The Unsung Hero In Business Strategy Success

Lynn Comp turns overlooked market opportunities into revenue. Lynn is currently the Head of Sales Enabling for Intel Data Center products.

Business strategy for large enterprises has long been relegated to professional consultants and their armies of recently minted MBAs, eager to undertake their own journey up to the partner ranks. The data analytics and presentation graphics can be compelling and help to simplify decisions for harried execs lacking the time to dig into any one topic deeply. However, when you compare these efforts to the number of truly successful business transformations as measured by business growth, strategic breakthroughs driving new revenues can be shockingly low. In other words, strategy work abstracted from business development and in-market operations has a limited positive impact on the business and may have limited ROI.

I have spent decades inside large companies and have worked alongside these professional consultants, finding some to bring fresh, original insights to the table and others to lean more on my internal insights to build their own new customer penetration profiles on the basis of our knowledge. Throughout these experiences, there are plenty of case studies to show that when “million-dollar” strategies are built on the basis of a static market analysis, they rarely offer the desired 10x returns.

An Analogy

The job for consultants and B-school professors wraps up after the presentation delivery stage, not even at the executive decision stage, often culminating in a generic recipe captured in their books. Think of the consultant-led market analysis as equivalent to proponents of Age of Enlightenment scientific battle philosophies: “Strategy was based on abstract mathematical foundations. The commander was required to be like a chess player capable of mastering all combinations, while the army in the field was like a figure on a chessboard. Personal and creative performance on the battlefield did not play a great role.”

For the rest of the organization, tasked with trying to align black-and-white conclusions from a top-down market analysis to the messier market realities on the ground, the work to match strategy and in-market reality is just beginning.

Internal debates on how close to stick to the top-down strategic model often swing between advanced predictions based on abstract market analysis and real-time pivots that appear as the result of a customer request or a competitive shift. Too much pursuit of the immediate deviates the organization from a more strategic approach, yet abstractions do not grow revenue opportunities. How does one reconcile these two points of view?

The Power Of Business Development

My experiences have demonstrated that business development combined with market analysis is the most powerful pairing for driving sustainable business success. Business development is how a business owner gleans detailed insights into their customers’ pain points in delivering their products and services. Quantitative surveys may indicate that customers want a second source of supply, but business development ferrets out whether the customers are seeking price arbitrage or a strategic partnership. Business development is what unearths insights around gaps between competitor balance sheets and PR theater.

In a world of greater fragmentation, shorter attention spans and higher consequences, your target customers may no longer want to take a risk on your latest product offers. Rather than responding to the most recent version of the product or service you’ve collaboratively brought to market together in the past, you might find that your B2B buyer wants more from you. In these cases, you must go deeper: Where and who are your customers’ prospective customers? How will your collaboration result in upside revenue for your buyer?

Learning your customers’ business pain points through active engagement is key. Going back to the analogy from “Art of War,” Napoleon’s armies operated in a radically different manner from other armies of their time. While there was a battle strategy developed in advance by Napoleon himself, his officers were taught to press strategic opportunities on the battlefield as soon as they spotted an opening. Think of business development similarly—a set of well-trained officers who know the strategic end goal and can press an opportunity during customer discussions while maintaining consistency with the top-line strategy.

I’d like to share an example of a business development approach I’ve taken, based on best practices I’ve learned—and use—to build consecutive multimillion-dollar businesses with my teams:

Let’s say your company’s market analysts note that video services are highly in demand with consumers. The downside is that the revenue opportunities for producing content are inhibited by a lack of ownership over the networks that deliver content to prospective subscribers. That reality impacts the margin for content producers, who have to pay a greater percentage of their revenue per customer to the network owners. In some cases, as much as half of their costs are in delivering the content the subscriber wants to watch. Your business experts realize there is a way to reduce the costs eating into the content producer’s profits: optimized support from a software partner. Business development works with the content producers to confirm their willingness to consider a solution to their pain point. Business development also works with the partners, bringing them to the content owners to further establish trust and credibility, further closing on the business opportunity. If needed, business development then manages the program execution on all sides to ensure solution delivery is up to the committed performance indicators.

While this example was simplified for brevity, these basics have resulted in two business transformations that delivered hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of revenue after opening up new revenue opportunities in the market.

The Importance Of Both Approaches Together

Where possible, view tops-down and business development as a both-and discussion: Consultants and business school analyses bring high-level clarity and structure, and business development operates more like Napoleon’s army, trained to read battlefields in the moment and take initiative, capitalizing on opportunities in real time. Businesses should balance the two and adjust their strategy as business development reflects reality, regardless of company size.

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