growth. Taking this one step further, when you deliberately use innovation methods such as lean start-up, innovation failure is an integral part of the process.

Brainstorming

When you have a brainstorming session, some not-so-great ideas will come up. You need those to inspire and shape the good ones, so don’t write them off. You need to have a culture of workplace innovation. This means that you and your team can be free to fail and learn safely and appropriately, as many times as it takes to succeed. Especially when it comes to shaping your next breakthrough idea.

Lean Start-up Fundamentals

The fundamental approach of lean start-up is to turn ideas into products or services, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful innovation processes should be geared to accelerating that feedback loop.

In reality, this means that you run tests on your idea and keep testing and tweaking until you get the desired result.

When you experiment, and you realize something doesn’t work, it doesn’t make it an innovation failure. Instead, it shows you what not to do next time. You can read about this in more detail in my video on lean innovation here.

Innovation Failure is Learning and Accelerates Success. Watch my video to learn more.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

In product development, the minimum viable product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and provide feedback for future development.

Creating and testing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a fundamental part of lean innovation.

Rather than waiting to perfect and polish every aspect of a product before it gets tested, or goes to market, the MVP helps innovators to be more agile, ship their concepts much more rapidly, and get customer feedback that helps them to continuously improve the product to make it better, stronger and more attractive more quickly.

Innovators can build fast, test fast, learn fast and then start the process again. They constantly refine and develop the product in response to customer feedback and behavior.

Waiting until the business has developed the ‘perfect’ product often means wasting time and money, and in some cases allows the competition to get there before you do.

Some tips for when failure happens

Unhelpful Innovation Failure

Repeated Mistakes

Repeated, avoidable and unnecessary mistakes are not the sort of failure that will help your business. It’s really important to make that distinction. If you’re getting fundamental stuff wrong repeatedly in the day-to-day running of your business, and you know how to do it better but aren’t doing it, that needs to get sorted as soon as possible.

If you’re getting fundamental stuff wrong repeatedly in the day-to-day running of your business, and you know how to do it better but aren’t doing it, that needs to get sorted as soon as possible.
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Failure You Can’t Afford

Innovation is a bit like financial planning. Don’t risk more than you’re willing to lose.

The brilliance of lean innovation is in its caution. It lets you test the waters gradually rather than diving headfirst.

Before investing fully, visualize the highs and the possible pitfalls of your idea.

Always be prepared for the worst-case scenario, ensuring it won’t be a showstopper.

By adopting this measured approach, you’ll increase your chances of success while staying resilient through setbacks.

Glorified Innovation Failure

Failure is going to happen in business, whether you plan for it to or not.

However, innovation failure is often glorified unnecessarily and unhelpfully, usually by the media and “rags to riches” stories.

There is a big difference between owning the failure, learning from it and moving forward, and glorifying failure. Failure isn’t the problem. How you respond to it is what matters.

It can be inspiring to hear the most accomplished people in our society have overcome significant adversity to achieve great things. But, in reality, many of these stories have been shaped by marketers and PRs to tap into our hope that we too can overcome the odds and make it big one day. These stories sell books and get views. In reality, you don’t have to fail so spectacularly to be hugely successful in the end.

Putting failure on a pedestal and glorifying it means that we don’t learn from the actions that led to the failure in the first place. Innovation failure helps us only when we stop to process what we have learned and integrate those insights into our future actions and decisions.

Putting Ideas into Action

A key difference between successful entrepreneurs and everyone else is action. Plenty of people have great product or service ideas but never do anything about it. The reasons are usually either that they:

lack confidence in their idea
believe the idea is too difficult to achieve
don’t think they have the time
are unsure how to make it happen

The result is that they give up too easily.

Drive Your Ideas Forward

All you need is one good idea, but it takes self-belief, motivation and leadership to make an idea a reality.

Motivation and enthusiasm as well as embracing trial and error, are what will stop your idea from being one that fails before you get it off the ground.

You’re the one behind this idea, and there is no magic solution to make your idea a reality. You need to accept good feedback and criticism, and go into your innovation journey with an open mind. Criticism is not something that makes your ideas invalid. Instead, it should strengthen them. Much like helpful innovation failure can make your business stronger, not weaker.

Fear of Innovation Failure

There’s a difference between being cautious about things that could go wrong and being too afraid to make a move. You may well be a strong, open-minded person who takes a few risks as an innovator, but that doesn’t mean that, like most of us, you won’t be afraid sometimes.

It’s crucial to remember that the greatest failure is the failure of not trying.

Tips to Help Overcome Innovation Failure

Here are some tips to help you overcome your fear of innovation failure:

Remember that regret is a stronger feeling than failure, and the feeling lasts longer
Recognize that fear is temporary
Don’t be afraid to embarrass yourself when you try and fail; it’s part of your learning process for success
Focus on your overall goal and not the smaller obstacles that get in the way
Trust your instincts. Take on board sound advice, make tweaks where you need to but trust yourself. Self-belief is vital!
Schedule review sessions with your team regularly to accelerate your learning cycle and catch potential failure early
Focus from the start on always working to achieve your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) – this approach has learning built into it

What to Do When Innovations Do Fail

Given that failure and innovation go hand-in-hand, here are some tips on how to deal with it.

Analyze it. Get to the bottom of what went wrong and learn how to make changes for next time.
Get your financials in order. You want to try again, so you need to be solvent enough to do it.
Speak to other innovators in your field about how they overcame failure. Take on board their tips and insights.
Take some time for yourself to get your head around the failure, and some space from the idea, so that you can come back and tackle it from a fresh perspective.
Try again, and make sure that you include the changes you can make to do better next time.

Potential Reasons for Your Innovation Failure

There are many reasons why an innovation might fail. These include:

Lack of effective validation and testing with your target group of customers
Weak implementation
A lack of money or insufficient investment
The wrong location, or time
Competitor activity
Impulsive decision-making
Ineffective marketing and communications; weak or unclear messaging or packaging
Quality issues

The failures that you encounter along the way will help you to develop and strengthen your ideas. Innovation is an iterative process. That means progress doesn’t always happen in a nice, straight line. Sometimes you need to go backwards so that you can go forwards again.

When to Quit Your Innovation?

Sometimes, the best thing to do it is to quit the innovation. Here are some ways that you can tell whether or not you should continue to pursue your innovation.

Confidence Level

How strong is your confidence in your idea, as a percentage? If you’re 70% confident still (I’ve heard that the benchmark that the US Marines use in combat decision-making!) go ahead. If not, it sounds like it’s time to rethink.

Customer Demand

If your idea is for a new product or service, re-test your assumptions about customer demand. Go back to the market to re-test and re-evaluate its commercial potential.

Also test that your marketing mix in terms of product or service design, marketing communications and promotions, as well as pricing are attractive. It may be that one of your marketing elements is “off”, rather than the idea itself.

If, once you’ve done that, it seems unlikely that you will get the market response that you need for successful commercialization, it’s time to walk away. Or, at least press pause for a while and reconsider before you invest more time and money.

Avoid Sunk Cost Mentality

Many entrepreneurs and corporate innovators think they’ve got to keep going with an idea that really isn’t working, because they have spent time and money on it.

The time and money you’ve already spent are known as “sunk costs”. That’s flawed logic, though. It’s much better to cut your losses as soon as you see that an idea isn’t going work. Don’t throw away good money after bad.

Get an Objective, Expert Perspective

As an innovator you have some skin in the game and are emotionally as well as financially invested in your idea. Talk through your idea and what you’ve done so far to launch it with someone who has expertise, and is objective. Look at it with a fresh pair of eyes.

The Delicate Balance of Innovation in the Corporate Landscape

Innovation is at the core of most thriving businesses in the United States and around the globe. From new products to new business models, innovation projects are essential for companies to stay relevant and competitive in their industries. It’s no secret that great ideas can propel a company forward, but as the innovation process unfolds, there are various potential pitfalls to be wary of.

Innovation Failure Examples

When considering innovation strategy, we can reflect on some historic missteps. A great example is the Google Glass. This product, while technologically impressive, failed to understand its target market and meet customer needs, resulting in it becoming one of the most notorious product failures. But it’s not just the realm of tech where innovation can miss the mark. In the consumer goods sector, New Coke by Coca-Cola faced a backlash from its dedicated consumers, proving that understanding customers’ needs is paramount.

It’s important to remember, however, that for every Google Glass or New Coke, there are successful innovators launching innovative products that revolutionize industries. Digital cameras changed the way we capture memories, rendering traditional film almost obsolete. Yet, their rise could be contrasted with the fate of the DeLorean DMC-12, a car ahead of its time but riddled with issues that prevented commercial success.

Large corporations often embark on ambitious innovation initiatives, seeking market leadership. However, these companies, including in the United States and across the globe, face inherent challenges. Cultural barriers, long decision-making cycles, and the burden of legacy systems can sometimes steer innovation in the wrong direction. In contrast, small companies with less bureaucratic hindrance can often pivot and adapt their innovation strategies with better results.

The innovation team within a company plays a crucial role in navigating these challenges. From brainstorming innovative ideas to understanding potential customers, their efforts can make or break an innovation project. Yet, it’s not just about having good ideas. The most innovative companies employ a team approach, engaging various departments from product innovation to marketing to ensure alignment with the corporate strategy.

Expect Some Failures

However, a high failure rate, especially of new products, is often the norm. The new product failure rate can be daunting, with some estimates suggesting that up to 90% of the time, innovation fails. Blockbuster Video, once a market leader in the United States, missed the shift to digital and streaming, leading to its decline. This stands as a good example of how even market leaders can make wrong decisions if they aren’t attuned to shifts in the market and consumer behavior.

Leverage Success Enablers

But there are also numerous success stories. The digital age brought forward companies that leveraged the power of social media and online platforms to capture significant market share. Moreover, initiatives like open innovation have enabled firms to collaborate externally, harnessing new ideas beyond company walls.

One of the most common reasons innovations falter is the disconnect between company management and the realities of the market. The main reasons range from not adequately assessing customer needs, misjudging market trends, or even internal challenges such as cultural barriers or misalignment in corporate strategy. Remember the fate of Pan American World Airways? Despite its early successes, it couldn’t adjust to changing industry dynamics.

For every failed innovation like the Google Glass, there’s a counter-narrative of successful products that understood and addressed customer needs effectively. There’s no one-size-fits-all formula for success, but key lessons emerge from both successes and failures. Whether it’s the ill-fated New Coke or innovative game-changers like digital cameras, understanding the market, customers, and having a flexible approach can spell the difference between success and obsolescence.

Every Success Story Has Its Challenges

Innovation, with its potential rewards and risks, remains a vital aspect of corporate and entrepreneurial endeavors. Whether launching new ideas or refining existing products, companies must remain agile, open to feedback, and committed to understanding and serving their customers. After all, in the world of innovation, today’s failure modes can become tomorrow’s blueprints for future success.

Whether you’re a budding entrepreneur or part of a global corporation, remember that every big idea starts with a spark, and every success story has its share of challenges. The goal is to learn, iterate, and relentlessly pursue better solutions for a changing world.

If you’d like any help with your innovation, please do get in touch here. I’d love to hear from you.

About the Author

The post Innovation Failure: What Your Business Can Learn appeared first on The Big Bang Partnership.

How to Create a Value Proposition for Your Business

Jo North — Thu, 24 Aug 2023 06:00:00 +0000

A Value Proposition for your business

What is a value proposition, and why do you need a great value proposition for your business, business idea, or for your products and services?

I’ve been running a lot of value proposition design sessions, particularly over the last 12 to 18 months. With all the changes that we’ve seen around the world in recent times, value proposition design has become more important than ever. Customer needs are constantly changing, meaning that all of us in business need to continuously reassess our value propositions, consider how relevant they are and evolve them to stay aligned with market demand and expectations.

How to Create Your Value Proposition Video

What is a Value Proposition?

A Value Proposition is the fundamental reason why your target customer should buy your product or service instead of one provided by a competitor. It is a statement or phrase that clearly communicates the most compelling, differentiating benefits that your product or service achieves for the customers you are aiming to attract. A Value Proposition could also be described as your distinctive promise of what you will deliver for your customer.

How does your product or service make your customers feel?

Think about how you might answer the question ‘What’s the best money you’ve ever spent and why?‘

What’s the best money you’ve ever spent, and why?

The best money I’ve ever spent was on my French Bulldog, who I absolutely adore. Sometimes he is quite demanding, and I like that about him. He’s wonderful company and is great fun. He lives in the moment, and he gives me a lot of happiness.

What was your answer to the question?

When I’ve asked entrepreneurs and innovators that question in my sessions, I have received responses such as:

My hiking boots, because they give me freedom and a sense of well-being when I’m out in the countryside.
My house because it makes me feel safe and secure and grounded.

People list all sorts of things they have bought, but what I find interesting is they very rarely say the best money they ever spent was on something that just performed the function it said on the packaging. Instead, what people always express in response to the ‘best money you’ve ever spent’ question is how that purchase made them feel.

How can you make your business idea, innovation, product or service be seen as a great investment for your target customers due to how it makes them feel? Make sure that you include this hugely important element in your value proposition. It’s an element that many of your competitors will undoubtedly overlook.

Your value proposition is about much more than the functionality of your product or service. It’s about why your customers would say that spending money on your product or service is money well spent.
Dr. Jo North

Clear, compelling value propositions help innovations succeed

According to Strategyzer, 72% of innovations fail in the marketplace. Reasons are that that

Customers don’t care enough about the innovations to buy them
The innovations don’t solve the customer’s problem in the right way
The benefits can’t be explained clearly and concisely
The product or service doesn’t stand out from the competition

Example: Think about the Sinclair C5. It was one of the first electric vehicles and came out in the mid 1980’s. It was a great innovation and technologically ahead of its time. But, it was impractical and it didn’t look good. It didn’t deliver what customers wanted and it had some flaws. The innovation was a great idea, but it didn’t solve the target customers’ problem in the right way, and at that time customers weren’t as environmentally aware as they are today.

28% of innovations succeed in the marketplace because the innovations…

make an emotional connection with customers as well as a functional one
solve the customers problem in the right way
can be explained clearly and concisely
stand out from the competition – also check out my article on how find your USP here

Value

Value is the regard that something is held to deserve. The importance, worth, or usefulness of something.

A value proposition is based on a bundle of products and services that create value for a customer segment.

It starts with a deep understanding of your target customers.

Value is connected with the price that you can charge. You might like to read my article on how to talk confidently about price with your customers here.

Understanding your target customers – introducing customer segments

Customer segments are the groups of people and/or organizations you’re aiming to reach, and for whom you’re aiming to create value.

You might have a single product or service or a single idea and it may appeal to different customer segments for different reasons and in different ways. What you’ll need is a different way of communicating that value proposition to each of your target customer segments.

If you have a number of products or services, then each one of those will need to have its own value proposition, making sure that your value proposition is very specific because everything else you do is designed around the value that you give to your customer.

So who might your customer segments be?

You can target and group customers in different ways. Remember that every customer is an individual and it’s important to give every individual as high a level of personal service as we possibly can. That said, it also makes sense to think about how you might organize the customers that you’re working with in terms of how they buy or why they buy.

Consumer segmentation approaches include:

Psychographic segmentation is grouping your customers based on their lifestyle choices, values and attitudes.
Geographic segmentation is based on based on location, or type of location
Benefit segmentation considers the ways in which a product or service is beneficial to the customer.
Demographic – how old they are, their occupations, and their levels of education and income. This might also include their gender, marital status, and number of children.

You can also blend these. For example, you can take a psychographic element or geographic benefit and a demographic and put them together to create quite a specific segment.

Some consumer segmentation examples

The more niche you are, the more focused you will be on each segment. And the more specific your niche, the more successful your value proposition and business growth will be.

Business-to-business segmentation approaches include:

Behaviours is based on their goals, approaches, values
Geographic is based on location, or type of location
Firmographic considers the size, age, structure, activities.
Needs considers what the customer is looking for or needs from a product or service

Some business-to-business segmentation examples

It’s all ‘P2P’ – or ‘person-to-person’

With technology and customer relationship management systems, and so on, we can now do a really good job of personalizing how we communicate with customers.

We can also create the opportunity for our customers to personalize their online experience as well.

Example: Think about shopping on Amazon. You can customize your Amazon landing page. Amazon shows you items that are based on your individual choices. While there are many people using Amazon across many countries, the experience is highly personalized to each individual user.

Prioritize your customer segments

Segmentation helps you to prioritize your customer base, and focus on those customers which have the greatest potential to help you grow your business.

According to the pareto principle, 80 percent of sales typically come from only 20 percent of customers. Identify those groups that provide the highest sales volume potential and quantify the total volumes for those groups.

These are your high-value segments!

Start where you have the greatest potential

Don’t try and do all things for all people

Make sure that you prioritize

Don’t try to do it all at once

Value creation

We’re all in business to create value for our target customers.

This means that you need to:

Solve a problem your customers actually have
Fulfil a genuine need for your customers
Take away pain and annoyances for your customers, where possible
Provide solutions to their ‘Jobs to be done’ on these three levels
- Functional: your product or service needs to fulfil the job that it’s designed to do
- Social: your product or service needs to help your target customers look good in the eyes of the people who matter to them
- Emotional: your product or service not only needs to create a customer experience, but should also help your target customers to feel the way they want to. For example, we buy insurance so that we can feel reassured. We buy a lovely new bed so that we can feel safe, secure, comfortable and healthy.

Value Proposition customer jobs to be done

You need to make sure any features in your value proposition are elements that your target customers are willing to pay for

It’s important when you’re developing your value proposition that you are developing things that your customer is willing to pay for. You could come up with all the fancy ideas and bells and whistles and more that you like, but, if they’re not important to your customers, then they’re not going to pay for them, and your innovation isn’t going to take off.

Examples:

Service Experience: Going out to eat at a restaurant
1. Functional– I get what I ordered in the way I ordered it.
2. Social – Feels nice, appropriate, people feel comfortable and relaxed. I want it to be a lovely evening. The restaurant choice reflects well on me in the eyes of my friends.
3. Emotional – Great experience for myself and others I am with. Great ambience and service, relaxing and enjoyable time.
Product Experience: Purchasing a phone case
1. Functional– Protects the phone, fits well, hole for the camera, etc.
2. Social – Looks good and makes me look professional in front of my work colleagues
3. Emotional – Feels nice, comfortable with it, proud of it. I enjoy the way it looks, feels and functions.

Are there any functional, social or emotional gaps in your value proposition?

Make sure that you are look for potential gaps at the functional, social and emotional levels, and that you yourself how you can you fill those gaps.

By filling those gaps you will:

Build resilience into your innovation
Outsmart the competition as you go forward

Final thoughts about your value proposition

Get input from customers

Make sure that you get insightful customer feedback before you launch your entrepreneurial idea, and engage customers early in the process. Test things quickly, do it at low risk and fail quickly, so that you can learn and then go again. That’s a really solid way of building your value proposition forward.

Communicate

Communicate why your value proposition is so special and be able to state that in a single sentence.

When you do this, you’ve got a solid start with your value proposition and you can use it in your marketing, social media, sales activity, as well as being able to better communicate it to your team.

Round up

The article underscores the crucial role of a compelling value proposition in steering a business towards success. A value proposition, by definition, is a clear statement that offers a promise of value to potential customers. It provides a specific reason why the target audience should prefer a particular product or service over similar products from competitors. This unique selling proposition gives the company a competitive advantage in the market.

Evolve Your Value Proposition

With the ever-changing customer needs, especially after the upheavals of recent years, businesses are urged to reassess and evolve their value propositions. Value is much more than the simple statement of the benefits of a product; it delves deep into the emotions and feelings evoked in the customer. For instance, while many products provide specific benefits, the best choice for customers often goes beyond functionality to how the product or service makes them feel. It’s about finding the pain points and fulfilling the customer’s emotional, social, and functional needs.

Do Your Research

To create a powerful value proposition, the first step is understanding your target market. This involves market research to identify customer segments and their specific needs. Using tools like the value proposition canvas, businesses can map out the unique benefits their products offer to different value propositions for various customer segments.

Small businesses can use case studies as examples to further elucidate their value proposition. The Sinclair C5, an electric vehicle from the 1980s, serves as a case study in the article. While it was a technologically advanced product for its time, it failed to address the specific problems of the target customers.

Communicate Your Value Proposition

Clear value propositions aid marketing efforts by enhancing conversion rates. They need to be prominently displayed on marketing materials, such as the company’s home page and product pages. The digital marketing space offers a plethora of formats, from mobile apps to online platforms, where businesses can showcase their unique value proposition.

A good value proposition also extends to the company’s product offerings and their customer service. It is essential for businesses to consistently deliver on their brand promise. Companies must go the extra mile to offer ease of use and excellent customer service, setting them apart from competitors. Furthermore, the mission statement and positioning statement of a company should align with its value proposition.

Get Customer Feedback

The article also emphasizes the importance of regular feedback from the target audience. By engaging customers early on, businesses can refine their value proposition. This iterative process can involve A/B testing, where different value propositions are tested to identify the most effective one. Ultimately, a powerful tool for businesses, a well-defined value proposition enhances marketing campaigns, boosts sales, and ensures a higher conversion rate.

How to work with me and my team

If you’d like some help with your business’ value proposition, and would like to explore working with us, please do get in touch using the ‘contact us’ form and we will get straight back to you. We’ll explore supporting you with our innovation consulting, or by facilitating either an online or in-person value proposition strategy workshop for you.

The post How to Create a Value Proposition for Your Business appeared first on The Big Bang Partnership.

How to Improve Your Influencing Skills for Innovation

Jo North — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 10:30:18 +0000

Influencing Skills – How to Influence People who can Make or Break Your Innovation Plans

Why Influencing Skills Matter for Innovators

Influencing skills are essential for innovators. Whether you want to get that big promotion at work, get the funding or resources you need for an innovation or entrepreneurial growth, or change the way things at work are done, there are usually some decision-makers who you need to win over.

These people might be from inside or outside the business, for example bosses, shareholders, colleagues, employees, investors, key customer or suppliers, amongst others.

Being able to shape and implement effective influencing strategies will help you to get to where you want to be, more quickly and successfully. Influencing skills are an essential part of your business skillset.

Read this article to learn, step-by-step, how to create a targeted, practical and ethical influencing action plan that will increase the probability of you getting the outcomes that you want. As an added bonus, download my free influencing playbook here.

What is the Meaning of Influence and Persuasion?

The definition of Influence and persuasion is getting others to do things by showing that there is a real and genuine advantage to them in moving in the direction you want.

Having influencing skills means that you have the ability to affect a person’s beliefs or actions, reaching agreement by discussion.

Influencing with Integrity

My choice of the word ethical in the introduction above is really important. This is not about manipulation, or Machiavellian manoeuvres. In my view, unethical motives benefit no-one in the longer-term, and are neither a rewarding way to do business, nor a sustainable way to develop your relationships, especially with those who really matter to you.

At the heart of the approach that I am sharing here is high integrity. It is perfectly possible to be very influential at work, whilst also considering the needs of others and striving to achieve a win-win for yourself and for them.

Influencing and Communication Skills

Influencing is necessary, though, because too often people don’t get what they want due to their failure to communicate effectively. They do not put themselves in the shoes of those key individuals whose support they really need.

The consequence is that, by not taking time to understand the perspective of others, they don’t explain themselves in way that other people can really get, and understand what’s in it for them. So, I am going to take you through a step-by-step process that you can use to make sure that you optimise your chances of success, using my Innovation Influencing Mix.

Have a pen and paper ready, preferably some sticky notes as well, and also download my free influencing playbook here. You can fill it in as you read through this article, thinking about something significant that you want to achieve that needs the active support of other people.

The Innovation Influencing Mix

Successful influencing at work requires a combination of skills and a great understanding of how other people think and make decisions. It’s actually a complex process, but I’ve broken it down for you here, based on the Innovation Influencing Mix (copyright Dr. Jo North, 2023).

Innovation Influencing Mix copyright Dr. Jo North 2023

Step 1: Goal clarity – be clear about what you want to achieve

If you’re not clear about what you want to achieve, you can’t expect others to understand what you want. Starting by articulating for yourself exactly what your target outcomes are will help you to align your influencing approach to achieve your goal. For example:

I want to become a director in 3 months, increase my salary by 20% and qualify for the company profit share, company car and private health schemes.
My goal is for the Board to see the potential of my new product development idea, and give me the go ahead to progress to the next step.
I want to raise $x of funding to launch and sustain sales of new product y as outlined in the business plan I’ve created.
I’d like my team to adopt these new, leaner and more agile ways of working that make the best use of our new technology, improving quality and efficiency.

Take a moment now to write down your own target outcome(s).

Step 2: People clarity – identify who can make or break your plans

The next step is to write down all the names of your stakeholders. Your stakeholders are the people who can really make or break your plans.

Also write down why and how their support matters to you in this situation. It is important that you identify who the stakeholders are in your project, which stakeholders are important and why. You’ll then be able to create an effective stakeholder engagement plan.

Either make a list of people, or write each name on a separate sticky note, to help you with the next stage.

Think as widely as you can, using these prompts as appropriate for you:

Family
Shareholders / investors
Bosses / leaders
Associates
Peers
Other departments / functions
Direct team
Employees
Customers
Suppliers
Other key stakeholders

Stakeholder Mapping

Now it’s time time to start your stakeholder mapping. Place each stakeholder onto the grid below. Either write names directly onto the grid, or attach each sticky note where you think it sits.

Grid for Stakeholder Map

The grid has two axes. For each person, use these axes as follows:

Importance of support. Decide how important having this person’s support for your plans is – low to high.
Level of support. Decide how supportive of your plans this person is right now – low to high.
Then place the name of the person where your decisions for 1 and 2 intersect.

Once you have worked through all your names, literally just plotting them onto the grid, identify who influences your most important stakeholders, i.e. in the medium-high category.

For each of these high importance people, think of who they listen to and are swayed by. Make sure that you add the names of those people who influence the influencers to the grid as well. Locate them appropriately in terms of importance and support.

Active Listening

The best way to ensure your point of view resonates with others is to become a good listener first. Active listening, a valuable skill, ensures that you genuinely understand the concerns, insights, and perspectives of those around you. This fosters mutual respect, an essential component in relationship building.

But remember, being a good listener isn’t just about the words spoken. Body language is a key part of interpersonal skills. Savvy innovation leaders are attuned to the non-verbal cues of those they interact with on a daily basis.

You can download my free, advanced listening skills workbook here to learn more.

Analyze the Communication Needs of Internal and External Stakeholders

You now have a really useful, visual map of where you believe your decision-makers sit.

Just seeing this on paper, rather than carrying all the information in a disconnected way in your head, is incredibly helpful in itself. It allows you to step back and assess so that you can plan your route to success.

Work through these items now, making sure that you:

Put yourself in the shoes of each person. Do your best to see things from their perspective, even if you don’t agree with their views; and
Strive to achieve a mutually beneficial outcome.

1. For each of those people in the high importance, high support category.

Write down the actions that you will take to keep their support levels high on an ongoing basis. This is important. Complacency or lack of attentiveness to supporters is risky. It’s better ad easier to maintain support than it is to regain it once it’s been lost.

2. For every individual in the high importance, low support category.

Write down the actions that you will take to increase their support levels.

3. For every individual in the low importance, high support category.

Write down how you you will maintain their support and use it productively.

4. For those in the low importance, low support category.

Make a mental note to keep an eye on things, just in case anything changes.

Step 3: Create a Compelling Case for Change

The next step is to create a compelling case for change. Paint a picture of the difference that your innovation or ideas will make. Make sure your it connects with your key stakeholders on an emotional level, as well as making great business sense.

Thinking about the emotional connection to the change you want to make skyrockets your influencing skills to the next level. Remember that humans make decisions and take action based on how we want to feel. We then explain them to ourselves based on logic after the event.

To achieve this emotional connection, find the common ground where your goals overlap with those of your stakeholders.

“People don’t buy WHAT we do, they buy WHY we do it.”
Simon Sinek

Use the power of data and evidence to support your assertions and build your innovation business case. Be clear how you will measure your innovation success.

Create a vision of what your innovation will achieve, and how you will get there, through storytelling techniques and principles.

If you’d like a definitive guide to becoming a successful change maker, you’ll find my article and videos here useful.

You may also find my guide to successful presentations helpful, too.

Step 4: Improve your Influencing Skills through Emotional Intelligence

Working on building your emotional intelligence will lead to better working relationships and increased self confidence. Plus, the ability to understand how you can adapt your behaviour and approach to influence others.

You’ll also be able to take on board feedback from your colleagues and business decision-makers with a growth mindset. This will help to strengthen your innovation plans. Diverse perspectives contribute to reducing potential risk and blind spots.

Before you interact with your key stakeholders, take the time to check in with how you feel. Adapt your mindset if how you feel isn’t helping you to get the impact and outcome that you want.

Once your mindset is in a good place, you can then bring your influencing skills to the fore. You’ll be in a better position to truly listen to and empathize with your stakeholders. You’ll be able to communicate clearly, directly and sensitively, increasing the probability of influencing for a win-win outcome.

Cultivating Leadership Qualities and Soft Skills

A strong leader doesn’t solely rely on their leadership abilities in direct tasks. Soft skills are an equally important part of their arsenal. In the course of action to becoming a successful influencer, one should focus on:

Positive Attitude: Approach situations with a can-do spirit. A positive attitude can have a positive impact on the work environment.
Good Communication Skills: Not to be mistaken with mere talking. This encompasses clarity, understanding, and mutual benefits.

Step 5: Use the 6 Universal Principles of Influence and Persuasion

Robert Cialdini‘s research identified these 6 Universal Principles of influencing and persuasion. You can use these appropriately to strengthen your case for change and enrich your influencing skills.

The 6 Universal Principles of influencing and persuasion are:

Reciprocity
Social proof
Scarcity
Authority
Consistency
Liking

1. Reciprocity

People repay in kind. Do good things for others, and they are more likely to do good things for you in return.

2. Social proof

People follow the lead of similar others. Enhance your influencing skills by identifying people or businesses that your stakeholders respect. Show that they have had great results from doing something similar to the idea or innovation that you’re proposing.

3. Scarcity

It’s human nature to want more of what we think we can’t have. Let your stakeholders know that they are special, that this is a unique and important opportunity. Also, that there is a short, optimal window of time in which you need to take action to get the best results.

4. Authority

When unsure about something, people defer to experts. Your influencing plan will be more effective when you demonstrate that experts support your ideas and innovations.

5. Consistency

Stakeholders support commitments and causes that are consistent with their own goals and values. Use your influencing skills to show how your proposals connect with your stakeholders’ priorities.

6. Liking

We are more likely to listen to people who we think like and appreciate us. Find the positive in everyone. Demonstrate your respect and appreciation, even if they hold very different views to your own.

Step 6: Use the Trust Equation to Strengthen your Stakeholder Relationships

When you’re asking someone to collaborate with you, or buy into your ideas, you’re asking them to trust you. Use David Maister’s trust equation to identify how you might strengthen trust in your key stakeholder relationships.

Trustworthiness is a combination of credibility, reliability, intimacy (also called openness) and a balanced approach to self interest. This means self interest that also prioritizes the interests of the other party, for a win-win outcome.

You’ve now got a really useful, actionable high-level plan. Use it to begin gaining more support for your target innovation outcomes. All that’s left is for you to go and make your plan happen! Keep your grid updated as things change, so it always reflects the latest situation at all times.

Innovation Leadership

To innovate in today’s rapidly-changing world, the critical steps involve mastering the art of persuasion and refining interpersonal skills. It’s also about understanding that there are no truly wrong answers, just new ways to approach problems. Building mutual respect and discovering common goals will strengthen your relationships. This will, in turn, support your innovation process and open up a new way of addressing challenges collaboratively.

Great leaders, or those with great influence, aren’t just born. They’re made through daily refinement of their skills, role-modeling a good example, and most importantly, understanding human beings. It’s not just about the technicalities of leadership positions or the opposite effect of bad leadership. It’s about being a good human being, one who recognizes the needs, desires, and potential in others. This creates a win-win culture, that is mutually supportive.

Influence by Elevating Others

To be a good innovation leader, be a good influencer. And to be a good influencer, always aim to understand, respect, and elevate those around you.

What Works for You?

I will post more on specific influencing techniques for different people and situations in future articles. I’d love to hear what you think in the meantime. Where are your challenges, and what works for you?

As always, if you’d like any one-to-one support and advice, or would like us to run an online or in-person Influencing Skills training programme for your business, please do get in touch with me direct via the contact us form here.

The post How to Improve Your Influencing Skills for Innovation appeared first on The Big Bang Partnership.

How to do Competitor Analysis

Jo North — Fri, 07 Apr 2023 07:30:14 +0000

How to do competitor analysis

When launching a new product or service, or updating your existing product or service portfolio, conducting a thorough competitive analysis is a crucial first step in developing a successful business strategy.

Competitive analysis involves identifying and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of competitors and the competitive landscape in which your business operates. By conducting a thorough competitive analysis, you can gain valuable information about your own product offerings, customer experience, and marketing efforts, as well as those of your competitors.

This article is packed with practical tips on competitor analysis for your business and how to use competitor to support innovation and growth in your business.

What is competitor analysis in business?

Competitor analysis evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors’ current strategies to help identify opportunities and threats for your business to enhance your own strategy.

When seen through a customer-focused lens, competitor analysis is not about head-to-head comparisons, instead, it’s about assessing how much better or worse a product or service is at helping your customer get a job done.

Why is competitor analysis important for your business?

Competitor analysis can help you to sharpen and define our value proposition. It can also help you level up and do an even better job for your target customers.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear a hundred battles.”

Sun Tzu

Staying ahead of the curve

The world around us is always changing.

As social needs, technology, the economy, politics and environment change, so do customer needs and competitor activity. It’s essential that your business stays current, relevant and competitive. Watching for emergent trends and changes is vital for sustainable business business.

Examples of how the world around us is changing for 2023

Let’s take a quick look at some recent trends from the Mintel Global Trends Report for 2023. These trends are what today’s consumers are expecting and aspiring towards in the marketplace. It’s worth checking out the full, free Mintel report for yourself. You can download it here. As a summary, the trends for 2023 include:

Me Mentality

Consumers will be eager to re-focus on themselves and brands can help them take centre stage.

Power to the People

Brands have to make room for a new ‘c’ in their c-suite as, consumers are investing, co-creating and voting for change alongside brands.

Hyper Fatigue

Consumers will try to cut through the noise and connect with what matters to them.

International Localism

Buying local will be a way consumers can protect themselves financially, environmentally and psychologically, and feel that they are giving back.

Intentional Spending

Factors like flexibility, durability and sustainability will play increasingly important roles in consumers’ value equation.

Why are trends important?

So, why these trends are important? Because the world’s always changing and so are your customer’s needs! Customer activity is changing, and your business needs to keep innovating and changing in order to respond appropriately.

Competitor analysis sits in the context of the change around us.

If we don’t look at what’s going on around us, we start to drift away from where we need to be in the marketplace. This is called “strategic drift”. It happens to businesses that are complacent, inappropriately traditional, similar to many others. Customers aren’t wowed with the products and services, and there is alack of innovation and change.

Disrupt, or be disrupted!

Some benefits of customer analysis

By looking outwards and around at what your competitors are up to, you’ll get important insights that will help to achieve all of the following for your business:

Nail down or create your unique selling proposition (USP)
Better understand current market trends
Better target your current customer base
Uncover untapped markets that your competitors aren’t selling to
Gather benchmark data to measure your growth against
Find errors and gaps in your competitors’ strategies
Identify your Unfair Advantage

Video: How to Find and Use Your ‘Unfair Advantage’

You’re looking for learning to create opportunity.

Customer analysis is not about copying – it’s about outperforming, finding gaps and opportunities for innovation and growth.

Customer analysis is all about healthy learning, a growth mindset, and looking at where you can realistically do better.

Be savvy.

Avoid comparisonitis! Sometimes competitors’ performance might look much better than it really is, especially on their own websites and social media posts. Take what they say with a pinch of salt, as the reality is that nothing is ever perfect in business.

Get started with my 7-step competitor analysis process

Here’s how to do a competitor analysis for your business in 7 steps:

Identify your competitors
Review how your products & services compare with those of your competitors
Work out what additional intelligence you need on your competitors and why
Get the competitor intelligence you need
Combine the competitor intelligence with customer needs and trends
Identify gaps and opportunities for innovation and competitive advantage in your own business
Create and communicate competitive differentiation for your own business

We will go through each of these steps in turn now.

1. Identify your competitors

I see many businesses dive into doing a competitor analysis, yet they’ve not considered who they’re competing with. Which competitors do you need to analyze, and why?

To conduct a competitive analysis, the first step is to identify the main competitors in your geographic area, market segment, or industry. This can be done through a Google search, market research, or by analyzing the market share of your industry’s top competitors. Once you have identified the list of competitors, the next step is to gather information about their product features, marketing strategies, sales volume, customer satisfaction, and online presence.

To get a closer look at competitors, visit their websites, review their product offerings, and read their customer reviews.

Include indirect competition in your analysis

In addition to analyzing your top competitors, it’s important to consider indirect competitors and similar businesses or brands that offer similar products or services. This can be done through a thorough competitive analysis framework or a competitor analysis template.

Think of this in terms of 3 of Porter’s Five Forces.

Porter’s Five Forces – the stars show the focus for your competitor analysis

The first of the 3 areas to analyze is direct rivals.

Who is in your market already? Who are your competitors?

Let’s say you have a pizza restaurant that also offers takeaway. Ask yourself who your direct rivals are. In the pizza business, they may be other pizza takeaways that operate in the same location or environment.

You also need to look at what substitutes are available to your customers. A substitute is something that your product or service could be replaced with. In the example of the business business, this could be be a supermarket pizza cooked at home, an Indian or Chinese takeaway, or a pub meal.

Next, think about who the new potential competitors are that are entering the market. Is there a new pizza restaurant or other food and drink provider opening up in your locale?

And last, but not least, look to see if you are in a ‘blue ocean’ market. This is a space that is wide open. You enjoy an unrivalled market position that none of your competitors are in.

We can also look at it this way…

Primary, secondary and tertiary competitors

Primary competitors

These are direct competitors. They are targeting the same audience or have a similar product as you — or both.

Secondary competitors

These competitors may offer a high- or low-end version of your product or service, or sell something similar to a completely different audience.

Tertiary competitors

These competitors offer products and services related to yours that are trending. They include businesses that it may be beneficial to you to collaborate with further down the line.

Again, looking at the pizza restaurant as an example…

The primary competition is other takeaways.
The secondary competition might be the lower-end pizza restaurant, or the five-star Italian restaurant.
The tertiary competition are potential collaborators. In this example, it could be the businesses selling wine, or an ice cream parlor. You could collaborate and have an offer around pizza, wine, and ice cream! Yum!

Where do you stand in relation to your competitors?

I find it helpful to use Gartner’s Magic Quadrants to carry out a competitor analysis that shows where a business is positioned in relation to the wider market. It’s designed for technology products, but works for many other product and service sectors, too.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrants for Competitor Analysis

In this image you see on the horizontal axis is for the completeness of vision that your competitor has, and the vertical axis is the ability of your competitor to execute that vision.

This drives out different categories of competition, so this can be used to determine how you can classify your competition.

A visionary has a really well-developed vision, but is still working out how to get there. They know where they’re going, but they haven’t nailed it yet in terms of putting those ideas into practice.

Leaders, on the other hand, have that completeness of vision. They know where they’re going and they’re leading the pack.

Apple is a great example of this. They have a complete, clear and compelling vision. They also have the money, time, resources, processes, marketing, and so on to get behind that vision and make it happen.

A niche business is where one that has a smaller, very specific vision, as well as a limited ability to execute in a way that influences and disrupts the wider market.

Challengers are those that have got a good power behind them in terms of their operations and resources, but they’re not as visionary as the others. They do, however, have the ability to deliver.

We’ve seen this with Samsung over recent years. While they didn’t have the original vision, they had all the resources and technology to create a vision and compete with Apple and have come out as strong challengers.

2. Review how your products and services compare with those of your competitors

On occasion I have a business tell me that they do not have competitors, that nobody else is doing anything like they’re doing. This causes me to think that one of following applies…

They have not looked properly.
They’re really onto a winner. If nobody’s doing it, and there’s a cracking space there, go for it!
There may not be any demand for it, and it will be very hard to create any demand for it.

If there’s no competition around, ask why that is. Have you looked and thought about it properly? Is it a real opportunity? Or is it a situation where there is no demand for what you’re looking to create and sell. Test it to find out if there could be some demand or not.

Structure your analysis

Do a structured analysis of how your business’ products or services compare to your primary competitors.

Perform a comparison on price, quality, innovation, customer service, and speed using specific evidenced information vs. just your perception.

3. Work out what additional intelligence you need on your competitors and why

To gain a better understanding of the competitive landscape, it’s also important to research industry trends, upcoming threats, and new trends in the market. This can be done by reviewing press releases, case studies, and industry reports.

When conducting a competitive analysis, it’s important to take a comprehensive approach and analyze all aspects of your competitors’ products, marketing campaigns, and marketing efforts. This includes analyzing their social media presence and social media competitor analysis, as well as their share of voice in the market.

Identify your information gaps

Start by identifying any gaps in your information on your competitors.

Is there any additional intelligence on those competitors that you feel you need? Make a note of that and determine how you might obtain that intelligence.

When you’re thinking about customer analysis, think about the customer journey from beginning to end.

How is that business is making itself known?
In what ways is it getting customers interested?
How are they hooking them in and getting them into the sales funnel so that customers will buy?
What is the purchase process is like?
How are they retaining their customers?
How are they getting customer recommendations, testimonials, and referrals?

4. Get the competitor intelligence you need

There are multiple ways of getting easy access to useful intelligence for your competitor analysis. Here are just some examples. Use a combination of sources to get a really rounded picture of what your competitors are up to and how well their strategies are working for them.

Industry research – public and paid
Websites and social media channels
Annual reports
News mentions
Online customer support threads and reviews
Networking – with customers and peers
Customer research
Sales team feedback
Mystery shopping
Subscribe to blog posts, newsletters, etc.
Monitor recruitment
Niche organisations and online communities such as Facebook groups

5. Combine the competitor intelligence with customer needs and trends; and 6. Identify gaps and opportunities for innovation and competitive advantage in your own business

It’s also a good idea to conduct a SWOT analysis of your competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This can help identify their competitive edge and potential threats to your own product or service.

At this stage I actually like to do a S.O.A.R. analysis.

S.O.A.R. stands for:

Strengths
Opportunities
Aspirations
Results

It’s a nice alternative to a SWOT. In a S.O.A.R. analysis, the opportunities absorb the weaknesses and threats from a S.W.O.T.

SOAR is strengths-based, consistent with an approach known as ‘Appreciative Inquiry’. This focuses on achieving successful change management by identifying what is working well and then doing more of it, because people (and therefore organisations) will grow in whichever direction people focus their attention.

When conducting a SOAR analysis, the basic questions you need to answer are:

What are my/our greatest strengths?
Where are my/our best opportunities?
How would I define imy/our preferred future, or aspiration
What are the measurable results that will tell me/us, I’ve/we’ve achieved the vision of the future?

Look at your SOAR analysis in the round. Select the items that would make the most significant difference to your business, and that have the potential to become a motivational innovation and growth goal resulting from your competitor analysis.

7. Create and Communicate Competitive Differentiation

Step seven is all about creating your competitive differentiation. Look at what you can improve, how you can level up and then put the plan that you’ve created in steps five and six into action.

As you create and implement your plan, make sure to ask yourself these questions about your own competitive advantage:

Can you sustain it?
Is it distinctive?
Can it be communicated clearly?
Do customers value the distinction enough to pay for it?

It is important to note that with competitive differentiation, what you do must be sustainable. So, if you’re going for it, make sure that you can keep it up for the duration.

Finally, using the information gathered from the competitive analysis, the next step is to develop a marketing plan that targets potential customers and captures the audience’s attention. This can involve developing marketing strategies that differentiate your product from competitors’ products and highlight your company’s strengths.

By conducting a thorough competitive analysis, you can make informed business decisions and develop a business strategy that leads to business success. Utilizing the best competitor analysis tools, such as Momentive.ai, Similarweb, Brand24 and others, periodic competitor analysis, and following the best practices for competitive intelligence in this article, you can gain a competitive advantage in the market and promote your product or service in a way that meets the needs of your target audience.

As well, why not have a look at my earlier show that I did on How to Create Your Value Proposition which will help you with that as well.

Next steps

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article on how to do competitor analysis and found it informative and helpful. Do let me know what you think and ask me any questions on the subject using the comments area. I’d love to hear from you!

You might also like to check out the many free resources that I have here. Browse the free content studio and get the items that interest you for free!

The post How to do Competitor Analysis appeared first on The Big Bang Partnership.

Innovation Strategy for Your Business

Jo North — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 11:59:36 +0000

Innovation Strategy for Your Business

What is an innovation strategy?

How can an innovation strategy help you drive purpose driven business growth?

How to get started with creating an innovation strategy that’s right for your business?

Have you got so many ideas and things you want to do, but don’t know where to start?

In this article I’m going to be helping you answer these questions as well as address some common pitfalls and critical success factors, so that when you do create your innovation strategy, you know where to start and you’ve got a process to follow.

Innovation Strategy for Your Business

What is innovation?

Let’s start by defining innovation, because it is one of those words that we use so often.

Innovation is about coming up with great new ideas that make a positive difference to the world, using those ideas and putting them into action to achieve something purposeful.

Innovation isn’t just about the tech. A lot of people associate innovation with only with technology and going digital when it’s about much more.

Business Innovation

You can read more about innovation in my article What is business innovation?

Definition of innovation – Dr. Jo North

What’s included in an innovation strategy?

Some examples of the content included in an innovation strategy are:

How you are going to develop your products and your service experiences
The systems and processes your business use
The company culture you have

When developing your products and services you should consider how you are going to be relevant to the market in the future and continue to stay aligned with what customers are going to need. You also need to consider how you position your products and services, and design your business model to deliver them – business model innovation.

Innovation includes thinking differently about the behind-the-scenes systems and processes you use, for example using automation for speed and better data insights, or decarbonizing your business operations as you work towards becoming a net zero organization.

Cultural innovation means being creative about how you attract retain and engage people, to make sure that people love coming to work, align with the business’ mission, and contribute their best performance. Here are some tips on how to build an innovation culture in your business.

What is an innovation strategy?

How do you build innovation into your business model?

A business model is how you organize your company to successfully create and monetize the products and services you offer to your customers.

There are different ways of innovating your business model, for example, by licensing, franchising, insourcing or outsourcing, moving on or offline.

Another aspect to consider is open innovation, which means collaborating with other organizations beyond your own. Your business benefits from external innovation input, expanding access to creativity, expertise and resources.

Innovation strategy – what’s included

Levels of business innovation

Innovation in business is like an iceberg. Most of it sits unseen below the surface – the multitude of small, incremental innovations designed to drive continuous improvement.

Some innovation is aimed squarely at creating competitive differentiation, i.e. to make a product or service more attractive to customers than the competitors’ offerings. This is often referred to as differential innovation. Examples are laundry detergents that manufacturers claim wash cleaner, or at an even lower temperature than any other; or a restaurant with a quirky menu created to make it stand out from the crowd. Differential innovation is about being better, faster, greener, perhaps even more exciting than the competition.

At the very tip of the innovation iceberg is radical innovation, also known as game changing or disruptive innovation. This level of business innovation is so disruptive that it forces the whole market to change tack.

So please don’t think that having an innovation strategy in your business means that that you’ve got to become the next Uber or Airbnb equivalent in your sector! Only a very small proportion of all successful innovations are so radical. Your innovation strategy can be focused on some of the smaller things that you want to achieve, and on building some fantastic foundations for your business to grow from.

Why does your business need an innovation strategy?

An innovation strategy is a plan to grow your business by taking a fresh, new, purposefully creative approach to product, service, organization and business model development.

Every company, whether you’re a solopreneur, or a multinational organisation, needs an innovation strategy.

Your business needs and innovation strategy because the world around us is constantly changing, meaning that your competitors’ strategies and your customers’ needs change too. To stay successful in business you need to change and align with developments in your market.

You can ‘evolve’ your innovation strategy, making it up as you go along, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But isn’t it better to have a really clear roadmap to take you to where you want to go?

An innovation strategy sets the direction that you want to travel in, giving you a roadmap to help plan your cash flow and the resources that you’ll need on your journey. Your innovation strategy provides you with clear focus for your decision-making and investments.

Your innovation strategy will be even more useful if it is purpose-driven.

What is a purpose-driven innovation strategy?

Businesses that are purpose-driven versus being solely profit-led aim to make a positive difference somehow to the customers that they serve or the communities they are located in. They are in business for reasons that go beyond simply money-making.

Making money in itself isn’t bad. Quite the opposite – money-making can be very positive because, with money, you can do more good. Profits and purpose can go hand in hand.

Businesses that have a purpose-driven innovation strategy, outperform those that are purely profit-led.

According to Deloitte research, purpose-driven companies experience higher market share growth and grow, on average, three times faster than their competitors. Plus, purpose-driven companies have higher employee and customer satisfaction.

I think it’s super important for your innovation strategy to be aligned to the purpose and direction of your business. Remember that purpose doesn’t have to be about solving huge world problems like world hunger or world peace. It can be, but it doesn’t have to be. Your business purpose could be about putting a smile on somebody’s face, making somebody feel a bit better, or have a better day.

Customers value buying from purpose-driven businesses they know that they’re also contributing towards something good.

It benefits employees, too. Doesn’t it feel greater to work for an organization that’s doing something meaningful, beyond just wanting to make a profit?

Thought-leadership & innovation – all about purpose

What are some examples of innovation strategies?

Here are some examples of innovation strategies.

UK Innovation Strategy

Did you know that the UK has got an innovation strategy? In July 2021, ‘Leading The Future by Creating It‘, the UK’s innovation strategy, was released. It sets out the country’s ambitions for an innovation-led economy.

Port of Tyne’s Tyne 2050 strategy

Another publicly available document is the Port of Tyne’s Tyne 2050 innovation strategy. I am really proud to work with the Port of Tyne. Tyne 2050 a great document, which you can download here. It sets out the Port of Tyne’s vision and how the business is going to transform the business and contribute to the region in the years ahead. The strategy includes clear commitments, and that aligns with the 2050 Maritime Strategy that the UK Government created.

Examples of innovation strategies

Northumbrian Water’s open innovation strategy

Northumbrian Water Group has an open innovation strategy, implemented via their Innovation Festival. They describe it as follows:

“It started in 2017 and has grown over the course of the last four years. The festival has essentially become our idea generation engine, but it is so much more than that. We also use it to make rapid progress on ideas that span organisational boundaries – a years’ worth of work in a week.”

Innovation strategy for small to medium-sized businesses

Through the ‘PAPI’ program, the Product and Process Innovation small to medium-sized business program led by the University of York, I’ve worked with many entrepreneurs to help them shape their innovation strategy for growth. It’s super rewarding to see these businesses go from strength to strength by putting their strategies into action.

How to create a successful innovation strategy

Do innovation strategies actually work? Well, that depends on how well thought-through the innovation strategy is, and how well it is actioned.

To create a successful innovation strategy, make sure that it delivers value for your customers on three levels, by:

Solving the customers’ problems in the right way. Your innovations need to be useful and achieve what they are designed to deliver.
Being consistent with the values of your target market, aligning with customers’ perceptions of who they are, what they stand for and who they want to be.
Achieving products and services that your customers will happily exchange their time, money, and effort to buy into.

Whichever area of innovation you look at, it is important to make sure that you focus on achieving these three types of value.

Value plus intelligent action leads to successful innovation strategy

As well as planning to create value for customers, you’ll also need to take intelligent action. Be smart and select what I call your ‘power moves’, those actions that are give you are going to give you significant progression, to get to where you want to get to.

Ingredients of successful innovation strategy

Part of that intelligent action is making sure that you’re constantly testing things with the people who are going to be on the receiving end, the people that you want to buy or participate in your innovation. Testing all the way through, and then making tweaks and developments as you go, is important, rather than waiting to the end. If you wait too long to test your innovations, you might discover that you’ve taken an unhelpful direction and need to u-turn.

Steps for creating an innovation strategy from scratch

When you’re taking the first steps towards creating your own innovation strategy from scratch, begin by looking outside your business. Take in what is going on in the outside world, identify the changes, trends and developments, and look ahead to future scenarios. Ask yourself questions such as:

How are people changing behaviours and expectations?

What’s happening with the economy?

How is technology changing the industry that you’re in?

Are there any new regulations that are due to come out?

What’s happening with climate change and how that might affect how you need to do business?

How to create an innovation strategy from scratch

1. Spot external trends for your innovation strategy

Look at all of the factors that are going on outside your business including looking at trends that you think might be here to stay.

There’s a difference between a fad, which is a short-term craze, and a trend, which is more long lasting and is more sustainable.

Aim for trends rather than fads in most cases, and also look at how your customers’ needs are going to be changing over time, as well as what’s going on with competitors. The aim of this is to really set out the whole landscape of what’s going on in the world around you and how that might create innovation opportunities for you in the future.

2. Be purpose-driven

Once you have reflected on the world around you, work on your answers to questions such as these:

What do you think the purpose of your business innovation is, in the context of your external environment?

What difference do you want your business to make to the world around you?

Clearly define your purpose and what you want to achieve with your innovations.

3. Identify specific innovation opportunities

Some opportunity areas to consider for your innovation strategy are elements of your industry that:

Demonstrate complacency

Haven’t changed for a long time

Are creating customer dissatisfaction

Offer customers little choice

Look for spaces that are ripe for disruption, and consider how you might turn those into an opportunity to do a better job for customers, or users. Innovate in those spaces, and create a game plan.

4. Collaborate to innovate

Throughout the process of developing your innovation strategy it will be invaluable to collaborate. Innovation is a team game, not an activity for lone wolves. Seek out feedback and ideas, continuously revisit and update what you’re doing. Innovation rarely happens in a straight line, you’ll go backwards and forwards. Sometimes the more we learn, the more we realise what we don’t know and collaboration helps with that.

Collaborative innovation for your business

What challenges are there in creating an innovation strategy?

I hear all sorts of objections and reasons why businesses find it challenging to create an innovation strategy, and I understand that it can be challenging to make innovation a success.

Often businesses have lots of great ideas, but face the following challenges.

Time

I work with so many different sorts of businesses, but the one consistent reason for not innovating and not innovating successfully is ‘we just don’t have the time.’

We’re so busy doing the day job, we don’t have time to innovate.

I think we need a mindset shift on this, because if innovation is in the DNA of our business and built into how we think, then it’s just an integral part of our mindset. This means that we will be innovating constantly, always looking for opportunity and picking up on ways to improve. The aim should be to achieve something however small, every single day to take us towards our innovation goals.

Although there’s never really a single, end goal, because when we reach a point, then we need to innovate again -repeatedly. We need to disrupt or be disrupted, and innovate to thrive.

To adapt an old saying do something today that your future business will thank you for. If you do that every day, however small that thing is, it will all add up.

Money

Another challenge can be money: cash flow and funding. There are exceptions, of course, but when we’re innovating, we usually need to invest upfront before we get a return. And that can have implications on cash flow, or create a need for inward investment.

Having an innovation strategy means that you can map out the cash that you’re going to need, and when you think you’re going to need it.

A tip is to always estimate for more time and money to be needed than you originally think, because things usually cost more and take longer.

Build an innovation roadmap and think about how much you might need, when and where you might get any funding from and how, before you need it. It’s always better to start earlier rather than wait until you’re right up against the wire and you need that funding now.

If funding is a concern, remember that there is usually money available for really great ideas. Work up your ideas, make sure you can tell the story of those ideas and that you can communicate them confidently and clearly. Think about the funding sooner rather than later.

Making your innovation strategy a success

Risk

Risk aversion and fear of failure can be a challenge of innovation. But it’s just as risky, if not more so, to stand still.

If you’re not innovating, you’re not moving forward and falling behind your competitors and what your customers want and need from you. So, weigh up the risk.

Look at what you can afford and take small steps. If you’re concerned about the risk, do the minimum possible and test your innovation, learn from it, and then go again. Keep things small, try things, pilot them – you don’t have to go forward with huge launches and massive expense.

Try something small, get a taste for it, see how well it works, and then build it from there.

Perfection

People worry about innovation being perfect, but it never is, and rarely needs to be. Having the mentality of always we’re being in beta helps.

Do your best work, put your best work out there, but remember it doesn’t have to be perfect. And then go again and keep improving from there.

Don’t innovate by striving for perfection in an echo chamber. Make sure you’re constantly getting feedback, and that you are being selective about how you use that feedback. This will reduce your risk and improve your chances of success, too.

Constant change

Some people challenge the point of having a strategy when everything’s always changing.

But, I’m with Winston Churchill: “plans are of little importance, but planning is essential”.

The very act of creating an innovation strategy and stopping to think about what it is you want to do, how you want to do it, and what’s important, will help you move forward, gain clarity and optimize your chances of success.

So yes, things will keep changing. But, you don’t set off on a drive without knowing where you’re headed. And the journey may change. Your sat nav may offer you a different route from the one that you were originally intending to go on. In that case, simply take that that different route, but know that you’re still heading for the destination you want to reach.

Next Steps

If you’d like to know any more about innovation strategy and how to create one for your organization, then please do reach out, I’ll be very happy to jump on a Zoom or Teams call to see how I can help answer your questions.

My purpose is to help you innovate, so that you, your team or organization get to where you want to be.

I’ve got all sorts of resources that can help you with your innovation strategy. Have a look at these free articles and YouTube videos that I’ve created for you.

I hope you’ve found this article useful, thank you for taking the time to read it.

The post Innovation Strategy for Your Business appeared first on The Big Bang Partnership.

How to Facilitate a Business Strategy Workshop

Jo North — Sat, 25 Sep 2021 08:37:00 +0000

Business Strategy Workshops

This article gives you practical tips and advice for planning and delivering an awesome business strategy workshop.

I believe that business strategy sessions are one of the most important things that we do. The world around us is always changing. Businesses need to stay agile, make sure they’re ahead of the curve and in line with where the markets are going.

It’s important to get everybody engaged and thinking differently in your business strategy workshop, and I’ll be sharing some ideas along the way about how you can do that.

What is Business Strategy and Who is it For?

A business strategy is really just an overarching plan for an organization.

Big or small, all businesses need a strategy, and the world is changing all the time. It’s important that we revisit the strategy frequently to make sure it’s on course, adjusting where necessary.

Some of the strategic plans that we make don’t actually play out over time. However, having a business strategy creates direction, helps with prioritization and gets everyone working towards achieving the same vision.

Video: How to Facilitate a Business Strategy Workshop

Objectives of a Business Strategy Workshop

The objectives of a business strategy workshop are for the organization to think about what’s going on in the world outside in relation to the organization’s vision, mission and values.

Where does the organization want to be in relation to the world around it?

How do you want to compete?
How do you want to deliver value?
How do you want to achieve your purpose?

From there, realign with the customer elements.

Who are you serving?
How have your customers’ needs changed?
How have your competitors’ activities changed over time?

This is really about setting a long-term view, but how long term depends on the industry that you’re in.

The energy and utilities sectors, amongst others, have really long-range planning of at least 10-15 years ahead. However, if you’ve got a small business, you might be looking at just the next 1 to 5 years.

The Opportunity

The world has never been in the place it’s in today, and I think we’re seeing a lot of unprecedented change at the moment with…

Post COVID recovery. Organizations are working out what happens now, what the future may hold, and how we need to change in light of that.
Climate change. We have organizations thinking about how they can do things cleaner, better with net zero decarbonisation.
Technology. The availability of new technology means that customers’ expectations are changing. Digital technology also means that we can streamline internal processes for increased business efficiency.
Social change. We are all in business to solve a problem, or problems, that our customers have. Because the world is always changing, our customers’ needs and aspirations are always changing too. We need to make sure that the business’ value proposition remains aligned with market requirements.

Video: How to Create Your Value Proposition

Sometimes organizations don’t think they need a strategy. They don’t believe they can plan for the future because of all the changes.

However, having a strategy is about having a direction. It’s about knowing where the organization wants to be so that it can build appropriate plans that it can then flex and change on its journey to get there.

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
Dwight D Eisenhower

Getting Ready for Your Business Strategy Workshop

In preparing for a business strategy session, you’ll want to take the individual circumstances of each organization into account. I always establish objectives with clients ahead of time.

What do people need to know?
What pre-work is needed?
What information and inputs are needed for the strategy session?
Why are all those inputs needed?
Who can provide and deliver them?
When do we need to get them and from where?
What data or info needs to be shared?

This helps delegates process the information in advance of the strategy workshop, so they come after having done some groundwork. It also means that you have any important information at your fingertips, ready to use.

Designing Your Business Strategy Workshop

Business Strategy Workshop Activities

Welcome and Warm up

There are many different icebreakers and energizers that you can do to warm people up. My article here will give you loads of great activities that you can use. Also, you’ll find some brilliant icebreaker questions specifically for your business strategy workshop here.

Where Do We Want To Be, and Why?

I recommend that you dedicate a significant proportion of your workshop to exploring the answers to this question, using a combination of activities that I’ve shared below.

Horizon Scanning

Start off with an activity that I have created called ‘Horizon Scanning’.

Horizon Scanning is about looking forward and reading the signals of today’s significant trends and seeing how they might evolve going forward.

Horizon Scanning Activity

When I’m working online, I ask delegates to use a virtual whiteboard in a tool such as Miro Online Whiteboard, and create an image with sticky notes for the things they think are going on in the future that will affect the organization’s strategy.

Video: How to Create and Share Miro Boards

If I’m facilitating in person, I like to have newspapers, industry publications or journals the delegates will use to find things that they think are going to be relevant to the company strategy from outside the organization.

I have delegates break into small groups and look at the opportunities and challenges the business might have, for example, between now and the end of 2025.

We have a discussion about what the social, technological, environmental, economic, political, legal and regulatory changes might mean for the organization in the years ahead.

Business mission, vision, values

We are still working on the question “Where do we want to be, and why?”

Now, you want to take a look at the organization’s vision, mission and values, and consider the organization’s intended place and role in the changing world.

Where do you see your place in the world, amongst all of those things that are going on in the world outside?
Where do you see your purpose, fit, place and contribution?

If the organization you’re working with does not have a mission, vision and values, use the activities in my article here to create them.

Wouldn’t It Be Fantastic If…

Having established what’s going on in the world outside of your business and how that might impact your organization, the next stage of the business strategy workshop is to determine:

‘Given our vision, mission and values, where do we want to be and how does that relate to us?’

‘What might a great future be like within the context of your vision, mission values and what’s going on in the world?‘

A really simple and effective exercise is to ask delegates to do the WIFI (Wouldn’t It Be Fantastic If) activity.

I ask delegates to complete the phrase, Wouldn’t It be Fantastic If, as many times as they can for things that they could make happen. These need to be things they CAN make happen, not just wishful thinking!

Once you are done with that, your strategy workshop participants select the top ones. This is where you’re really starting to envision where the organization wants to go.

How to Facilitate the Wouldn’t it Be Fantastic If Technique

I like to use Wouldn’t it be fantastic if... because it’s all about possibility and imagination. It gives people the freedom and the permission to think differently, stretch themselves, and dream a little bit as well.

Lightning Talks with Customers

Now look at how customer’s needs are changing. I’m defining customers in the loosest possible sense. If we do something for somebody else, that ‘somebody else’ is our customer. So make sure that you’re specific about who your organization’s customers are.

When I work with an organization, I often invite a selected number of the organization’s customers in to do something that I call a lightning talk.

A lightning talk is designed to really spark creativity, insights and ideas. It’s fast and punchy, but it’s packed with value. The purpose is to get ideas sparking and delegates really thinking through the lens of their customers.

I ask customers at this stage to share their thoughts, experiences and future priorities.

TIP: If you have a small business and you’re not sure how this would work for you, you can simply contact some customers and have conversations with them, get some input from them and feed that into your own strategy process.

Product / Service Life Cycle

Next, explore the products or services that the organization is providing using the product / service lifecyle model.

I ask delegates to plot out where each element of their offer is in the lifecycle.

Is it in a growth phase?
Are there some elements that are declining?

This stage is important because you’re thinking through what’s working, what’s growing and what to get behind.

You may also focus on those products or services that may need another growth curve, or what you should turn off or let go in order for resources to be directed somewhere else.

Product / Service Lifecycle

Using the product / service lifecycle tells us about customers’ behavior. It highlights what customers want, what they’re enjoying, what they’re benefiting from, and also what isn’t so popular and why. As an alternative, you can do this using the Boston Consulting Group matrix (pictured below).

BCG Matrix template (source: Slidemodel)

With the Boston Consulting Group matrix, you’re looking at sales and growth and plotting them in one of the four squares: Stars, Cash Cows, Dogs or Question Marks.

Stars – Fast growing products or services that might not be selling a huge amount of volume yet, but they’re showing some really fantastic promise.
Dogs – Products or services that are not going anywhere and are probably not at all profitable.
Cash Cows – Products or services which aren’t growing a lot, but are steady and bringing in a nice profitable income. The cash cows provide the cash flow to fund innovations for stars and future cash cows.
Question Marks – Products or services that do not seem to have a clear path for success. They could either succeed or fail. The question is do you get behind it, leave it a bit longer, or maybe put it to one side and focus on something else?

Mapping all of the business’ products and services out in this way helps to identify where the priorities might be, as well as understanding where customers are heading with their choices.

Competition

Next, explore competition with delegates to understand how well competitors are serving customers. Discuss how well competitors are showing that they might be serving customers going forward.

I ask delegates to plot out how well competitors are performing versus themselves and give themselves a score using a visual template, such as in the image below.

Template for a simple competitor analysis activity in your business strategy workshop.

For more information and a detailed step-by-step guide on how to do competitor analysis, check out my article here and video below.

Video: How to Do Competitor Analysis

How it all Fits Together

So we’ve been divergent up to this point, and now we’re going to look at being more convergent.

It is usually at this point that I’ll ask delegates to do a SOAR analysis. SOAR stands for Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations and Results.

Related Article: Appreciative Inquiry for Facilitators

In a SOAR analysis, I’ll ask the team to think about and work through the following:

The organization’s greatest assets – people, money, the brand, ways of working, products, services, networks, supply chain, and many more things.
Key opportunities coming from the outside world from the earlier horizon scanning activity.
Internal weakness – these can be converted into a strength internally, so that could be an opportunity for growth.
Mapping out and consolidating their aspirations from the WIFI activity above.
Identify the measurable results that they want their strategy to achieve.

This is where you are bringing everything together from all the activities that the team has done so far. Pull them into one place to create a consolidated SOAR analysis.

Potential Solutions

We now know where we want to be, where we are and what we have to work with. But, how are we going to do that and create competitive differentiation?

There are so many different tools that I use for this. One really good one is the Four Actions Framework from the Blue Ocean Strategy suite of tools.

So the next activity is about asking the team to think through what they could:

Eliminate
Reduce
Raise
Reduce

The idea is to eliminate or reduce things without negatively impacting the customer experience.

These simple questions are really fantastic at prompting great strategic thinking and you get lots of ideas from that which you prioritize.

Action Plan

The last thing is to create an action plan.

What’s the action?
Who’s going to do it?
When does it need to be done by?

You want everybody to leave the business strategy workshop being superclear about where the organization’s heading. This includes what it means for customers and where the competitive differentiation is going to come from. Also, on what the organization needs to put in place and start doing in order to make that happen. It’s important too to have a clear segue into actually getting there.

Next Steps

If you’d like our help with designing and facilitating your business strategy workshop, either virtually or in-person, please do get in touch. We’d love to help.

If you’re interested in facilitation and developing your professional practice as a facilitator, I’d love you to come and join me in my free, private Facebook Group, Idea Time for Workshop Facilitators. As well as a fantastic community of likeminded people, you will get access to free facilitation trainings, tools, techniques and time savers.

If you’d like to book us to deliver some professional virtual facilitation for you and your team, or would like a one-to-one virtual facilitation training and coaching session, find out more about what we do here. Contact me direct using the form below. I’ll get straight back to you.

Hope to hear from you soon 🙂

The post How to Facilitate a Business Strategy Workshop appeared first on The Big Bang Partnership.

How to Write a Business Case for Your Innovation

Jo North — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 11:58:47 +0000

Do you need to write an innovation business case?

In this article, I show you how to get started with creating a business case for your innovation, and how to overcome some of the challenges you’re likely to experience, such as dealing with risk and uncertainty.

Live video recording: How to write a business case for your innovation

What is an innovation business case?

An innovation business case captures WHY you want to action your innovation. It’s usually a short, written document that includes the tangible and intangible risks and benefits of the innovation, and the rationale of why the innovation should be actioned and supported.

An innovation business should contain all the key financial and non-financial data needed so that the reader can make an informed decision on whether or not to proceed with the innovation. It justifies the investment decision – investment in time, money and opportunity cost- in the innovation, taking known and “known unknowns” into account.

Overall, the fundamental purpose of an innovation business case is to stack up whether or not your proposed idea worth doing.

Trust and your innovation business case

When you present someone with an innovation business case, you’re asking them to trust in you – your idea, judgment and capability for achieving the results that you say your innovation will achieve. Your innovation business case needs to be reliable, credible, transparent and directly aligned to the strategic and tactical objectives of your organisation.

60 second video on trust in business relationships

It’s essential that you invest time, care and attention in creating your innovation business case. Its quality is a reflection of you and your personal brand.

How long should an innovation business case be?

An innovation business case should be as long as it needs to be, and no longer. It’s important to make sure that you only include information in your business case that is material to the decision-making process, and leave out superfluous items. The reason is that by excluding information that is not influential in the decision-making process, you’ll make your business case much clearer to your reader. Present extra information in an appendix if you need to, but you should be able to articulate your argument clearly and succinctly.

I’ve presented business cases successfully valued in the tens of millions of dollars to just a few thousand. In my director and leadership roles, I have also been a decision-maker at the receiving end of other people’s innovation business case proposals. For many, even complex, long-term and high-value innovation proposals, the idea, rationale and supporting evidence can be communicated effectively in just a few pages.

What should you include in an innovation business case?

Each innovation business case is different, or course. That said, my starting point is always this list of heading prompts that I created. Expand on the ones that are more relevant to you, and skip over any that don’t apply.

BUT beware of not including something simply because you don’t know what to write, or don’t know the answer.

One of the great benefits of going through the process of writing your innovation business case is that you are prompted to consider factors that you haven’t thought of so far. In this case, make sure you explore it and see how you can get the answers – or at least some of them – that you’re missing.

A “known unknown’ is something that we know that we don’t know. If something is genuinely a “known unknown”, don’t skip over it. Address it head on, and show how you’re going to mitigate, or reduce the risk. Doing so actually increases the credibility of your innovation business much more than simply trying to brush the risk or gap under the carpet.

An innovation is, by definition, something that hasn’t been done before, in this way and at this time. Therefore you should expect to find that you have some questions and “known unknowns” about what might happen.

Prompts for writing your business case

Purpose of the innovation business case
Summary of the opportunity
Customer need
- Why do customers need this right now?
Competitor review
- What are competitors doing?
Market attractiveness
- Where’s the gap in the market?
- How attractive is the market?
Strategic fit
- How does this fit with your wider business and strategic goals?
Definition of success
- What’s your definition of success?
Key risks and mitigations
Non-tangible costs and benefits
Impact on the value chain or the wider business
- Will you need to bring in people from other departments or teams?
Proposed implementation approach
Key assumptions
- What assumptions are you making? Why?
Financials
- Three financial scenarios, for cost savings and /or revenue growth from the innovation: best case, most likely & worst case.
Cashflow implications
- NPV & payback period
Opportunity costs
- What are the other things that you could be doing instead of this particular innovation? Why are you recommending that this innovation takes priority right now?
Conclusion
Recommendations
Next steps

What are some of the challenges of writing an innovation business case?

The most common challenges that I see people struggling with when aiming to build an innovation business case are:

They have no clear definition of success, so find it difficult to build an argument as to why their innovation is investable. Identifying the purpose and target outcome right from the start is essential.

They have inaccurate or incomplete information. If this applies to you, focus on what you really need to know to make a decision, and leave the rest. Do your best to find the information you need, and demonstrate best endeavours in your business case write-up. Remember, though, that we rarely have a perfect set of data to base our decisions on, so you’ll have to step back and evaluate your innovation in the round. Also bear in mind that the past definitely doesn’t always project as a straight line into the future, so allow for that too.

Forecasting how the innovation will perform, for example sales forecasts, timings, costings. Do your research and idea testing, and be prepared to make some judgment calls. An assumption is something that you assume to be true for the purposes of developing your business case for innovation. Write down your assumptions, as you can go back, test and learn from these later. It’s also good professional practise to do so because it helps others to follow your rationale and consider those assumptions.

Risk aversion / gung-ho thinking. Everyone’s appetite for risk is different, it’s a very personal thing. Equally, some people are much more optimistic or pessimistic than others about potential likely outcomes. Try to be as objective as you can, and let the work you’ve done in gathering the numbers, facts, customer responses and so on build the story for your innovation business case. Avoid letting your emotions or personal agenda influence you too much.

Mini video lecture – Creating a Business Case for Innovation

Multiple stakeholders with different interests and views. It can be challenging to navigate a range of perspectives and agendas, but if you think positively about it and actively listen to your key stakeholders, you can use diversity to actually strengthen your innovation business case. Other people will spot things you’ve missed, and make suggestions that you might not have thought of. It can feel like herding cats, sometimes, but as long as you use your leadership skills and remain true to your purpose, leveraging multiple viewpoints is a healthy thing to do.

Time (aka procrastination). Sometimes we are genuinely super busy, but if the innovation is important to you then do create the time to do a great job of your innovation business case. I often see people putting off getting started with it because the innovation business case is so important to them! They want to do a great job, but perfectionism and self-imposed pressure prevent them from getting started. Use the heading prompts I’ve given you above to get going. They’ll help you as you won’t be starting with the dreaded blank sheet of paper!

How to reduce uncertainty?

Innovation comes with inherent risk. Make sure you try to identify and discuss the unknowns clearly in your business case. Whatever you do, don’t just brush them aside. Make sure you address them head on. This will actually give your innovation business case far more credibility than if you just pretend that all these risks don’t exist.

Next, make sure to gain as much clarity as you can on the things that you can. Focus on the issues that make a material difference. You don’t have to go down every rabbit hole to find every little bit of information.

Zoom in on finding out the things that really matter. What are the levers? What are the inputs and the outputs, and the costs and the revenues that are going to make a material difference?

Consider using the bullet proofing technique and work on those risks that are the most probable, and that could cause the biggest problems if they were to occur.

Bullet-proofing template

Think about those and then work out a strategy for dealing with those risks.

Cost checklist

To accompany your written innovation business case, create a spreadsheet that shows the timing and amounts for all the cost efficiencies (savings) and revenue. Here’s a checklist of items for you to consider.

Each item of capital expenditure needed
Employee costs
Ongoing operational costs
Legal, admin, accountancy, insurance, intellectual property protection
Projected sales from the innovation; and / or projected cost efficiencies / savings from the innovation. Show when they will start, and how they will build.

If you don’t know where to start with projected sales, I suggest you have a think about what your sales per week or month could be. What would be a realistic sales volume for you?

And again, remember to use the worst case, most likely case, and the best case scenarios. This is also called sensitivity analysis. When you do this, you can plan for each scenario from a financial or reputational perspective, and then plan for what you might put in place to gear up for each different scenario.

Evaluating your innovation business case

Next, it’s really important that you take a break from your business case for a while and focus on something else.

Then, come back and ask yourself…

Do the potential benefits truly justify the efforts, risk and investment?
When is this investment likely to pay back?
How will this investment impact our cash flow?

You’ll find my guide Do your reports make your business ideas shine? super helpful, too.

Lastly, you should have everything in front of you then that you need to make a decision, but make sure you adapt this to your needs.

You can find more information on this subject, as well as other innovation related topics on my website at www.bigbangpartnership.co.uk/resources.

The post How to Write a Business Case for Your Innovation appeared first on The Big Bang Partnership.

How to create an awesome USP for your business

Jo North — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 20:53:00 +0000

How to create an awesome USP for your business

My 6-step process for defining your competitive edge

Dr. Jo North

What I know for sure…

I know for sure that businesses with a truly awesome, customer-focused USP (Unique Selling Proposition) are successful at competing without having to cut prices, retain their target customers for longer and are more likely to generate a healthy return on their marketing investments.

Read this article for some tips and insight into how to create your USP, and download my free Awesome USP Playbook here. Then work through the activities I’ve created for you. These activities will take about 30 minutes to complete and by the end of it you will have an outline USP statement that you can develop to be used in your marketing, customer and employee communication.

The purpose of this USP article

The purpose of this article is to provide you with an opportunity to stop and think for a few moments about your business’ USP. I hope that it will help you to challenge and stretch your thinking about it, and shape a succinct, meaningful, impactful USP statement.

Definition of the term ‘USP’

The term USP stands for “Unique Selling Proposition.” It means the feature or characteristic that makes your product or service outperform the competition, giving your target customers a compelling reason to buy from you.

Ideally, you should be able to communicate your USP in a single, reasonably short statement.

Criteria for your USP statement

Ideally, your USP statement needs to fulfil a number of criteria. It needs to:

Actually work and matter in the real world, especially to customers, of course.
Add value to financial performance, helping you to sell and generate customer loyalty and employee engagement.
Be something that you can keep delivering consistently.

And of course, it does actually need to be genuinely unique!

Be genuinely unique

From my experience, too many businesses generically describe their USP as being their customer service, innovation, people or reliability, but fail to back it up with compelling communication. Plus, in reality, their competitors are often good at those things too, so there is little true differentiation.

Defining your USP is sometimes not easy, so I’ll provide you with some current examples, and then walk you through a short activity which you can download here, so that you can begin to create a more compelling USP statement for your company in a few easy steps.

Is your business standing out for all the right reasons, or lost in the ‘me too’ thinking of your industry?

In business it’s essential to stand out to the right people in the right way. Companies that successfully differentiate have better margins and brand loyalty. They are clear about what they are offering, to whom, why, and on what makes them different.

The good news is that the USP does not have to be complex or blue sky, especially when the focus is on customer experience.

I have been impressed recently by three businesses I’ve experienced as a customer that have taken an effective and inventive approach to differentiation. These are: The Alchemist, Everyman and a restaurant called Moules a go-go in Chester, UK.

Whilst these three examples are all in the entertainment and leisure industry, entrepreneurs in any sector can adapt elements of their approaches and use them in developing and strengthening the USP statement for their own businesses.

Top Takeaways

The top takeaways from this article are that:

Focus is key. Trying to be all things to all people risks being expensive and ineffective. Hone in on your core strengths and deliver those with excellence.
People buy with emotion and justify their decisions with logic. Connecting with customers positively on an emotional level as a key component of your USP is a smart move. Even smarter is going a step further and making the experience as personal and individual as you can.
Focusing on creating a really special customer experience can be a significant differentiator.
Being more creative about how products are presented, packaged and described can help to communicate and sell your points of difference.
Make sure that your USP remains relevant. Stay ahead of the curve.

Upping the ante – from functional to personal

Why our customers really buy

Everything we do as a species is to make us feel the way we want to feel. It’s how we are designed. We hardly ever just buy something due to its functionality. Often we buy it because of how we think it will make us feel.

For example, I buy mascara. Its function is to make my eyelashes look longer and more defined. The real reason I buy it is because I feel that I look prettier when I wear it.

I have also been known to buy a power drill. As my good friend and master of selling Nick Bramley, CEO of the Impactus Group would say, I didn’t need a drill, I needed some holes. The holes meant that I could hang the curtain rail and poles which made me feel more comfy and cosy in my living room, and also feel pleased with the way the room looks.

To achieve this emotional connection, it’s essential to understand your customers in detail. Trying to appeal to everyone is usually a suboptimal strategy because you can end up being a bit meh overall. Much better to target your core customer segment(s), get to know them in depth and align your business activities to meet their specific needs and aspirations.

Don’t forget that, despite all the extra processes, tenders, proposals and so on that B2B clients require us to go through, they are just people in a business environment. They too make decisions based on how they want to feel, and by getting to know them you will be able to work out what that is. For instance, they may want a supplier who creates an easy life for them, or who makes them look good, or who can be trusted and relied on, or who they can get creative with.

The essentials for an awesome USP

For a USP to be awesome, it needs to work at all these levels, not just one:

Functional. This is the basic foundation. Your product or service needs to actually serve its core function.
Brand promise. The next level up is engagement through a brand that is appealing and engaging for your target customers.
Customer experience. Creating an amazing experience – yes, including B2B as well as B2C customers – is where the magic really starts to happen.
Personalisation. The more you are able to tailor your product or service to the specific needs of each client, the more compelling your USP will be. Amazon is one of the most frequently cited examples of this. They have literally millions of different customers, each of whom can personalise their set up and details to a significant extent.

If your USP addresses all of these needs, you are in a great place. If you are focused only on your functional differentiators then you have a huge opportunity to improve your competitive advantage, margins and customer loyalty by working on the other three levels.

USP Examples

Here are some real examples of businesses that I feel differentiate themselves really successfully. They only take a couple of minutes to read, and they might give you some ideas, so I do suggest you read them, but if you’re short of time just skip them and click here to get straight to the activities that will lead you step by step through the process of defining your USP.

Example 1: The Alchemist

There are a gazillion cocktail bars out there. Have a look at The Alchemist’s website and you will see that they describe their business like this:

‘At The Alchemist we’re masters in the dark arts of molecular mixology and demons in the kitchen. Our mixologists create every cocktail with an obsessive eye for detail, presented in vessels orchestrated to add a devilish dash of theatre, they bedazzle, bewitch and set the scene for everything we do. Enjoy a flaming atmosphere, creative cocktail and delicious all-day dining that’s become our trademark – Theatre Served.’

The company has bars and restaurants across England and Wales, and at the time of writing, has several new venues opening soon.

Photo: Jo North – The Alchemist Cocktail Menu

Having visited the Chester and Manchester venues, they absolutely deliver on their brand strapline of ‘Theatre served’, and always with a great sense of fun and customer service. They are innovative on three fronts: the products they serve, the styling of the brand and their environment, and the theatre with which their employees mix and serve the cocktails. If you’d like to learn more about their recent expansion and results, click here.

The Alchemist has its own distinctive marketing and communication style, but many businesses could transfer in some of the concepts of creating theatre, experience and innovative products that really engage customers.

Example 2: Moules a go-go

In a recent visit to Chester, UK, and doing the usual sweep online to find somewhere good and interesting to eat, this one stood out head and shoulders above the other options in the city because it has a speciality focus – mussels and seafood (the name gives it away!).

It also stood out as a great independent option amidst a range of the usual restaurant chains that you see everywhere:

We’re a family-owned and operated independent continental style bistro and bar situated in the heart of the historic city of Chester.

With amazing food and fantastic customer service as a given, I was impressed with this bar and bistro because they have focused on one key theme that they deliver incredibly well.

So many businesses try to offer too many things to too many different customer groups, almost with some sort of fear of missing out. But, as Moules a go-go have shown, if you understand and target your customers really well, and completely deliver on what they want, you literally have a recipe for success. Not everyone will like their product, and that’s fine. In fact, it’s more than fine, because they know what their target customers want and go all out to achieve that for them very successfully.

The key business takeaway from Moules a go-go is to find your strength and absolutely focus on that, making sure your product and customer experience are both excellent.

Example 3: Everyman

Everyman is a cinema and media business. If you explore the company’s website, you will see this positioning statement:

Everyman is redefining cinema. Bringing an innovative lifestyle approach to our venues, where you swap your soft drink for a nice glass of red wine and a slice of freshly made pizza served to your seat.

Everyman has the features of being a ‘blue ocean’ company. Blue ocean companies create new market space, and move away from commoditised, price sensitive competition. One of the ways that they do this is by eliminating or reducing aspects of the product or service that are not liked or valued by customers that the rest of the industry continue to offer. Blue ocean companies also create or improve the product or service by focusing on the things that really matter to customers.

Everyman has eliminated / reduced:

Old-fashioned and cramped seating.
Limited and unexciting range of food and drinks.

They have created / improved:

The overall look and feel of the venue, a more funky and sociable space.
Comfort, relaxation, fun and informality through the seating style and at seat food service.

For more about Everyman’s financial performance and growth plans, see here.

Idea Time

Now it’s time to get down to thinking about the USP for your company. Here’s my simple 6-step process that should take about 30 minutes to work through.

Step 1: Your Awesome USP Playbook

First, download my free Awesome USP Playbook here and work through the activities that I have created for you to think about your business, and put together your own USP statement. It is a great resource and, as I have said above, takes about 30 minutes or so to complete. You will be able to use the statement that you create in your marketing, proposals, employee communications and much more.

A playbook, as you probably know, details the range of moves that a team, usually in sports, has mapped out in order to achieve the target outcome – the win.

My playbooks are designed to help you to step back from your business for a few minutes, and see things from a different perspective and gain new insight by asking you to answer a small number of really powerful questions.

Once you have this new insight, the playbook then walks you through a really quick and easy process to work out how you can take action simply, quickly and effectively to create a step change in your performance.

Step 2: Your Customer Avatar

If you have more than one target customer segment, you will probably need to complete this step separately for each one.

A customer avatar is a representation of your target segment. Creating and then using an avatar helps you to ensure that your business activities, products and services are all designed to have maximum appeal and usefulness for your customers, increasing the impact of your marketing and the propensity of customers to buy from you.

Describe the Customer Avatar for your business.

Step 3: Honest appraisal – the fundamentals

Use the five-sided grid in the playbook download to create an overview of your most important competitors.

Give each competitor a score out of 5 for each of the following, and mark their scores on the grid.

Price
Speed
Quality
Innovation
Customer Service

Join up the marks with lines, using a different colour for each competitor.

Then complete it honestly for your own business.

Now step back and look at the picture overall, and make a note of your thoughts and observations.

Step 4: What if…?

Jot down your intuitive responses to these What if…? questions in the playbook.

What if you had an opportunity to give a 1 minute pitch on your USP on a prime time broadcast to your ideal customers? What would you say?
What if your greatest competitors were asked for their perceptions of your business? What do you think they’d say and why?
What if your most loyal, high value customers were asked to explain why they choose to buy from your business? What do you think they’d say and why?

Step 5: Awesome USP essentials

Write down what you think your USP is for each of the 4 items below:

Functional. How well and uniquely does your product or service deliver its functional purpose?
Brand promise. How well and uniquely does your brand appeal to and engage your target customers?
Customer experience. How well and uniquely does your business create an amazing experience for your customers, whether your company is B2C or B2B?
Personalisation. How well or uniquely does your business tailor your product or service to the specific needs of each client?

Step 6: Drafting your USP statement

Now review all your notes from the earlier steps, and then put them together to form your USP statement, replacing the prompts in brackets, which are there just to give you some ideas, to complete each one.

XYZ Ltd is for [engineering companies in Europe] who [who use specialist widgets as an essential component in their manufacturing process].

We are [include your point of difference – e.g. Europe’s only handmade, small batch widget manufacturer, providing the highest quality widgets with guaranteed delivery within 48 hours of order to our clients’ premises].

Unlike [other widget manufacturers], XYZ Ltd is [the only specialist widget manufacturer that integrates with our clients’ systems and processes, meaning that we help make production quicker, more efficient and reliable for our customers].

Our clients say that they choose to do business with us because [they can trust us to provide an exceptionally quality of bespoke customer service every single time they order from us].

If you have any real testimonials that support this last paragraph, even better.

And finally…

If you enjoyed this post, I’d be very grateful if you’d help it spread by emailing it to a friend, or sharing it on Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook. Thank you.

You might also enjoy my article on What is a Value Proposition? Why does your business need one? here.

If you’d like to work me in person to help shape your business’ USP, I’d love to hear from you! Please get in touch using the contact us form on this page, and I’ll reply right away.

The post How to create an awesome USP for your business appeared first on The Big Bang Partnership.

Launch Your Business - The Big Bang Partnership

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Pain Points

Step 2: Prepare for the Jobs-to-be-done Interview

Step 3: Conduct the Jobs-to-be-done Interview

Jobs-to-be-done Interview Questions

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Financial Plan

Management and Team

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SWOT Analysis

Sales Strategy

Business Plan Formats

Resources for Entrepreneurs & Innovators

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Ethical

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Feeling

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Your Summary

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