Positioning for Customer Advantage

Prioritize what customers need. Respond with agility to changing market conditions.

Successful organizations anticipate and understand what their customers need during changing market conditions and are able to quickly realign priorities.  Realigning priorities quickly focuses time and resources on the work that matters and generates value for all stakeholders.

Too many companies are confused or misaligned about how to provide greatest value to customers.

We regularly ask leadership teams to name the three words that describe their firm brand. Their firm brand is what they want to be known for by their target customers. Rarely do we find teams that have even a 60% overlap. This lack of clarity and focus leads to competing priorities and investments that make all things equally important. In the eyes of customers, these businesses are not distinctive. They are “as good as anyone else.”

In other organizations, there is strong internal consensus around growth and customer strategy, but it doesn’t reflect customer or investor expectations. In every business lifecycle, market disruptions usually drive people to work harder at doing what made them successful in the past rather than reinventing themselves for a new future with different priorities and capabilities. This dilemma must be overcome or the business goes into decline.

Clarify and align around growth strategy and customer capabilities.

Senior leadership teams must make positioning for advantage a priority. This customer centric positioning points towards the opportunities where the business can win the hearts, minds and wallets of customers. RBL’s approach to clarifying strategic positioning uses an outside-in approach to clarify the growth strategy and customer differentiation. Our approach includes:

  • Conducting a diagnostic with internal and external stakeholders: strengths and opportunities
  • Executive alignment workshop to clarify growth and customer capabilities
  • Identify key strategy and organization priorities and implications
  • Identify recommendations and roadmap
  • Align leaders and organization with implications

Position to win.

Companies who clarify their customer centric positioning based on customer and investor expectations are better positioned to win in the marketplace. They are able to define distinctive capabilities that focus investments in organization, talent and leadership. This creates clear priorities and implications for resource allocation and allows faster, better delivery of results that customers and investors care about.

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