Ranking Your Opportunities

Last week we delved into the topic of ‘Where to Play’. Refer to blog http://www.superiorsales.com.au/where-to-play/ The logical next step from this is to assess and to rank your opportunities. This should always be conducted with the Customer at the heart of everything we do. Throughout this post we will use a fictitious ‘energy’ company example.

Finding Value is complex. Our markets are made up of an intricate system of consumers, shoppers and customers. Changing behavior of each can create value in different ways. Some of these are larger, more profitable or winnable than others and are likely to change as the market evolves. It is essential that our business leaders be empowered to make the complex choice by having access to the right data and trends so that they can ‘cut to the chase’ and identify the most attractive sources of value, in terms of both volume and profitability.

The Superior Integrated Way helps us identify and prioritise the most attractive source of value.

Key Questions:

Prioritizing Category Growth Opportunities / Risks

Finding value in the market is only the first step. It is equally important to objectively identify where in the market we have the best capabilities to win. The size of the opportunity is irrelevant if we do not have the capabilities to capture the value. Getting this balance right is a challenge our business leaders face.

Thinking clearly about the ‘big’ picture (e.g. category vs. business growth), balancing growth and risk and selecting the appropriate win ability criteria is not straightforward. But successful businesses are the one that prioritize opportunities / risks that are not only big but are also the ones where they have the best capabilities to win. The final choice should reflect these trade offs, category versus business growth; growth opportunities versus risks and attractiveness versus win ability. 

The Category Strategy aligns our brands, packs and channels against a common set of category growth drivers and leads to the development of roles and challenges for each asset

How do we use the outputs of Category Opportunity Assessment?

 

At the end of Category Opportunity Assessment, we should have a final list of prioritized Growth Opportunities / Risks. This list is a key input to Portfolio Strategy. It is the starting point from which the team develops an approach that outlines how the business will use all of its assets (e.g. brand, channels, packs) and resources (e.g. capability and investment) to capture the growth needed to fulfill the Business Goals beyond business as usual (or the forecasted performance)

At Superior Sales we build programmes leveraging all the core drivers of capability – organisation, people, process and culture, not just skills. Refer to our white paper at http://www.superiorsales.com.au/storytelling/whitepaper/

Our capability experts work extensively with companies to equip sales teams, and indeed the whole organisation, to deliver a better customer experience. Please get in touch at  http://www.superiorsales.com.au/contact-us/