Case Study
Author: John Wildman | 5 minute read
The Opportunity
New leadership needed category immersion & strategy quickly.
A commercial leader hired from outside the category arrives with a mandate and no fact base, and has roughly one quarter before people stop waiting and start deciding without them. The organization is usually mid transformation, so customer requirements are undocumented, channel strategies do not exist in written form, and the organizational choices that should follow strategy are being made first because they cannot wait. The risk is not a bad strategy, it is that structure gets set before anyone has written down what the channels need.
- Organization choices pending
- Requirements to win unclear
- No channel strategies
The Approach
- Developed the company’s objectives, goals, strategies, & initiatives as a single connected chain, which is what stops a strategy document from becoming a list of aspirations with no initiative behind them.
- Documented customer requirements by channel. That documentation is the artifact the new leader did not have and could not get any other way, because it lived in the heads of people who had never been asked to write it down.
- Grounded channel choices in shopper and demographic data rather than in current revenue. Choosing channels by where the revenue is today guarantees the plan reproduces the past.
- Socialized the strategy across the commercial organization. This is how a new leader converts a document into authority.
The Outcome
Channel strategies setting priorities by segment, timing and resourcing, and a commercial organization aligned behind a leader who now has a fact base.
$17M Growth Opportunity
Meet The Team
John Wildman
