Whenever you are ready to fight your way on the new market with your product or service, there are several steps you may want to make sure you got, in order to deliver the best business strategy, and not to waste your investitions right away!
1. Collect as much information as you can
To know where your company is heading, you have to know where you are right now. So before you start looking ahead, you should review the past experience, or the current financial situations . Look at each range of the business and marketing you made the right choices, what could have made better and what opportunities you did miss because you were preoccupied with some non-vital technical or management problems.
Lots of tools and possibilities, and personally the one that i use is the SWOT analysis. (Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats). I swear, it works like a charm. Not a fan of SWOT? No problem. Try other strategic analysis ways like PESTLE (political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental) analysis.
2. Establish your vision and mission for your future company
A vision is a clear, comprehensive 'photograph' of your future company at some point in the future. It provides the vector because it describes what your business needs to be like, to be successful within the near future. A vision describes the WHAT. i.e. what you are trying to achieve in the future.
For the mission part of the job, you’ll want to ask yourself the questions:
- What do we do?
- How do we do it?
- Whom do we do it for?
- What value do we bring for customers ?
3. Determine strategic objectives and goals
Your goal is to develop a set of high-level objectives for most business areas. They need to highlight the priorities and inform the plans that will ensure delivery of the company’s vision and mission.
By taking a look back at your review in step one, in particular the SWOT and PESTLE analysis, you can incorporate any identified strengths and weaknesses into your objectives.
Crucially, your objectives must be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-related). Your objectives must also include factors such as KPI’s, resource allocation and budget requirements.
4. Tactical Plans
Now is the time to put some meat on the bones of your strategy by translating the strategic objectives into more detailed short-term plans. These plans will contain actions for departments and functions in your organisation. You may even want to include suppliers.
You’re now focusing on measurable results and communicating to stakeholders what they need to do and when. You can even think of these tactical plans as short sprints to execute the strategy in practice.
5. Performance Management
All the planning and hard work may have been done, but it’s vital to continually review all objectives and action plans to make sure you’re still on track to achieve that overall goal. Managing and monitoring a whole strategy is a complex task, which is why many directors, managers and business leaders are looking to alternative methods of handling strategies. Creating, managing and reviewing a strategy requires you to capture the relevant information, break down large chunks of information, plan, prioritise, capture the relevant information and have a clear strategic vision.
