As 2026 strategic planning kicks off, I’m sure many of you will be evaluating business plans. To assist you here’s a filter used by Sequioa Capital to separate substance from hype. Before you greenlight any initiative, ask: Who cares? (Is the market big enough to matter?) Who needs it? (Is there real customer pain or […]
Read More… from Three Questions (to Cut Through Any Business Plan)
Google the words “sales funnel” and you’ll see that perfect triangle. Awareness at the top, purchase at the bottom. Clean, logical, ubiquitous…and completely misleading. A client had a problem they didn’t know existed. Following a standard playbook their sales team was equally divided amongst all accounts. It didn’t matter if an account bought 3 items […]
Market leaders have the ability to resist competitive challenges by leveraging their superior infrastructure, preying on people’s fear of change, and further entrenching consumer habits. This is the ‘incumbent’s advantage’. To challenge the market leader, “the longest way around is often the shortest way home”1. says Liddell Hart, a 20th century military thinker who postulated […]
When it comes to marketing a feeling can be more important than a fact. In the early 2010s, Coke was faced with plateauing sales mostly due to a declining engagement with Millennials and Gen Z consumers. Research showed that Millennials and Gen Z’s viewed Coca Cola as a generic, mass-market product that had little personal […]
It wasn’t long ago that Intel was the dominant player in the computer chip industry. Computers needed more powerful chips and Intel was the major supplier. Customers demanded more power and the Intel brand delivered, propelling the company to dizzying heights. However, a major shift happened in the market when Blackberry and later Apple and […]
If you’re from the western USA, you’ll recognize “Les Schwab Tire”. The company became the dominant player in their market, earning profit margins three times higher than their competitors. From humble beginnings in 1952, Les Schwab, knowing almost nothing about the tire business, sold his home and life insurance policy to buy a failing tire […]
Rolls Royce was in crisis needing to secure new financing from the markets and assurances from the government that the business would survive. In the middle of the crisis, a new CEO was appointed and in January 2023 Tufan Erginbilgiç took the helm. His opening remarks to the 42,000 employees was a message of both […]
Conquering with force only brings resistance Guiding teams in new product launches and developing new strategic initiatives is a big part of what IIBD does but as tough as it may be to get the strategy right, by far the more difficult is job is getting the strategy implemented. Business leaders everywhere know the frustration; […]
Read More… from Finding apostles … Implementing Strategic Change
Peloton was founded by John Foley who had a vision of bringing high energy boutique fitness classes into people’s homes. The strategy was rock solid with a laser focused customer segmentation. That is until Covid came along and Peloton got greedy and abandoned their strategy. Today some of you may actually still use one but […]
When Cat Stevens sang “It’s not time to make a change” he could have been singing about Kodak two decades later. In the late 1990s Fuji and Kodak dominated the photographic film business controlling over 80% of the global market. Few could have predicted that within a decade, one would go from printing money to […]