Achieve great goals with the right strategy

"Success once is chance, success twice is luck, success three times is strategy".

So success can be planned! Even if success is usually understood to mean financial success, I would like to define success here more generally as the "achievement of self-imposed goals". So whether I am running a company or my own business, or whether I am pursuing big goals in my private life, a strategy is essential.

If I have no (or an inadequate) strategy, then my success will only come about by chance or by luck, I will have to invest far more energy and resources than necessary and I will certainly fall far short of my potential. To make matters worse, we now live in an economic environment that is characterized by massive oversupply and too few customers in almost all sectors. Strategy must therefore also play a key role in differentiating us from the competition and establishing a "unique position" for our business. Strategy is without doubt the decisive factor in building future competitive advantages and the necessary basis for long-term and sustainable corporate success.

Building a unique selling proposition strategy for SMEs in 7 phases

The aim of strategic positioning, especially for SMEs and the self-employed, must be a strategy of "unique positioning". This means that the strategy must be designed from the ground up in such a way that it gives the company a highly unique character from the perspective of its customers. The more unique and beneficial the customer perceives the SME to be, the easier and more successful it will develop.

The necessary foundation for a successful unique selling proposition strategy is laid by four important basic principles:

1. Concentration and specialization: "Doing few things for few people". In other words, don't get bogged down and don't try to sell your products and services to everyone.
2. Acting on bottlenecks: Our customers have problems, needs and wishes (I call them bottlenecks here). Our strategic actions must therefore always focus on the bottlenecks that "hurt" our customers the most. Because "pain" is still the best driver for change.
3. Intangible before tangible: Everything tangible has its origins in the intangible. If we therefore focus primarily on intangible values (ideas, benefits, relationships, trust, image, etc.) - including in our companies - then the material values will follow. Of course, there is no doubt that we also need these.
4. Benefits before profit: As entrepreneurs and freelancers, we must primarily create benefits for our customers. Because only if we provide the best possible benefit will our customers be prepared to pay our bills. This means that profit is a consequence of the fact that we create value with our products and services. The primary strategic objective must therefore always be to create the best possible customer benefit.

The actual strategy development takes place in seven phases:

1. Strengths, knowledge, experience, core competencies: A good strategy always builds on the strengths that the SME or self-employed person already has. A careful analysis and evaluation of strengths, core competencies and other strategically relevant experience and characteristics is therefore of great importance.
2. Promising area of specialization: Which business areas and activities are best suited to the strengths identified above? How competitive is the targeted market already? Where are there profitable niches, etc.?
3. Promising target group: By target group we mean a group of people who have similar problems, wishes and needs for which we can and want to offer a solution. The target group must be as small and homogeneous as possible so that it can be easily addressed and processed.
4. Most pressing bottlenecks of the target group: True to the basic principle of "acting on the bottleneck", we think deeply into our target group in this phase in order to get to know their real bottlenecks. The better we can satisfy them with our products and services ("problem solutions"), the better our business will develop.
5. Performance innovations: Strategy always means "creating something new". If we do everything in the same way as our competitors, we will hardly be noticed by our potential customers and fall into the comparability trap. We must succeed in setting new trends with new or modified business models and industry-changing processes in order to draw attention to ourselves on the one hand and create better benefits for our customers on the other.
6. Cooperation: If you cannot do everything yourself, you will occasionally need partners so that you can fully satisfy the problems and needs of your customers. Cooperation at a strategic level may therefore be of great importance for the completeness of our solutions.
7. Constant basic need of the target group: The ideal approach in the final phase is to abstract the bottlenecks identified in phase 4 to such an extent that the underlying basic need of the target group becomes visible. In the further course of the strategy work, you then concentrate on this and try to develop future-oriented solutions to problems. This makes you a long-term partner for your customers.

The seven phases of strategy development are not simply carried out in a linear fashion, but in a networked process. Appropriate aids and tools for strategy work have been developed for this purpose (such as the "Strategy Tableau").

With the help of professional moderation and support, the strategy development process can also be worked through compactly for SMEs and the self-employed. Depending on the initial situation and weak points of the current strategy, the process takes a few days and results in a robust and promising strategy for a unique position. It is then the ideal basis for developing the positioning and marketing and thus for going public.