What Is It?

The Guide is a packaged set of detailed procedures to rapidly organize and accelerate the process of evaluating and selecting new markets.

• The Guide is easy to use and easy to adapt to your company's unique capabilities and circumstances without requiring the services of a consultant.
• The Guide aligns your company's resources, capabilities, capacity, and skills to determine the value it can deliver to a target market that satisfies a need the market perceives to be a benefit your competitors cannot provide.
• The Guide targets companies that know what they need to do—they just need a framework in which to do it.
• Part I of the Guide is the due-diligence process to evaluate and select a new market.
• Part II of the Guide involves preparing a market focused business strategy for the selected market(s).  

Who Needs It?

• Companies seeking an easy to use framework to evaluate and select new markets
• Companies focused on satisfying needs in a newmarket
• Companies determined to deliver real value that differentiates them from their competition
• Companies who want to define a sustainable competitive advantage

Why Use It?

• The Guide is easy to use and is adaptable to unique situational circumstances
• Provides a structured approach that does not require the services of a consultant or consulting firm
• Addresses situational events in a market such as; shifting economic conditions, new market opportunities, and growth opportunities
• Delivers a market-focused business strategy

The guide targets small-to-midsized companies that know what they need to do—they just need a framework in which to do it. Our customers use the packaged set of detailed procedures we provide to rapidly organize and accelerate the market discovery projects that they already know they need to undertake. They use the Guide’s approach to adapt the principles and techniques of market discovery to their unique circumstances, according to their company’s own capabilities and constraints.
 

Part I of the Guide is the process of doing the due-diligence required to evaluate and select new markets. This involves identifying potential markets and choosing between them. The process focuses on matching each target market’s needs and requirements to the company’s own resources, capabilities, capacity, and skills. This process includes:

Market discovery – Market discovery is a process that carefully examines the company’s resources, capabilities, capacities, and skills, in order to naturally determine which potential new markets (if any) are good fits (Chapter 1).

Needs and Requirements – Needs are determined by market studies and the company’s experience in a particular industry and its markets. Determining a market’s needs insures the company has the resources and capabilities to satisfy a target market’s requirements (Chapter 2).

Company Analysis - Company analysis is about determining what real value the company can provide a new market, based on resources and capabilities that differentiate the company from its competitors (Chapter 3).

Market Feasibility – Market feasibility is the exercise to determine whether the company has the required resources, capabilities, and skills to take advantage of a potential opportunity it has determined may exist in a targeted market (Chapter 4).

Financial Feasibility – Financial feasibility is the exercise to determine whether the company has the financial resources to take advantage of new market opportunities (Chapter 5).

Market Risk Assessment - Market risk assessment is the exercise to determine the risks for entry into a targeted market. To make an objective choice, the likelihood of success needs to be quantified (i.e., stated in terms of probabilities). In order to quantify probabilities the company restates them in terms of risk. Risk is an uncertain event or condition that, if it occurs, has a positive or negative effect on at least one objective in a targeted market (Chapter 6).

Making Complex Choices - Making complex choices uses a multi-criteria decision making process to objectively select the market that is the best fit for a company. The process is a structured technique for dealing with complex decisions. The process insures that the leadership team makes an objective decision about which market best fits the company based on its resources, capabilities, capacity, and skills (Chapter 7).

Part II of the Guide is about preparing a market-focused business strategy. It becomes the plan that defines and documents your company’s purpose in a new market, the goals it plans to attain, and the real value it will deliver by defining a sustainable competitive advantage. This plan will describe and document both the short term (tactical) and long-term (strategic) approach for entering the market selected in Part I.

Part II organizes the information and data from Part I into a plan of action focused on the following themes:

• Preparation for a Market Focused Business Strategy—explains why this exercise is different from what is usually called strategic planning, addresses avoiding failure, and outlines the market focused planning process.
• The Purpose—describes the company’s purpose for entering a new market.
• The Goal—describes the company’s goals for its new market in terms of what it expects to achieve.
• The Resources and Capabilities—describe the company’s resources and capabilities in terms of how they align with the needs of a targeted market. 
• Real Value and Competitive Advantage—describes the real value the company can deliver to a new market that differentiates it from its competitors.
• New market communication—describes the impact of delivering real value to a new market and the company’s own employees.
• Finishing the Strategy—the process results in a strategy that is tactical—a plan that details the plan for action in a new market.
• Implementing the Strategy—describes the process of monitoring and controlling the implementation and execution of the plan for action in the new market.

Part II of the Guide includes the following chapters:

Preparation of a Market-Focused Business Strategy – A market-focused business strategy describes and documents the needs of customers in a new market that results in a sustainable competitive advantage (Chapter 8).

Purpose – The purpose describes what the company expects to achieve in a new market. It guides the actions, spells out the overall objectives, provides a sense of direction, and guides decision making for all levels of management. It is a vital element in any attempt to motivate employees. It gives them a sense of purpose and it keeps the company focused on its goals and objectives (Chapter 9).

Goals – Goals establish what the company expects to achieve in its new market. The purpose of formally stating goals is to prevent wandering away from them later on. Goals are specific, measureable, aggressive, yet achievable (Chapter 10).

Resources and Capabilities - A company’s resources and capabilities determine what real value it can deliver to a new market. The challenge will be to determine if the company’s resources and capabilities fits the new market’s requirements (Chapter 11).

Real Value and Competitive Advantage - Real value is a benefit the market perceives will satisfy a need the company’s competitors cannot provide (information and data derived from Part I of the Guide). A real value defines a sustainable competitive advantage (Chapter 12).

Communicating to the Market - Market communication is about informing the company’s new market of the value it will deliver that its competitors cannot provide. The goal is to deliver the best message (a) to the targeted market that (b) communicates how the company has resolved an existing need or creates a need that the market perceives as a benefit. It also stresses the importance of employee participation (Chapter 13).

Finishing the Strategy – An effective market-focused business strategy addresses the demands of a new market. It describes them with tactics (short-term) and a strategy (long-term). In the previous five chapters, we created the content of the plan. Now we will lay it out in a coherent form that describes a plan of action (Chapter 14).

Implementing the Strategy – The implementation and execution of a company’s market focused strategy is the ultimate business difference maker. Companies that will prosper in a new market need to turn their strategy into results. Bottom line results are far more dependent on implementation and execution than any plan can provide. Developing a plan without effective implementation and execution is a waste of everyone’s time. Success depends on getting the right people to take the right actions (Chapter 15).