One of the biggest challenges we see in identifying new opportunities is how business professionals view and prioritize opportunities.
Most professionals typically view them in two different ways: either an undefined concept or a business plan / case.
Developing a business plan / case can take months of time and a dedicated effort. Organizations can’t do that for every idea.
How to prioritize growth strategy opportunities
There’s a lot more to prioritizing opportunities than market size and growth.
You have to consider a few things when establishing a framework for your growth strategy discussions. Aspects that are important in your discussions will be things like market entry barriers, players in that specific market, and whether somebody is already selling products or services that you’ll be competing with.
One of the best practices in accomplishing this is through uncovering business insights that can help you prioritize your options faster. Ideally, these are business insights that are delivered to you and your teams in a mere matter of weeks instead of months. The faster you can leverage insights, the quicker you can implement change and make decisions inside your organization using this market intelligence.
In the prioritization exercise, I’ve found that most professionals want the larger growth opportunities, which can be tough for prioritization. They want to know how big their specific market is, what the total adjustable market is, and ultimately want to go to market with a solution that’s larger from a revenue perspective. They want to target the growing markets and that’s their criteria for attractiveness and prioritization. However, it’s not about the size of the opportunity, but rather about how it fits with your business.
How to incentivize new opportunities
Let’s not forget incentives.
One of the most powerful pieces to this prioritization is learning about incentives. For instance:
- What does your product or service look like from an incentive perspective?
- Are you going to offer it at a lower price upon soft-launch?
- Are you going to offer your product or service that’s more attractive from a pricing perspective because it doesn’t have features that are currently unpublished or can’t currently get access to?
- Are there ways to build an audience of influencers with your product that’s newly entering the market, but will have published features based on updates and sprint cycles?
Here’s a great example of what this looks like.
Recently, the 10EQS team worked with a company that developed a new way of making fabrics that work well as filters for filtering air and hydraulic fluid and oil and water. They invented a fabric for filter companies that goes into filter cartridges and their product performs better than their competitors but is priced a bit more expensively.
They could guarantee performance as part of their value proposition, thus yielding a better experience with less problems from their air handling system.
The problem lies in entry into that market as they’d have to convince potential buyers, who were already making filters, to remove the material already in their existing filter and replace it with this new material. But, if I’m a filter maker and my business is operating well, and I have no pain point, why would I do anything different?
My point is this: there needs to be an incentive for change.
- Is the incentive monetary where I’m going to make more money or be more profitable?
- Am I going to sell more filters, faster, thus generating more revenue, because of this new fabric?
- Are you, as a fabric manufacturer, going to pay me a certain dollar amount for the cost of switching?
It’s almost impossible to break into a new market with so many barriers of entry. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether you come up with a new kind of material, a better separator, or a or world-class wiziwig, you’re not going to see the results you’re expecting because your market is already full of players who have prioritized opportunities long before you.
I’ve found the only way to do so is to create a whole new vertically integrated product or service, just to get a new material or a new component into that space.
The solution we offer at 10EQS is to guide you through these types of challenges in the form of a market assessment and a value chain assessment.
We review things like the total adjustable market, how fast it’s growing, and what is your potential for entering into that market. We then find and interview existing players that you would essentially be displacing, including their suppliers and their customers. We want to ask the questions that aren’t often addressed.
To wrap this up, prioritizing opportunities is important and so are incentives, as a part of the process to successfully executing your growth strategies.
To learn more about how your team can prioritize and incentivize growth opportunities for your organization, click here to get in contact with us.