January 17, 2020

What Goes On in Business Strategy and Value Proposition Intensives?

January 17, 2020

What Goes On in Business Strategy and Value Proposition Intensives?

Business Strategy

Step Change works with some of Australia’s largest and fastest-growing businesses to effectively communicate business strategy and market insights from the bottom up. 

If you’re curious to know what goes on in a business strategy intensive with us, read on. 


Insight: Businesses with a clear value proposition and a refined business strategy achieve better alignment and can work more effectively in achieving their goals for the year while differentiating themselves from the competition. 

Data: 61% of businesses acknowledge that they often struggle to bridge the gap between strategy formulation and its day-to-day implementation. (Board View)

What’s the step change:  Achieve better business alignment for your organisation at the start of the year through a value proposition and business strategy refinement session.


Every business has ambitious goals about how to win and succeed, but without clarity in how to achieve them, most companies struggle to succeed. 

We spoke to Laura Webster, our Senior Strategy Executive and Senior Business Analyst Adeline Neoh to share what happens in a business strategy intensive and a value proposition refinement workshop. 

Aside from making sure clients and strategists are fully caffeinated in a business strategy session, here’s a look into the objectives, processes, and deliverables involved. 

 

A Value Proposition Step Change

Losing focus on the customer will make you lose customers. And all too often, businesses assume they understand what is important for their customers.

But the reality is that there’s an average alignment of only 48% between what businesses think customers think is important and what customers actually think is important.

Customers are becoming more value-oriented. So it’s vital that you have a value proposition, or a statement of everything that you do that adds value for your customer.

A value proposition aims to crystallise the key pillars of value for your customers that are true to you, important to your customers, and unique from your competitors.

It helps you achieve clear differentiation, improves revenue, and helps boost your marketing campaigns. 

A complete value proposition includes: 

  • A clear elevator pitch and messaging summary, focusing on pillars of value. This is written in natural language and can be rolled out across all your touchpoints.
  • A clear brand personality and tone of voice guidelines.
  • A full list of value statements for your business, ranked by their importance to customers and the predatory advantage against competitors. These are expanded across rational features, utilitarian benefits and the implications for your customer. 

Millward Brown reports that top brands that combined a strong and unique value proposition with their marketing campaigns achieved a 168%  growth average, compared to only a 27% increase for brands that had ‘excellent advertising’ but weak propositions.

Read further: Create a Value Proposition that Makes People Buy

 

Business Strategy Refinement 

In a business strategy intensive, teams should work together to develop a clear and aligned strategy. It entails being able to make choices on scarce resources and empowers your team to implement plans and manage them towards clear outcomes. 

A business strategy intensive usually begins by looking into your organisation’s purpose and clarifying the measures that matter, answering the question, “How will we know when we’ve won?” 

By reviewing context and where to play, Step Change is able to build a bespoke strategic framework that ensures core strategies are easily implemented. We then test them, considering capabilities and important measurements and metrics. Then we consider the practicalities of implementation, both internally and externally.

The Step Change process works by leveraging the power of the attendees’ collective intelligence, bringing the team together to rapidly develop the outcomes we require. Intense and fast-paced, nothing is off the table as we work to discover what’s possible and how it could be implemented for the greatest impact. 

A business strategy refinement session aims to identify and align the ‘why’, ‘where’, and ‘how’ in the organisation to understand how to best apply key resources, leadership, and determination. 

 

Key Processes in a Business Strategy Intensive 

  • Immersion. Step Change will spend 2–3 weeks to get up to speed on the organisation, conduct secondary research on the industry, and create an initial hypothesis on the business strategy
  • Scoping meeting. With the organisation’s key stakeholders, the group will sit down to identify and define key challenges and objectives of the intensive.

  • Intensive session. The team works together to develop the big blocks for the business strategy.

  • Polish and Present-back. The business strategy team consolidates and polishes all intensive outputs into final documents.

 

Business Strategy: Core Deliverables & Outputs

After the intensive, a business strategy should be well-defined and should set a plan in motion as to how to address the key challenges and opportunities identified. 

By highlighting the organisation’s top opportunities and challenges, the team involved will be better guided by the core strategic objective and will give them the strategic lens to navigate through short-term and long-term goals. 

The business strategy intensive will ensure alignment and clarity on the external and internal environments across all divisions. 

Adeline Neoh, Senior Business Analyst at Step Change also points out that it is important to have clear and simple-to-understand organisational directions with objectives framed as “<verb> x to y by when”.

She adds, “By having strategic objectives and growth pillars clearly articulated, your team can create and determine the actions needed to make them a reality.”

 

A Business Strategy Step Change

Our Business Strategy Intensives combine talented strategic minds with our simple, yet comprehensive, processes to help you gain powerful insights and practical ideas to transform your business. 

In fact, it’s something we’ve helped hundreds of Australian and international businesses with — from startups to multinational blue chips. The tailored business strategies have aligned their teams, assisted their decision making, and determined their direction in order to reach their goals.

 

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