Strategy is a word that is thrown around a lot. Sometimes we get it right, most of the time we don’t. I’ve struggled myself with not only defining what strategy means but also sticking to a standard definition. It’s easy to hear someone else define it in a different way and start believing what they are talking about is in fact strategy.
As someone who has played and consumed sports their whole life, the sports analogies are a great starting place. Sports is ultimately about winning. There is a winner. And there is a loser. The goal is to win. How you win, is your strategy. Simple as that.
This doesn’t mean that just because you won, your strategy worked or achieved exactly what it was supposed to. You could have won just because you’re strategy was slightly better than your opponents. Or you could have just gotten lucky.
Jumping back to the sports metaphor. As a coach, you will want to develop a game plan or scheme that gives you the best chance of winning. The nice part about sports vs real-life is that it’s easy to understand the result and who wins. Real-life can be tricky with lots of gray area between a clear win and loss.
With that game plan (or strategy), you will want to look at the resources you have (your players) and the current situation (who you are playing against) and assess what levers you can pull to come away with a victory. If you are a basketball coach, this might be looking at your team’s skill set, and physical attributes and contrasting them to your competition. If you’re smaller but quicker and maybe had a longer rest period between games, you may want to employ a strategy around shooting more 3 pointers and playing an uptempo, fast game. This puts you at an advantage to win, which is what strategy is all about. This also means that you are not going to do certain things. You are probably not able to have your one big man post up a lot. You are probably not able to run an offense that takes a lot of time to develop. Strategy has as much to do with what you choose to do as it does with what you choose not to do.
In business, it can be easy to over-complicate your strategy to try and fit in every single thing you want to do. This hardly ever works and confuses your team and organization. When you keep strategy simple, it’s easier for others to understand and rally behind.
In simple terms, you need to first define what your “win” is and where you will play. Is that market share? Revenue? A specific brand awareness metric? Depending on what you are working on, these can be at a macro level (ie revenue or EBITDA) or a smaller level like a department strategy (ie new customers or increased average deal size). Secondly, figure out how you and your team are going to win. Are you going to invest more time and energy into making your sales and marketing teams more customer-focused which will lead to an increase in new customers? Are you only going to target prospects with high ACV’s and low support costs? Once you have figured this part out, you can then start to develop the tactics to deploy once that quarter or new fiscal year starts (or in the basketball example, once the game starts).
If you want to win, strategy is all about how you plan to win.