Rocket-fuel your business with growth strategy consulting

It is precisely when you are making important business decisions that the value of great growth strategy is most visible. Its three key elements are:

• Business strategy: Understanding how the business will make money
• Go-to-market strategy: Understanding how the business will get customers in a repeatable manner
• Scaling strategy: Understanding the long-term plan for the business

How should the process of creating growth strategy look like?

Should your first step be establishing your vision or understanding your customers? What about defining your market? What tools will you use to achieve these things, and in what order? This is exactly what we can help you with.

At Netguru, our growth strategy consulting team build strong foundations for our clients during the 4-step growth journey.

• Building situational awareness;
• Formulating business strategy;
• Creating go-to-market strategy;
• Drafting scaling strategy.

Building situational awareness — the market

We start with understanding the market, taking into account the following elements:

• Maturity: Some markets are just at the beginning of their lifespan, which means high degree of unpredictability. Others are approaching standardization phase and become more predictable. Knowing the maturity of your market allows you to take much better risks.
• Structure: How can we segment the market? How do the segments differ? Is the market highly fragmented? Understanding those elements is crucial for designing both market entry and marketing strategy.
• Categories: What matters is how the customer perceives reality. They do it by categorizing it. Insights on how your customers make sense of reality serve as the north star for all business decisions, from set of features, through monetization to pricing.

• Competition: Who do you really compete against? Who do you not compete against? Are you competing actively or passively? What competitive advantages do your competitors bring into the market? How can you beat them?

Building situational awareness — the product

Market understanding is followed by adding the context of your product or service in the following areas:

• Vision: What is the ultimate goal? If everything goes to plan, how will the world that you’re crafting look like in 20 years? This is essential for deciding where we will be playing in the first place.

• Personas: One cannot possibly be talking about markets without talking about customers. What are their jobs to be done? What are theirs motivations? Pains? Needs?

• Value proposition: What precisely will you provide for the customers? Is that value dependent on anything (like network effect, for example)? Do you know where the value is located?

Formulating business strategy

The set of the most crucial decisions regarding market entry are made during this step:

Entry strategy: We’ll choose between the broadest approach of mass marketing, a more focused approach of segmentation or an absolutely focused approach with account based marketing.

Monetization method: Whether we talk about SaaS, other services, or more regular products, there are often multiple ways to monetize our value proposition. Finding the proper way might be the difference between having a competitive advantage or not.

Offering strategy: We’ll need to decide on how customizable should our offering be, and how we should price and package our product.

Competitive strategy: Aware of the competitive advantages of our competitors and of our own strengths, we can design the strategy for conquering the market we chose.

Creating go-to-market strategy

How will we bring the previous decisions into effect?

Direct vs indirect distribution: Important and often overlooked decision on building our own distribution capabilities or outsourcing those capabilities for a piece of profit.

Sales and marketing: The decision whether we build a sales team or invest in self-service capabilities (or any combination of those two in case of more complicated products).

Marketing strategy: Understanding the customer journey and how we want to manage it with marketing activities. How will we create interest? Do we even have to do it?

Organic vs inorganic channels: At last — understanding whether we want quick results and need to leverage inorganic options for growth, or if we are determined to have sustainable growth strategy from the very beginning.

Drafting scaling strategy

What happens once you fulfill your initial strategy? What should be your next steps?

Same product — new market: Should you simply take what has already worked and use it to try and conquer new markets?

New product — same market: Should you try to use the fact that you already have a strong market presence and understanding, and introduce a new product or service to your audience?

Organizational scaling: Alternatively, maybe you should be focusing on internal optimizations rather than endless cycles of market penetration?

How can an innovation consulting agency can help you with innovation?

Developing new products or reimagining ways of delivering value can be an overwhelming experience. Where does one need to begin? How do you bring colleagues together to set on a new path? Will this new product idea become viable at all?

When doing new things, information can be scarce and stakeholders can be skeptical. When innovating, there might not be a lot to go on other than intuition. However, the sooner that gut-feel and instinct becomes grounded on facts and sound analysis, the better the chances of translating that novel idea into a ground-breaking product, a viable business.

Here at Netguru, we believe — and have proven — that innovation is a disciplined process, rather than accidental or arbitrary. Our innovation consultancy offers structured and methodical approaches to help you sharpen your take on innovation — be it a novel product, an advanced technology, a new process, a fresh business concept.

An innovation consulting agency with deep experience will not only help you uncover data and insights, but walk you through battle-tested processes, frameworks, and methodologies. At Netguru, we’ve built the expertise to prototype ideas and stress test them so you can make the right call before you heavily invest in its full development or implementation.

There are plenty of tools in our innovation toolkit, but here are some that can get you started:

• Discovery and generative research
• Trends and competitor analysis
• Product prototyping and testing
• R&D sprints
• Hackathons
• Customer behavior analysis
• Business model discovery and design
• Product roadmap development