To Lead Your Market, Pick One of These Strategies

Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema, in their New York Times bestselling book The Discipline of Market Leaders, identified three key strategies that lead to dominating a market. I think their choices are still helpful in thinking through the strategies that can result in you having a dominant positioning in your target market.

Key Point: You Have to Be Good at Everything Today!

Before we list the choices, in today’s world, you simply have to meet a minimal standard of excellence or “good” in all three of these areas. You can’t excel at one, but stink at the rest!

In your industry, there is simply a minimal level of performance expected by customers. So this is about reaching that minimal performance standard in every area of your business. That’s why at EMyth we talk about “the 7 Essential Systems“.

1. Leadership

2. Marketing

3. Finance

4. Management

5. Customer Fulfillment (Production, Delivery, Customer Service)

6. Lead Conversion (Sales)

7. Lead Generation

We work with clients to make sure all 7 of those areas are working well. Any given CEO/business owner can’t be personally good at all 7 areas. But you can make sure your company is performing well in each of those areas. They are, indeed, “essential”. That said, what we’re talking about today is picking at least one area where you simply are outstanding. The best-in-class for your field. Head and shoulders above your competition.

Here are Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema’s 3 strategic choices to become outstanding at:

Strategic Choice #1: Operational Excellence

In this choice, you strive to build a company that operates so efficiently that customers can come to you easily, get what they want (because you have lots of choices/options for them), pay less than they’d pay with your competitors, and go home happy.

Walmart would be an example of this strategy at the low price (and one could argue lower quality end of the spectrum). Amazon would be another example. Convenience. Price. Quick delivery or access. Lots of choices. And the only way they can offer that is by a highly automated, systematized set of processes (and unfortunately for the workers, relatively lower wages).

I have a number of business clients who choose this strategy. One is offering online training in marketing to Etsy sellers (people who make custom jewelry or other products of an artistic nature). They don’t know how to sell, only make, so she teaches them in a convenient set of courses. Key to making money for her is systematizing her processes. Before she came to EMyth, she was doing everything herself, and it was time-intensive. So she didn’t make a lot of profit. But now she is getting it all systematized so she can deliver maximum value for minimum time commitment.

Strategic Choice #2: Product Leadership

In this strategy you offer top-of-the-line, cutting edge products or services that delight your customers. These are customers for whom price is a secondary consideration. They want functionality and to get that, they are willing to pay a premium.

To get this kind of consistent product leadership and make money from it, your product development processes have to be outstanding. Your Marketing research also needs to be outstanding because while you may build a better mousetrap, you want to be sure there’s a big enough paying market who would like such a mousetrap once you build it.

Apple would be a prime example of this kind of strategy. Their products are always functionally cutting-edge AND emotionally delightful. I’ll never forget the moment I opened up my Macintosh computer and within 30 minutes was working on one of the papers for my doctoral program! Wow. Didn’t even read a manual, it was so intuitive.

Strategic Choice #3: Customer Intimacy

In this choice, you offer a total AND customized solution to each of your customers or clients. You get to know what they really need, and then you offer it to them (including things they didn’t know they needed but once you show them they do, they are delighted and feel well taken care of). Your focus is on solutions to their problems/jobs they are trying to get done. And you focus on results–making sure your solutions actually get implemented in their organization or life (or there will be no results).

Henry Ford is rumored to have said back in the 1930s that “People can have any color car they want–as long as it’s black.” That was because black cars were the only color Ford Motor Company was producing. It was classic industrial era assembly line production thinking. Today, people want choices. They often want to talk with you and get a customized version of what you offer.

The key to making money in this strategic approach is to develop process for quickly and efficiently customizing your offerings so that you spend the least amount of time as needed. From an EMyth point of view, I’d say that the more you systematize your processes, the easier it will be to give people exactly what they want. Because you can cut and paste rather than invent from scratch with each customer.

In our grant writing family business (the business I do besides being an EMyth coach), we do this. Each grant and client organization is different, so they can’t just “buy” a grant proposal from us. But behind the scenes, because I was an EMyth client years ago, we have developed cut-and-paste templates and plug-and-play operational processes which we bring to bear with each engagement. That saves us a great deal of time trying to figure it out from scratch.

So What’s Your Choice?

This model by Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema is not the only way to frame your strategic choices, that’s for sure. And in other articles I’ll discuss other strategic choices. But take a moment and think about which of these three your own company is striving to become outstanding at (and good at the other two).

EMyth’s Choice

I don’t know if the people at EMyth HQ would agree with me, but I think if we put it into these three choices, that EMyth has chosen Customer Intimacy. I think probably most coaches and consultants do. We work with businesses one President at a time. And we get very deep into the workings of each client’s company and make sure they are able to implement the EMyth approach to business within their company.

But part of the brilliance of Michael Gerber when he created EMyth is that he systematized a lot of the coaching so that we are also good at Operational Processes and Product Leadership. We have a library of 100+ business solution guides and templates our clients can use in all 7 essential areas of a business which gives us real product leadership (no other small business coaching company has this kind of solution library). It also gives us operational excellence because our clients don’t have to reinvent the wheel…and I as a coach don’t have to reinvent the wheel either! Together my clients and I can draw from the wisdom of 40 years of coaching 100,000 business owners to identify and quickly deploy the right solution for any given client, ready to be customized to their situation.