Know Your Playground
From a marketer's point of view - What's the business environment, what's the value proposition, who are your customers, what's your business model?
Integrated Tools
01. The Environment Map
Use this map to understand the environment in which your firm is operating. You can control the business model, but not the environment; you have to work with it.
[ Also refer to competitive intelligence in enterprise marketing below ].
02. The Business Model Canvas
[ Business stage: Revenue, Scale]
Use this simple framework to easily understand your business - how your firm is creating value, delivering value and capturing value.
03. The Value Proposition Canvas
[ Business stage: Empathy, Stickiness]
Use this tool to:
break your value proposition into products and services, pain points it solves and gains it creates for your customers.
break your customers into jobs they want to get done, pains they experience and concrete benefits they intend to seek.
Videos on the above tools
04. Market Navigator: a Tool to Identify Your Next Playground
[ Business stage: Scale]
The value proposition canvas help creators on how to rapidly find product/market fit inside a market, and how to pivot when their hypotheses are incorrect. The business model canvas helps managers create value for the business. However, these tools don’t help managers figure out where to start the search for their new business.
This article by noted entrepreneur Steve Blank introduces a complimentary tool called 'Market Navigator' developed by Prof. Marc Gruber and Dr. Sharon Tal at wheretoplay.co to address this gap:
Find more about the Market Navigator here:
Read a case study
How Flyability - a Swiss company building safe drones used Market Navigator.
Download the main board and three worksheets:
The Navigator's main board to map out the 3-step process of identifying, evaluating and prioritising market opportunities for your business
Worksheet 1: Generating your market opportunity set – The first step of the Navigator helps you to uncover different market opportunities stemming from your core abilities.
Worksheet 2: Evaluating market opportunity attractiveness – The second step of the Navigator helps you to systematically assess the potential and the challenge of your opportunities, so you can better grasp their upsides and downsides, compare and prioritise them.
Worksheet 3: Designing your agile focus strategy – The third step of the Navigator helps you to clearly define your primary focus, and to design a smart portfolio of backup and growth options that you will keep open to ensure future adaptability.
05. Lean Analytics Map
Business Stage > Objectives
This is one of the most crucial concept that a marketer should understand. This map or mental model helps you know / remain aware of:
the stage of the business that you are marketing.
your firm's business model (overlaps with Business Model Canvas ).
the metrics that you should be tracking depending on combination of the above two.
and the fact that you should not move ahead to a stage unless you have proven yourself in the earlier one.
Stage | Objective | Metrics |
Empathy | Fine (1) a problem worth solving and (2) a good solution to garner traction. | Problem is painful enough for many people to care who are already trying to solve it. [ Also refer to Value Proposition Canvasꜛ ] |
Stickiness | Retention and Engagement | You have solved the problem in a way that keeps people coming back. MAU, DAU. Evaluating product features. |
Virality | Acquisition and growth | Along with Stickiness stage, this is where Growth Marketing primarily comes in. Focus is on growth loops / 3 types of virality - inherent, artificial, word-of-mouth. Search of a 'lead indicator' predicting future growth. |
Revenue | Proving you can make money in a scalable, consistent, self-sustainable way. | Focus on CAC, LTV, magic number, break-even, monetising. |
Scale | Proving a market | Entry into new markets, larger customers, new partners. [ also refer to Market Navigator toolꜛ ]. Channel relations, competitors, focus on efficiency or differentiation, multiple-levels of metrics. |
Business stage + Type of business = Metrics to track
Invest in some online dashboard tools rather than sharing spreadsheets via emails as attachments. You know the drill! 😁
Competitive Intelligence in Enterprise Marketing
[ more to come in this section on the methods used. ]
Enterprise product marketing teams gather, analyse and interpret competitor data and have the resulting information ready to guide decisions.
A competitive analyst works with business development, sales, and product management to continually gather competitive intelligence.
Multiple sources such as public news, field sales reports, attendee’s notes from events, proprietary competitive information platforms are used to prepare a robust picture.
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