Structure follows strategy. Strategy follows customers. It all starts with a customer.
- Who is your target customer segment?
- Who is your best customer?
- What is your best customer’s profile? How do we recognize them?
- What does your customer need? What is necessary in your customer’s life?
- What does your customer want? What is your customer’s preference?
- How will you collect that data? How much data do you need?
- How will you analyze that data?
- How will you verify the accuracy of your analysis?
Strategy follows customers?
- Based on what your customer needs, what is necessary in your customer’s life, what product or service can you produce to satisfy that need?
- Will your customer be willing to pay a price for your product or service that allows you to make a reasonable profit?
- In the profit for your product or service, is there enough volume to sustain your company’s operation?
- Is your product or service exclusive to your company, or do competitors offer a similar product or service perceived on an equal basis?
- Based on your customer’s preference, what will make your customer decline your competitor’s offering and buy from you? What is your competitive advantage?
- How can you create that competitive advantage in a way that is sustainable, difficult or impossible to copy by your competitor?
- How can you effectively communicate the competitive advantage to your customer?
- How can you operationalize your competitive advantage to make is real, observable and obvious?
Your responses to these questions will guide your structure.
- What core functions do you need to create the product or service your customer needs?
- What support functions do you need to meet your customer’s preferences in the way they want to buy?
- In each function, what is the level of work required to sustainably produce the desired outputs?
- In what way does each function need to integrate with its neighboring functions related to work handoffs?
- What is the output capacity of each function, and how does its output match the output capacity of its neighboring functions?
Customers drives strategy, strategy drives structure.
Tom,
Spot on, as always. You have a one line question in your piece about communication strategy to get to your customers. IMHO, we should blow this up to really get thos structure forming juices forming:
Are your target decision makers/customers available easily?
Who are your best Centers of Inflences that can make a referral or introduction?
Is your ‘best’ marketing strategy/structure to target your end customer, or to be ‘Top of Mind” to you COIs?