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Why Aren't My Prospects Buying?

Every day, business owners, professional services buyers, and e-commerce sellers are asking, why aren't my prospects buying? I may have some answers. At the very least, I have some tools that will help you ask the right questions. With the right questions, you may begin to tweak your offerings and see better results. When prospects hear or discover your marketing messages, a process of analysis begins. They are processing a lot of information. We are going to introduce a tool or two that will provide some framework around modifying your offerings when needed. It's vital that the buyer's experience, from the moment they discover you, to the point they dispose of your product or end their relationship with you is viewed through their eyes and NOT yours. So what are the things businesses like yours need to be mindful of at all times? Let's cover some basics. Buyers are considering lots of things very quickly when deciding their next move. Depending on the circumstance and need, some of these considerations would include productivity, simplicity, convenience, personal/corporate/financial/reputational risk, fun and image enhancements, and environmental considerations. They consider all of these things during different phases of a relationship with you. What might those phases be? The discovery/purchase phase, followed by the delivery phase, then the use phase, if necessary, a supplements phase, a maintenance phase, finally, a disposal phase. This is graphically demonstrated in a Blue Ocean Strategy framework known as the Buyer Utility Map. The Buyer Utility Map or BUM is a methodical way to identify blockages to utility. Don't fret if your BUM is riddled with X's that indicate an offering or service is full of blockages in customer utility. These blockages represent opportunities to distinguish yourself from the competition! In the graphic below one would take the graphic and initially place an X over any square when there was a blockage to optimal user experience.

There are many ways one may use the buyer utility map to uncover blockages in the user experience. These blockages are LOST SALES. If you start asking questions through the lens of the buyer utility map, you will see obvious things pop up fast. If you continue to move deeper and into more advanced customization of the buyer utility map, you'll find it's a flexible tool useful in any industry. If you'd like to leverage the framework for your business, consider joining the Blue Ocean Strategist for a 45-minute training on May 3rd, 2021, it's free and easy to register on LinkedIn. Case studies,  resources for self-use, and more will be shared. Join us by visiting this link! https://www.linkedin.com/events/identifywhycustomersdon-tbuywit6787832988420857856/ For an even deeper dive join us for the Blue Ocean Strategy Challenge. If you have questions and want to schedule a brief call schedule that time here! Read the full article

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Five Days to a More Profitable Business

Five days to a more profitable business. That's our attempt at a catchy headline. We are, however, going to see that you receive some value before leaving the page. Here at the Blue Ocean Strategist, we're committed to seeing that every reader leaves with something that benefits their business in some way. Let's get started on that effort right now. In Blue Ocean Strategy terms, the key goal is value innovation. That is defined as breaking the value/cost tradeoff. That tradeoff in traditional business is when a company either raises its price and subsequently its offering's value or lowers the price and decreases the value of its offering. Think Ford Motor Company's attempt over the years to trick out a Crown Victoria with added luxury, call it a Mercury and charge more. Or on the opposite end of the spectrum, think of airlines stripping features away from flights and lowering the prices. So what might benefit your business right now? Obviously, that is impossible for us to know with any real specificity. We do know without a doubt, that you'd likely like to deliver more value to your customers while simultaneously lowering the costs of what it takes for you to deliver your offering.         How might you be able to lower costs of production, marketing, sales, fulfillment, and support while delivering more value? Take the Blue Ocean Strategy Challenge. I have two special offers for the readers of this post. Offer One: Read the full article

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Meet Value Innovators The Drury Brothers of 1 Stroke Club

Meet value innovators the Drury brothers of 1StrokeClub.com. The Value Innovators Show is a web series featuring company founders that have launched or run companies that exhibit numerous qualities of blue ocean strategy. Some of these founders have a clue that they've done something related to blue ocean strategy. Most do not. I met one of the founding brothers, Brian Drury via a great Nashville connector, Todd Bowman of Insperity. Brian and I struck up a business relationship that has served to keep us connected and aware of what's going on in our professional lives. Brian mentioned on a recent call that he and his brothers, Grant and Kyle, had launched a business. I immediately inquired as to the nature of the venture and was truly impressed. Brian explained that in Japanese culture there are huge expectations of a massive celebration when a recreational golfer aces a par three hole in a round of golf. In the states, our expectation and the norm is that the golfer who makes the hole in one will buy all those in the foursome and likely those at the club bar a round of drinks to celebrate. The scorecard gets witnessed and the ball is retired with the general understanding that all of this fanfare will be documented and put in a box frame of some kind for hanging in the golfer's den or office. Aces are a big deal. In 2019 there were an estimated 24 million recreational golfers in the US. It's a decent measurable, reachable market. Read the full article

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Map your today and reveal your tomorrow. A restaurant industry example.

Map your today and reveal your tomorrow. A restaurant example. Taking a look at where one is today is extremely important. In Blue Ocean Strategy, the As-Is Strategy Canvas is a great tool to gauge where you are in the context of key competitive factors. It's hard to modify something that works. When a dish sells okay and makes money, it can be difficult to change it.  It's important to remember this extremely vital truth. Market share is a lagging indicator. Yes. Meaningful but not the entire story. Think of all the market leaders that existed in the automotive industry in the 60s. It wasn't long before leading automakers were getting their butts handed to them. Kodak used to lead in film. So what right? In today's market, market share leadership has been completely upended. There has never been a more important time to review where your offering is in the context of vulnerabilities. There are three Blue Ocean Strategy concepts that need to be explained. These distinctions will help you plot your offering or service in the right spot on the Blue Ocean Strategy tool called the Pioneer-Migrator-Settler Map. Defined in the book, Blue Ocean Shift/Beyond Competing - Proven Steps to Inspire Confidence and Seize New Growth - Pioneers are businesses or offerings that represent value innovations. They don't necessarily have customers; they have fans. They offer unprecedented value that opens up a new value-cost frontier. Read the full article

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Sports Challenges are Thriving with Blue Ocean Thinking

Sports challenges are thriving with blue ocean thinking. Our culture loves the thought of winning big. Winning big with a half-court throw at a basketball game or a mid-rink puck strike into the net at a hockey game. One of the more popular prizes fantasized about by those who golf is the hole in one prize offered in most golf tournaments. If you've done any golfing and found yourself in a foursome in a local tournament, there is a good chance at some par three hole on the course, there was a car parked close by. The car had a bow on it and the premise was simple. Get a hole in one and the car is yours. Sometimes it's cash, sometimes a vacation, or something else of significant value. The prizes aren't coming out of someone's pocket of course. These are items or prizes that are delivered if a winner hits the shot thanks to an underlying insurance policy. The policy covers a cash amount or a sufficient amount to buy that prize being promoted. The hole-in-one in Japanese culture "Golfers are dreaming of these exceptional swings everywhere in the world. Except in Japan, where golf players avoid this kind of feat to keep away from an expensive tradition. Indeed, a Japanese custom requires that golf players who make an ace are morally obliged to pay for a party in their honor. All golfers’ friends and other players on the course can then celebrate this feat without spending a single yen. Read the full article

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Alignment's Role in Strategic Implementation

Alignment's role in strategic implementations. Isn't it interesting how important alignment is across all of life? Think into two common definitions of alignment. 1) arrangement in a straight line, or in correct or appropriate relative positions. "the tiles had slipped out of alignment" 2) a position of agreement or alliance. "the uncertain nature of political alignments" In strategic thinking, we're focusing on correct or appropriate relative positions and positions of agreement or alliance.  In blue ocean strategy implementations, we focus on reconstructing market boundaries and value innovation as a path toward unlocking vast oceans of uncontested market space. Alignment of value, profit, and people is required for these implementations to be realized and sustainable. What is meant by the alignment of value, profit, and people? In blue ocean strategy terms, these are strategy propositions. They constitute organizational frameworks that keep strategic implementations in alignment. Without sufficient value innovation, profits and people will be sufficient and happy for a short period. Profits may be high but without value innovation and motivated people, you have a cash cow that will spin off cash in the near term but as an offering with no path to value innovation and people to move it, it's a temporary win. Happy Read the full article

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Executing Your Strategic Implementation

It's a new year. Many of you are now executing your strategic implementations. It doesn't matter if your initiative is a blue ocean shift or a more traditional red ocean implementation you can take steps to make sure your ideas move forward. The companies that execute are the ones that feature a workforce, stakeholders, and a public that are all on the same page. In the end, companies, whether large or small have to harness the cooperative attitudes and behaviors of all people involved in the company. If you're a small business, this cooperation may come from a spouse or partner. If you're a large business, it may come from your board and employees. No matter what, to successfully implement strategic change, you have to have buy-in. So how to get that buy-in?  In a perfect world, you would have involved stakeholders from the start of the planning process. If you've not done a great job of doing so, blue ocean strategists use a process that may help. It's called Fair Process. Carrots and sticks used traditionally by demonstrative leaders and managers won't do the trick when it comes to real strategic shifts. So what is fair process? Its roots are based on procedural justice. In the 70s, John W. Thibaut and Laurens Walker combined their interest in the psychology of justice and the study of process and coined the term procedural justice. Read the full article

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Overcome Your Organization's Hurdles

When your company or division develops a blue ocean strategy with a profitable offering, it's time to overcome your organization's hurdles. Implementing any strategic plan or shift is a challenge. When you're rolling out a key innovation that rattles the status quo, you can bet the haters will show their ugly side. Blue ocean practitioners have found the following hurdles to be the most predominant. Hurdle one? The cognitive hurdle found in simply getting constituents, employees, and stakeholders to understand the need for change. Hurdle two is limited resources. The more significant your strategic shift is believed to be, the more expensive it will be perceived to execute. It's typical to find the biggest blue ocean shifts need to happen during times when budgets are most strained. The third hurdle is motivation. How might you find ways to motivate people to assist when they perceive real benefits may come to employees, customers, and stakeholders yet to come? Fourth and finally, it's politics. Bureaucrats and administrators like to protect their turf. There is no better killer of innovation than the individual who sees more work coming their way for a season while change takes place. Overcoming organizational hurdles and making blue ocean implementations happen in real-time is the fifth principle of blue ocean strategy. Tipping point leadership is key in the execution of change and there is no exception when it comes to blue ocean strategy implementation. Read the full article

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From Exceptional Utility to Getting Your Price Right

Revenue streams are a function of transactions. In most cases, more transactions lead to more revenue. Today, we are going to move from exceptional utility to getting your price right. Getting your price right is a process in blue ocean thinking. We have discussed the sequences around product design in blue ocean terms. We have covered the importance of developing the AS-IS Strategy canvas and distinguishing your offering from that of your competition's. Review these topics if desired here. Reconstructing Boundaries with the Six Paths Framework Focus on the Big Picture and Not the Numbers Finding Markets from Non Customers Implementation of Blue Ocean Strategy  Most companies think that an analysis of competitor pricing is the determining factor in pricing their offering. They fall for the red ocean trap of simply lowering the price or adding perceived value and going to market. This is not proper thinking if you intend to capture mass markets of new customers and make it very difficult for your competitors to keep up with you. The first requirement for strategic pricing is to determine what price will lead the masses to adopt your product or offering. If you're a service provider who never intends to scale your offering to a large market, this may not apply to you. However, I would encourage consideration of this kind of thinking. Read the full article

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Starting Something New in 2021? Get the Sequence Right.

If you're starting something new in 2021, you need to get the sequence right. You may ask, without the benefit of reading our previous posts, the sequence of what? What we mean is the use of blue ocean tools and frameworks to confirm the validity of your idea or offering in blue ocean terms. Of course, if capturing uncontested market space and new customers is not a priority, blue ocean thinking will not be a fit. In this post, we'll cover the first step. Buyer Utility. If you are content to compete head-on with others in your industry on the basis of price, these frameworks won't be very valuable to you. Let's start with the graphic below. The high points of the Buyer Utility step. Buyer Utility. In blue ocean disciplines, buyer utility is an absolute essential. Buyer utility may be defined as a consumer's ability to purchase, take delivery, use, obtain necessary or not need accessories, maintain, and dispose of the product or offering with limited barriers to any of those factors. The tool used by blue ocean strategists for this process is the Buyer Utility Map. See below. The map uncovers all the levers a company, or you, may pull to make sure you're delivering excellent buyer utility to your consumers. As you go through the process, you place an X in the boxes where there are blocks to exceptional utility. An example would be as follows. Amazon identified significant blocks to exceptional utility with delays in the delivery of products. As a result, they establishe Read the full article

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Don't Do Your Strategic Plan Until You Do This

Strategic planning is a must. Most business owners know it. Most small business owners and sole proprietors don't do it well.  Don't do your strategic plan until you do this. What is "this"? Construction of a Blue Ocean Strategy As-Is Strategy Canvas. There is a significant argument to be made for going through the As-Is Strategy Canvas process as prescribed in Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant. This strategic planning book and its later companion Blue Ocean Shift both describe Blue Ocean Strategy case studies and in Blue Ocean Shift, some high-level details on the implementation of blue ocean strategies. W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, the authors are worthy follows on social media by the way. John P. Kotter states in his outstanding strategic planning related book, Leading Change, "A useful rule of thumb: Whenever you cannot describe the vision driving a change initiative in five minutes or less and get a reaction that signifies both understanding and interest, you are in for trouble."  The Blue Ocean As-Is Strategy Canvas process will serve to initiate candid conversations with your team, your fellow co-founders, your division, or other trusted advisors as it relates to your industry's current state of play. By the current state of play, we mean, the comparison of your key factors of competition laid against those of your industry and competition. The image below represents an As-Is Strategy Canvas. The s Read the full article

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Blue Ocean Strategy for Sole Proprietors: Finding Growth from Non-Customers

Blue Ocean Strategy for Sole Proprietors: Finding Growth from Non-Customers. This is where blue ocean frameworks and tools begin to pay off and deliver revenue. "We should not listen to customers and most people, when we’re designing a breakthrough because most people can’t see it. Now, when you’re doing incremental things, customer feedback is awesome. But in general, most people cannot see a breakthrough, whether they’re customers, partners, potential employees, or even potential investors." Christopher Lochhead This quote is congruent with the Blue Ocean Strategist's view toward noncustomers. Blue oceans of uncontested market space do NOT come from current customers. It sounds contrarian for sure. Reaching beyond existing demand is a process and requires discipline and courage. Most companies simply compete on their industry's key factors of competition and don't go through the steps laid out in our previous posts about blue ocean strategy for solopreneurs. To reach beyond existing demand, think noncustomers before customers: commonalities before differences: and desegmentation before pursuing finer segmentation. Few sole proprietors have insight into who their noncustomers are. They are too busy putting out daily fires and serving current customers to think about how to expand into noncustomer markets. This is a big mistake. Take a listen, at your leisure, to Lochhead on Marketing's 084 Episode on "Do Not Listen to Customers". It's basic reality and a fun 5 minutes. Read the full article

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Blue Ocean Strategy for Solopreneurs: Big Picture Thinking Implementation

Today we cover Blue Ocean for Strategy for Solopreneurs: Big Picture Thinking Implementation. In this series, we're breaking down the business bestseller Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Marketspace and Make the Competition Irrelevant. Today, in Blue Ocean Strategy for Solopreneurs: Big Picture Thinking Implementation, we wrap up our last post on big picture thinking and discuss how to use the As-Is and To-Be Strategy Canvas as well as the ERRC Grid. In review, the As-Is strategy canvas is a visual depiction of your industry and the company's state of play. It lays out the key factors of competition along a horizontal axis. It cannot be overstated how important the discoveries will be when you start to honestly assess your company's key factors of competition. Most businesses find that they are swimming in a deep red ocean of competition. With discipline and guidance, these discoveries lead company owners to understand how important value innovation is to the future. Let's look at a visual. In this case, I'm sharing an As-Is strategy canvas around the topic of personal leadership. You can see in the graphic that one is asked to be candid about the key factors of competition among leaders. Translate the horizontal lines into whatever the key factors are for your business or industry and you'll quickly learn how vanilla your offerings probably truly are. In the case above, the leader is scoring very low on time and effort on the vertical axis. When you've e Read the full article

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Blue Ocean Strategy for Solopreneurs: Focus on the Big Picture, Not the Numbers

You may recall, the first principle of Blue Ocean Strategy is the reconstruction of market boundaries. Without permission internally, and a process to break your industry boundaries, it will be impossible to move into blue oceans of uncontested market space. In today's post, we learn how important the second principle is in blue ocean strategy for solopreneurs. Focus on the big picture, not the numbers. The temptation when planning is to launch into a business plan or strategic plan and use templates that one finds online or using some process read about when researching a business, marketing, or strategic plan. I have been guilty of the same thing. Before I know it, I've played office and have spent a week mocking up fabulous charts, graphs, marketing and sales projections, and more. Focus on the big picture In blue ocean methodology, one works through a systematized visualization instead. The end result is a strategy canvas. The advantages of a strategy canvas are numerous. By building a company's strategic planning process around a canvas, a company and its managers focus on the big picture view and don't get caught up in minutiae, details, numbers, and jargon. A strategy canvas shows a strategic profile of an industry by depicting key factors of competition. Second, it shows the strategic profile of your company against the competition. You can glean lots of information about where the industry is investing through the careful construction of the strategy canvas. Th Read the full article

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Blue Ocean for Solopreneurs. Reconstruct Boundaries with Path 6 of Six

In today's post, Blue Ocean for Solopreneurs. Reconstruct Boundaries with Path 6 of Six, we discuss looking across time. No, we're not learning how to forecast the future. We are, however, learning a framework around assessing trends. When a company or individual learns to assess trends, serve the culture, and then get in front of those trends using all the other frameworks, magic begins to take place. What special qualities of looking across time work in the context of blue ocean strategy? You have to look at the trends for blue ocean for solopreneurs and reconstruct boundaries with path 6 of six with these questions in mind. What trends have a high probability of impacting or are decisive to your industry? What trends are irreversible and what trends have a clear trajectory? In the text, Blue Ocean Strategy, Apple and its music business are shared as blue ocean strategy examples. Apple recognized trends from what had happened at Napster that millions of people were illegally downloading music. The industry was attempting to fight back and was ripe to make a deal that monetized downloading. Licensing met with technology and a legitimate business was born and immense value innovation was created. Similarly, Cisco Systems saw the explosive growth of the internet. They understood innovative solutions were called for. What might the solopreneur do? Where might the solopreneur or small business owner go with this framework? In many cases, it's the solopreneur's opportunity Read the full article

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Blue Ocean for Solopreneurs. Reconstruct Boundaries with Path 5 of Six

Blue ocean for solopreneurs is a series written to provide a translation of the business best-seller Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant into language more useful for the solopreneur or small business owner. Today in Blue Ocean for Solopreneurs we Reconstruct Boundaries with Path 5 of Six. Path 5: Look Across Functional or Emotional Appeal to Buyers. Companies of all sizes generally default to doing what the competition does. There is generally little thought given to strategic planning that leads to true differentiation of one company's product over another. In most cases, companies will compete on functional price-oriented factors or emotional feeling-oriented factors. These two competitive defaults end up training the entire customer base of entire industries. The cycles of function or emotion become reinforced over time. One example shared in the text is that of Swatch. The budget-oriented watchmaker managed to transform a functionally friendly watch segment into an emotional buy and as a result, the brand went global and sales exploded. Another example includes QB (Quick Beauty) House. QB House understood the traditional barbershop experience in Japan was ripe for disruption and began delivery of highly functional haircuts that took a fraction of the time at a fraction of the costs of the Japanese barbershop experience.   Via Semantic House As you see in the QB strategy canvas, laying out the key competitive fac Read the full article

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The Six Stages of the Buyer Experience Cycle. More Important Now than Ever. Stage One.

In the launch post of this series, I shared the importance of testing for exceptional utility. The reason this is so important is simple. Many industries, most in fact, will have to reassess how customers are experiencing the product or service offered. The safety of customers, clients, employees, staff and more will all become a first consideration. All liability for that safety will rest on how the buyer experience is planned, implemented, and monitored. It is imperative that companies assess these factors. The greatest blocks to buyer utility often represent the greatest and most pressing opportunities to unlock exceptional value. Building value and value innovation that naturally follows is what leads to blue oceans of uncontested market space. The buyer experience defined: It is summed up as the entirety of the customer experience.  The cycle, as measured by Blue Ocean Strategists includes the following stages. Purchase Delivery Use Supplements Maintenance Disposal In this post, we'll cover stage number one. Purchase. Read the full article