Winning Types of Business Strategies to Achieve your Goals

Winning Types of Business Strategies to Achieve your Goals

Winning Types of Business Strategies


Click here about two types of strategy - a Deliberate Strategy (Outlined below) and an Emergent Strategy

Using a deliberate strategy you first determine what your goals or objectives will be you need to make decisions on what types of business strategies you will use to achieve them. Strategy setting is about decision making and really answers the question - how? - while the goals and objectives answer the questions what and when?


Goals and objectives sometimes get confused. An objective is a broad statement of intent e.g. 'Diversify the business profitably' while a goal is more specific and measurable see ( SMART ) e.g. 'Increase sales and marketing efforts into the preferred market segments by 20% over the next two years. 

There are many options or choices (strategies) on how how you can achieve the objective and goals.


Gain Competitive advantage - do something that gives you advantage over your rivals


Diversification - New product Development


Geographical expansion


Contraction Expansion


Pricing - e.g.low price or high price


Seek Cost advatage - seek out and secure lower costs


Market segmentation - e.g. large institutions or small institutions


Sell off parts of business


Restructuring

Here are other types of business strategies developed by consultants Treacy an Wiersema. They call them value disciplines and they are:

Product leader - have the best most advanced products -like Sony and Apple


Operationally Excellent - be reliable, dependable, efficient and low cost - like Walmart, Adsa, FedEx and McDonalds


Customer Intimate - live with customer - address their specific needs like IBM


The idea is to become best in one of these disciplines and good in the others. 

Sometimes, depending on the product/service lifecycle you need to change over you strategies. e.g. become customer intimate to begin to learn the needs and then move to Operationally Excellent as the market grows.


Professor Michael Porter in his 'Competitive Strategy' theory has a similar classification


Product Differentiator


Low Cost leader


Nicher


Here are more strategies, competitive advantages or positionings you could use to achieve you objectives

Most Reliable


Most Durable


Safest


Fastest


Easiest to use


Most prestigious


Most Conventient


Best Designed


Best Value for Money


Once you have worked out your strategies come tactics - short term initiatives to make the strategy happen e.g. 'Run 10 sales seminars in the next 12 months'.'Hire two additional sales staff by end of year 1'

A word of warning though - selecting a strategy and persuing it always holds a level of risk. It is important that you access the risk carefully and the strategic decision should always be backed with thorough market research and the use of business intelligence data if you take the deliberate strategy approach. 


 Winning Types of Business Strategies to Achieve your Goals