Transforming businesses for market success and growth in uncertain times

Part 3 of 4: Transforming the go-to-market strategy and approach (Link to the first article on the role of leadership in a business transformation, and link to the second article on transforming business operations)

You may have heard of the Choluteca Bridge, sometimes called the "Bridge to Nowhere," an architectural marvel that was built in Honduras over the river Choluteca. However, due to a hurricane, the river shifted course, the bridge was left intact, but was no longer needed. Some corporations may face a similar situation in the current environment. Recently, the pace of change has accelerated, causing market shifts, where consumers' needs have remained unchanged, but the services they are using, how they access those services, and the providers they use, may have changed. Forward-thinking leadership needs to recognize these market and business shifts and evolve their business to position their corporation for long-term success.

Five steps leadership can take to transform their go-to-market strategy and approach are:

1. Identify - the shifts in the market and customer landscape and their impact on the business. Leadership will see the positive and negative symptoms of the shift. Positive symptoms are sudden growth in revenues and profitability, while negative symptoms are stagnating or declining revenues, pressure on margins, drop in repeat business, new competitors entering the market, etc. Many established corporations are likely to see negative symptoms, due to their more traditional go-to-market approaches and high-cost structures. Identify the underlying cause of the symptoms. For e.g.

• Financial Services - Customers are looking for the easiest way to pay for products and services. They have moved away from cash to mobile banking. Retailers have stepped in to provide easy ways for customers to pay for their products and services, similar to what Starbucks has done for coffee, and Alibaba has done for retail in China. New competitors with deep pockets such as ApplePay have also entered the market. All of these shifts will have a significant impact on credit card companies and consumer banks.
• Legal Services - C-suite is looking to proactively identify, and mitigate legal issues as they focus on market growth and operational efficiencies. They want cost-effective and efficient legal advice and services, from their internal and external legal counsel. Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs), LegalTechs, and the Big Four have stepped in to provide legal services, tools, technologies, and managed services. This shift will have a significant impact on Corporate Legal Departments and law firms.

2. Ascertain - If these market shifts provide a market opportunity or a risk to the business. Conduct workshops to develop a view on the "future" of the industry and the corporation, identifying best practices from other industries, and working with leading futurists, strategic thinkers, innovators, and business leaders. Assess the organization in terms of revenues, margins, customer base, geographic footprint, product/services, delivery mechanisms, etc. Conduct a gap analysis between the current and desired "future state."

3. Determine - The approach to position the business for long term success. According to an HBR study, leadership will need to determine their level of ambition and how aggressive they want to be and invest accordingly. Leadership has the option of innovating just the core of their business, identifying adjacent areas to grow revenues, or they can seek to transform/disrupt their own business before someone else does it to them. Each choice has its own risks and returns. Historically, to achieve growth, corporations had the option to build or buy. Today they have many other options: i.e. form strategic alliances, create/or become part of a business or industry ecosystem, or run innovation labs or programs. All of these will require identifying the "right" partners. Leverage traditional and non-traditional ways to grow revenues.

4. Co-create - Solutions and services with customers and employees (if they are, or can be, consumers). Remember transformation is about people. Consumers bring deep insights into their needs and motivations and provide candid feedback on existing products and services. They are often willing to work with the corporation to co-create solutions that better meet their needs, test them, provide feedback, and become early adopters. Some of the more vocal consumers can become "evangelists" and convince others to buy the product or service. Treat customers as partners in the transformation journey.

5. Experimentation - is key to the success of a go-to-market transformation. The corporation needs to simultaneously conduct several agile/lean experiments, fail fast, learn from those failures, and then experiment again. Most innovative businesses run thousands of experiments at a time. Ideally, the team running the experiments should be separated from the core of the corporation, so that they have the luxury to be innovative and bold, and fail without negatively impacting the entire organization. There needs to be a defined process for experimentation, established KPIs for success, a detailed methodology, and an approach to take each successful experiment, through the various stages of testing, piloting, and then bringing the product or service to the market. Experiment, test, refine, retest, repeat.

Transforming the go-to-market strategy and offerings is significantly more complex than transforming business operations. However, for many organizations, this could be essential. There is a graveyard of corporations that failed to transform in a timely fashion, and the market moved away from them, i.e. Blockbuster, Kodak, Polaroid, ToyrRUs, Borders, to name a few. Transformational leadership needs to have an innovation mindset, set the tone-at-the-top regarding the imperative for change, and define a bold vision for the future of the business. In addition, they should be willing to invest in transformation, for a length of time with the knowledge that they may not see immediate returns. Leadership needs to support, push, and empower their business leaders and their transformation team to think "outside-the-box" for solutions. They should also focus on managing change and communicate extensively, with both internal and external stakeholders. The key to the success of a go-to-market transformation is the leadership team.

The next article in the series will focus on sharing tried and tested processes, tools, and techniques to transform the business. For more information or to discuss further, please contact me at, [email protected].