Prepping 2025 Strategy Planning Sessions

Question #1: We had a solid year…but how do we continue evolving our products to keep customers satisfied?

This question comes from established companies that felt some bumps during the pandemic. Their focus during the past few years was shoring up loose areas, getting back to their core competencies, and focusing on keeping existing customers retained. They feel secure, but also understand how valuable it is to keep satisfied customers satisfied.

How To Answer This Question:

This question centers on finding new product or features that have strong market resonance, but are not currently available. There are two approaches we typically recommend to answer this question:

• Product Idea Testing: This approach requires gathering data from the right customer group to take a pulse on what ideas have the greatest appeal and relevance. It usually includes sharing product or feature ideas and then gathering feedback on those ideas. It’s a great way to quickly benchmark ideas against each other to see what yields the most excitement or interest.
• Feature Prioritization Studies: Sometimes it’s less about broad sweeping concept ideas and more about nitty gritty feature details. When this is the case, we suggest a product feature prioritization study. This survey-based approach is a specialized way of requiring respondents to select their most and least preferred features. By requiring respondents to make real trade-offs, teams get a clean read on features that are “must haves” versus “nice to haves.”

Question #2: We’ve got a solid hold on our market today…how can we expand into other markets?

This question comes from companies with strong ownership of their current addressable market. They feel pressure to find new growth opportunities and suspect they can reach new customer segments with their existing products.

How To Answer This Question:

While not always possible, sometimes the same product meets multiple customer segments’ needs. However, organizations need to explore those segments to determine if they are viable targets. This leads us to frequently suggest two approaches:

• Buyer Persona Research: Our clients usually have some hunches about who could buy their products. But, they need to validate those hunches. For this, we suggest buyer persona research. This type of research, often done via interviews, lets us connect with different potential customers. We learn their pain points, category and product engagement, customer journey process, and roles in the buyer journey. This gives us clear insight into who they are and therefore how likely they would be to want a certain type of product.
• Product Concept Study: We could also start answering this question via a product concept study. However, unlike the approach we described above, this time we would test just one product. But, we test it with different audiences. This method lets us see if anything rises to the top with some audiences while sinking with others.

Question #3: We’ve carved a great niche for ourselves…how do we protect ourselves from competition?

Forward-looking business leaders across marketing, sales, product, and strategy frequently have this question looming in the back of their minds. Both new category entrants and established players struggle with staying fresh and current. But, as categories get crowded, it gets harder and harder to really stand out from the pack.

How To Answer This Question:

This question often begs two exploration areas. The first is understanding what competitors bring to the market. The natural follow up is determining how to create differentiation given what’s in the market. We usually use one of two approaches, if not both, to dig into these areas.

• Competitive Audit Research: It’s always valuable to get a lay of the land with competitive audit or landscape research. This covers exploring a wide set of dynamics across competitors including features, pricing, marketing, positioning, and customer journey experiences. It provides an apples-to-apples comparison to benchmark what the market is doing, and where you can create a singular position.
• Product Concept / Feature Studies: We won’t go into detail on this again. But, always remember that testing and launching new features is a solid way to maintain a “moat” around a business. And, when the strategic question is about differentiation, we make sure to include research questions to probe on how well concepts or features drive uniqueness.

Question #4: We just finalized our marketing budget…how do we make sure we’re spending our money wisely?

This question tends to come from organizations with solid proofs of concept. They have an in-market product and an existing customer base. With market validation in-hand, they want to drive customer acquisition. Frequently, they have limited resources and wonder how best to allocate their funds.

How To Answer This Question:

This question comes down to go to market planning and channel marketing. Understanding where customers spend their time or go to learn about a product category lets our clients know where to focus their resources. We typically take one of two paths to evaluate this:

• Exploratory Interviews: When we really have very few ideas going in, we suggest asking. Spend time talking one-on-one with end customers. Asking about conferences, events, newsletters, influencers, or other places where they spend their time or do work-related activities lets us hone in on channels our clients should consider.
• Marketing Channel Surveys: The flip side of this is when we have initial ideas but want more certainty. For this, we suggest go-to-market surveys. You can quickly test several different channels across many customers and easily identify where they spend their time.

Question #5: We have a great product…but how do we talk about it so that people really care?

This question comes up when organizations are in flux. Sometimes, it’s an early stage startup still assessing product-market fit. Other times it’s an established organization evolving its value propositions and customer targeting. Essentially, they need to know how best to present themselves to get customers excited and ready to buy.

How To Answer This Question:

At its core, this question centers on product or brand positioning. This is because good positioning homes in on the value propositions, benefits, and customer targeting that yields strong market resonance and drives customer acquisition. We often suggest a one-two punch approach to address this question.

• Customer Segmentation: Start off with customer segmentation. Whether done via surveys or interviews, segmentation studies identify which types of customers in a given market are the right target. And, implicitly, they help bring clarity to who is not a customer.
• Brand Positioning Research: With the right target customer, you can now see what type of positioning works. Consider running a brand positioning survey, a process that shows different target customers different positioning options. This lets organizations compare and contrast options and isolate the one with the greatest resonance.

Prioritizing 2025 Strategy Planning Questions

The list of strategic questions above is no small feat to answer. In fact, most organizations can’t explore all of these questions at any given time. They simply do not have the resources.

How then, do you prioritize what to tackle? We always say follow the data! Consider these metrics…

• YoY new customer growth is declining….This likely means it’s time to start looking at new customer segments to build your addressable market or explore if competitors are taking away potential customers.
• The “competitor” tag is appearing more often as a reason for losing deals…It’s time to understand how to better differentiate yourself to win more business and grow revenue. Start with an audit to get a better lay of the land.
• Customer churn rate is increasing…This generally means the initial product promise was attractive, but it didn’t deliver enough value. Consider buyer persona research to identify underlying needs and where the product falls short.
• Low Close Rates or Trial-To-Customer Conversion Rates…The product or brand promise was likely not quite right. Look at your positioning to see how to adjust it.

In essence, use your business data to guide your 2025 strategy planning. And, if you haven’t made a point of collecting historical benchmarks to guide this process, consider making that a priority in the new year.