If your alignment is wrong, you probably have the wrong plans

A 5-3-1 is a planning framework that works through 5 questions:

             i.What's the problem you're solving?

             ii.Who's the customer that you're solving it for?

             iii.What's your solution?

             iv.What's the right strategic positioning?

             v.What's the plan and execution to get there?

The Assumption

Too often, companies create a great product or service and believe the rest will take care of itself so long as they work hard to grow it.  Unfortunately, your customer doesn’t care about your product or service.  They are only interested in solutions to their problem.  “But we ARE a solution to their problem” you might say.  That doesn’t matter if they don’t know it.  If you want them to know that you solve their problem and that you’re different than competition, you’ve to get your positioning right by perfectly aligning the 3 key elements, problem, customer and solution so that their value is clear to the market, and you are differentiated from alternatives.

We started off this process looking at 5-3-1, to build out the problem that we're solving, the customer that we're solving it for, and the solution that you're offering to deliver against the problem and the customer.  I call those three items, the building blocks of strategy.  When we package those three inputs together, we're able to create and structure the right strategic positioning for the solution in the market to provide the right positioning for your customer and also to separate you from your competition.

Now that you’ve figured out the right positioning, you’re ready to grow. Building a strong go-to-market plan and execution is completely dependent on making sure that your entire plan is aligned with your positioning.  Your positioning should feed your sales plan, your marketing, your product roadmap, your pricing and every other approach you take when you go to market.  That way, the plan is clear and focused and everyone internally knows exactly how it all fits together.

Note: I’ve seen many companies fall in love with a specific tactic independent of whether or not it’s the right one for their market.  Tactics come last.  Get the strategic building blocks right and position to succeed before any talk of plans/doing or you’ll waste time and $.

The right questions for growth plan (there are many)

And so, on the way to doing that, there's a whole series of questions that have to be asked and a whole series of areas to be covered.  Below are some of those questions to help get you on your way to a strategically aligned go-to-market plan for growth.

Problem:

• How big is the problem for your customer? 

• How much pain? 

• Is it enough for them to seek you out for a solution or will you need to find them and explain why they need what you have?

For you, your product is everything but for your customer it may be one of a thousand things they are thinking about.  Regardless of how they see you, you must understand that dynamic to start putting together the right types of tactics.

Customer:

• Where do they operate?

• Are they online or offline?  Both?

• Do they go to events?

• Are they more likely to read the news or scroll social media?

• How much time will they invest to learn about what you do?

  
  

Once you know where the problem sits for the customer, then you can create the tactics in the places where they are. 

Your Product:

• Is it easy or hard to explain?

• How am I going to price this?Is it low cost, easy access? Is it a freemium model where you're getting lots of people in and then upselling them later?

• Is it a high-end price?

• How many of them are you trying to sell? Once someone comes in the door, is it a recurring revenue model, or do you need to sell lots and lots of units? So, all of these factors would then drive how you approach that.

• Is it expensive or cheap? 

• One time purchase or ongoing?

• Mass market or niche?

• How important will social proof be to get customers to buy?

• What are the next set of capabilities that will support how you solve the problem for your customer?

Understanding the nature of your product helps to guide the right tactics for selling it – both how you get awareness but also how you will close deals (and how long that will take). 

Other Stuff:

• Are there channel opportunities, partners and channels to then drive additional growth?

• Are there things you can do on the product front to do cross selling or upselling within that?

• What does the customer success approach look like?   High touch or self-serve getting customers onboarded and then ongoing usage?

• What level of resources are required, not just dollars, but people, both the amounts, but what kinds of people, what kinds of skills or capability are we looking at?

• And then finally, as you think through this, how will you measure how you're doing?

As you build your go-to-market plan there are so many considerations around sales, marketing, pricing, product roadmap, legal considerations (like does a patent help you sell), and financials including looking at the cost to acquire a customer (CAC) and their lifetime value (LTV). 

There are so many other questions and considerations as you head down this path – I won’t go through all of them here.  Because no matter how good a plan is, no matter how clear you are, you want to make sure that you're always learning and adapting as you grow.

The key takeaway is that the more you think it through before and align your plans to your strategic positioning that’s unique to the problem, customer and product you have, the more focused and effective your plans will be.  And the more successful they will be too.

Need help?  Let’s talk.