“4 strategies to improve your brand!”

“3 strategies to get noticed!”

“8 strategies to great presentations!”

I’ve never met a marketer who doesn’t love to use the word “strategy”. You can find countless articles on the web about strategy. Unfortunately, a lot of them mistake “strategy” for “to-do list”, and if your investor or customer (or employee) asks you, “what’s your strategy”, you don’t want to give them a checklist. They won’t be impressed.

When you started your company, you had an idea about software that was going to make a major difference for those people who used it. You knew that IF you could make your product as good as you want it to be, and IF buyers and users saw the value of it, and IF you were able to get them to pay enough for it…everything would work. (Massive celebrations and random acts of joy to follow).

However, the idea isn’t the strategy - the strategy is how you address all those “IF” questions (and others) like:

• How can you make your product as good as you want it to be?

• How can you communicate that value?

• to Whom will you sell the product, and for How Much?

• Where will you sell the product?

• …and so on.

Underlying each of those big questions is the biggest question: WHY?

• Why is your product good? Do we know what “good” looks like?

• Why is there value to communicate? In other words, how does the buyer win? What pain do you solve for them?

• Why do you sell to those persons, and not others?

• Why is your price the right price? Is it different for different buyers? Why or why not?

• (Not an exhaustive list by any means).

When you’re building strategy, it’s helpful to let your inner 5-year-old out - you know, that kid who always ask, “Why?”. She can be very helpful!

All of these questions require answers, and there usually is no right answer, just your answer - the set of answers, of assumptions or theses, that make your software stand out, that make it more valuable, more desirable, more necessary, than all the others…to the right person.

Your answers, together, are your strategy.

By the way, every time you make a decision, you are implicitly making a strategic move. When you set a price, you have implicit assumptions on who will buy at that price and who won’t. When you make changes to your product, you have assumptions that those changes will be attractive to your market. When you choose to go after certain prospects, you have implicit assumptions that those prospects are the right ones to pursue. However, all of those decisions may not support each other - the price may be wrong for those prospects you’re going after, and the prospects may want features you aren’t building, and you may not have hired the right developers to build a solution that is acceptable to your target prospects, and…

To think strategically, then, is to think about assumptions, or answers to strategic questions, and to make those assumptions clear and obvious. Setting prices, developing your product, selecting prospects - all of these things are so much easier when you have a clear and obvious strategy - when you, and everyone you work with, knows your assumptions. Debating these decisions with your team or your board becomes so much easier because the decisions flow from your strategy.

In the rush to grow a company, it is very easy to let the immense amount of trivia that fills our days block us from focusing on the key (and difficult) answers we need to find. Answers that point us where we need to go. Answers that make us more effective, more efficient, and allow us to grow so much faster.

And so now you can see why investors, employees, board members and customers want to know your strategy - they want to know if your answers resonate with them; if your answers are similar to their answers; if your strategy is, to them, the right strategy. That is why they invest, sign up, and buy.

So…what’s your strategy?