Winning Strategies Start
With the End In Mind
What does winning look like at your organization?
Defining success may sound simple, but few strategic
plans come to grips with what winning looks like. Too
often management teams fall back on broad-brushed
vision statements. “To be the best…the biggest…the
leading…” that lack the specificity employees need to
implement the strategy or provide the benchmarks that
leaders can use to measure progress.
Should growth strategies be visionary? Certainly. But they
should also be concrete. That’s what Plan to Win is all
about.
Plan to Win is a market-driven approach to strategic
planning. It’s designed to create an actionable growth
strategy and align the organization around implementing
it. It relies on senior business leaders, including both
business unit and functional heads, to work together to
identify what really matters to driving growth.
They start by identifying, very specifically, what winning
looks like. When McDonald’s built a Plan to Win several
years ago, it successfully married the aspirational (“To
be the world’s best quick service restaurant”) with more
granular descriptions of the same store growth and
customer growth required to deliver the vision. Importantly,
they defined winning objectives based on customer
outcomes. They assumed that increased EBIT and
stock price gains result when a company wins with its
customers.
Once the team knows what winning looks like, it must
agree on the obstacles that are getting in the way of
customers buying, buying more often, or buying at higher
prices. Again, these have to be concrete barriers that
really matter—and that are surmountable.
GE Healthcare’s strong relationships with purchasers
and purchase influencers of diagnostic equipment didn’t
necessarily provide an on-ramp for relationship building
throughout the hospital (where the greatest opportunities
exist), or with the CEOs who drive many larger-scale
purchase decision. At McDonald’s, the lack of salads and
other healthy foods had become a barrier to mom making
a purchase even when her children were eating a Happy
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Meal. At Electrolux, a global appliance leader, low brand
awareness was a barrier to sales in the U.S.
It’s actually pretty easy to list the barriers to growth.
Prioritizing the surmountable barriers that make a big
and immediate difference to winning or losing is a crucial
and difficult part to an effective plan to win. Employees
need their leaders to make the hard choices and prioritize
the key challenges that they must tackle. The trick again
lies in identifying key barriers for each of marketing’s
four Ps—product, price, place, and promotion. Is there a
product issue that must be addressed, like healthy foods
at McDonald’s? Is there a communication issue like the
one Electrolux was facing? Is there a cross-customer
opportunity like GE’s to take advantage of?
Should growth strategies
be visionary? Certainly.
But they should also be concrete.
That’s what the Plan to Win is all about.
Prioritizing involves understanding customer needs and
assessing the importance of meeting these needs to drive
growth and improve the bottom line. For McDonald’s,
flattening beverage consumption among its customers
was a clear barrier to growth. In the fast food world,
beverages have always been an important profit center.
But shifting consumer preferences for coffee drinks from
Starbucks and fruit drinks like Jamba Juice’s, as well as
the explosion of bottled waters had left McDonald’s with
a big problem. It wasn’t seen as a natural outlet for any of
the beverage types that were growing the fastest. At the
time its Plan to Win was developed, the fast-food giant
didn’t know that investment in equipment, training, and
advertising to promote specialty coffee drinks was the
solution to its beverage problem. But because leaders
prioritized beverages, the product development and
marketing teams were able to rapidly create the strategies,
plans, and business case to address it.
And the results were there: According to published
reports, the chain and its franchisees had to make
significant investments to build McCafe stations, which
would add $125,000 in additional beverage sales per
restaurant. According to Morningstar, McDonald’s stores
are running well ahead of that goal on average. And now,
the chain is entering the blended, or smoothie, drink
market to boost its beverage business even further.
The final step in the Plan to Win is to take the time to
identify and address the organizational implications
for execution. Who will lead the effort to address each
growth plank? What roles will different employees play?
Part and parcel of this stage is reaching agreement on
the best metrics to track success, and a plan to integrate
the growth planks into a unified and improved customer
experience.
Electrolux achieved success with its Plan to Win in the
U.S. kitchen appliance market through rigorous attention
to relaunching the brand using actress Kelly Ripa as a
spokeswoman. The plan started two years ahead of the
actual launch, first by building the scorecard to measure
success at the consumer, trade partner, and employee
levels. Once the objectives and the metrics were clear, the
teams went on to develop the products and the channel
and communication strategies. Results were outstanding.
NPD consumer appliance tracking indicate that Electrolux
brand awareness rose from less than 5 percent to
60 percent among premium appliance buyers. More
importantly, Electrolux share of its segment rose from 2
percent to more than 30 percent in only a year.
Planning to win works, as GE, McDonald’s, Electrolux,
and any other number of businesses will tell you, because
it departs from the modus operandi of most strategic
initiatives. It defines winning in tangible terms, and
identifies the most critical of the surmountable barriers to
achieving it. With a clear and tangible vision accompanied
by a critical list of priorities, winning is the logical
outcome.
Scott Davis (sdavis@prophet.com) is Chief Growth Officer
and Fred Geyer is a Partner at Prophet, a strategic brand and
marketing consultancy.
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