Your how-to-win document

At the core of all businesses they have activities they perform which they believe will allow them to win in the market places they operate in. Something akin to “We are going to win in market A by doing X,Y,Z”. Michael Porter defined 3 major high level strategies of low cost, differentiation, and niche focus as a guide to win in a marketplace. The X,Y,X will reinforce one of these high level strategies.

Each team them takes the X,Y,Z from above (the “how” of strategy) and uses their skills to amplify these activities.

For example, the business strategy might be “to win in the automotive sector by producing cars that are differentiated by having Wifi built in and screens in every seat”.

When other teams look at this, they ask themselves how they align their teams skills to align with this approach. For example, the marketing team will need to push the differentiated angle, the tech team will need to find low cost Wifi solutions etc.

All teams have an amount of housekeeping to do, things that are best practise in the field, these are “permission to play” features as everyone should do best practise activities. As they are measurable and comparable across industries it is easy to focus too much on them and not spend enough time on the activities that make you win. As an example, over time other automotive companies might install Wifi in their cars - now the competitive differentiation is gone. If you do not put aside time to work on and evolve your how-to-win your position in the market weakens.

Summary

Internal strategy “how to win” documents do not need to be lofty presentations 100s of pages long. They need to contain the basics of:

1. Which market are we operating in
2. How are we going to win in this market? What activities are we going to perform that will cause customers to buy from us and not our competitors?
3. When was the last time these activities were tested against the market to ensure they are still valid