How to predict your competitor’s next move

 

By Emma Parry

Know which competitors matter the most and predict their next steps with greater accuracy.

In this episode of the Inside the Strategy Room, John Horn, author of the new book Inside the Competitor’s Mindset (The MIT Press, April 2023), explains how to predict competitor actions. Horn is a professor at Washington University’s Olin Business School in St. Louis who helps companies maximize the value of competitive insights. He spoke with Emma Gibbs, who leads McKinsey’s Strategy and Corporate Finance Practice in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Israel. This is an edited transcript of the discussion. For more conversations on the strategy issues that matter, follow the series on your preferred podcast platform.

Emma Gibbs: What is the core message of your book?

John Horn: The big idea is that many companies do competitive intelligence, but where they fall down is in turning that intelligence and data into insights about what the competitor will do. Many of my clients say that their competitors are irrational, but this is because they are not taking the time to look at the world from their competitors’ point of view. Once they do, those competitive actions start to make sense. The book sets up frameworks and processes to help executives get inside the competitor’s mindset.

Emma Gibbs: Why do you think companies have such a hard time understanding their competitors’ points of view?

John Horn: One reason is that we assume our approach and the way we look at the world is right. When someone does something differently, it creates a dissonance with what we think is the correct answer. The other reason is that with more seniority, power, or status comes greater difficulty in being empathetic. We made choices that got us promoted, so we assume they had to be right choices. Any others don’t make sense to us.

Emma Gibbs: Have you come across instances when a company does act irrationally?

John Horn: I have yet to see a company act truly irrationally. Typically, the competitor’s actions aren’t irrational but are moves that we wouldn’t make or we don’t want them to make. I did a war game with a transportation client, and we discussed whether we should include warehousing space as a choice in the game. The client said, “No, because our competitor is irrational with their warehousing. It’s a mature industry with excess capacity and they are adding warehouse space.” I asked, “Have you added capacity in the past 18 months?” He recited a short list: expanding one facility, adding another, acquiring a third. I said, “So you’ve added or expanded 12 facilities. Your competitor added four, and they’re irrational?” He looked at me and said, “Yeah, but there is a good reason why we added those 12.”

Emma Gibbs: How would you approach figuring out the competitor’s reasons for their moves?

John Horn: It’s about breaking out of your own mindset and forcing yourself to look at the world from competitors’ points of view. If I had their assets, what would I do with them? If I decrease my prices and the competitor matches that decrease, I won’t gain any market share. Any time you plan to build a new plant or acquire a company or change your pricing, you should think, as in any game, “If I make this move, what will my opponent do in response?” The minute you say, “They’re irrational,” you stop trying to understand them.

Emma Gibbs: In your book, you have a four-stage framework for understanding competitors. Can you explain those steps?

John Horn: The first step is to pay attention to what competitors say and do by downloading earnings calls or annual reports and scanning media releases. 

The second step is to find out what assets, resources, and capabilities they have. They may have a supply chain in markets or geographies that you don’t have or upgraded facilities. That’s where you start to differentiate the competitor. The way I like to phrase it is, “If I had their toys to play with, what would I do?”

The third step is to consider the person making the decisions. What do you know about them? When someone with a marketing background becomes the CEO, they won’t suddenly start optimizing the footprint of factories. That person will likely focus on marketing to help the company grow, partly because they will think, “My background is why the board hired me.”

"Companies doing competitive intelligence often try to collect all data about all competitors all at once, but they lack the staff or the ability to analyze the information and develop insights. You should start small. Who are the major competitors you want to track, and what do you want to track about them?"

Compa

The fourth element, which is really important, is making a prediction and then tracking it to see how it lines up with what happens. If you paid attention to what the competitor said and did, considered all its assets, and understood the leaders’ backgrounds, you can say, “I think they will do this in the next three to six months.” If what they do is in line with what you expected, you know you are on the right track. If you’re off, then go back and ask, “What did I miss? Maybe they used a certain partner or hired a new person to make decisions.” That updates what you pay attention to going forward to help you make better predictions. The objective is never to be 100 percent accurate, but it’s a lot better to be 30 percent accurate than to be 0 percent accurate in predicting what your competitor will do.

Emma Gibbs: In our practice, we talk a lot about the social side of strategy—ingrained ways of thinking or internal agendas. How should individuals who gather these insights share them with senior leaders so they make the best decisions?

John Horn: It’s more about storytelling than about charts and spreadsheets. It’s hard to say, “Here is what we should have invested, and here’s what the return would have been.” Rather, come up with examples of where the company faced big challenges in the past. For example, it might be something like, “Remember when we entered Latin America and got hammered by that competitor and lost our $200 million investment?” Then go back and look at what the competitor had done before. “If we had spent time to analyze the competitor, we may not have perfectly predicted their reaction, but we could have seen them as a threat and paid more attention to them.” Anecdotes aren’t proof, but you want those big hairy, messy anecdotes to be in senior leaders’ minds, so they realize that this is something they need to pay attention to.

Additionally, when you start implementing a competitive intelligence program, you want to go for small wins to build up the right to get bigger. Focus on one or two competitors and one or two strategic choices; maybe it’s one competitor’s pricing and product portfolio. Then track that and show that you can predict their actions with growing accuracy.

Emma Gibbs: Should business leaders start small when venturing in a new strategic direction, to get a sense of the competitor response?

John Horn: Some strategic choices can’t be made incrementally. If I’m going to acquire a company or expand a facility, I can’t do that partially over time. On the other hand, maybe I can expand a product into a couple of areas and see if a competitor tries to block it. We have this idea that our competitors are tracking our every move and just waiting to pounce. In fact, many will not realize that you are making a move in the market for weeks or months. With big moves, war games and simulations can be very helpful: “Emma, I want you to play a competitor. Here’s what I want to do. What would you do in response?” You can come up with a pretty accurate sense of the competitor response and based on that, decide what you might do differently.

Emma Gibbs: You interviewed people from different backgrounds for the book. What insights did you gain from that?

John Horn: One of the challenges with competitive insight is that you can’t talk to your competitor, so you have to intuit outside in, from second- and third-party resources. A colleague of mine said, “It’s similar to a homicide detective who can’t ask the victim, ‘Who killed you?’” It made me realize that other professionals, such as archaeologists, paleontologists, and neonatal ICU nurses, face the same challenge. Paleontologists can dig up fossil bones, but that doesn’t tell them how T. Rex ran or if it hunted in packs. I asked these different groups how they approach the challenge of not being able to directly interrogate the subject of their research and synthesized their answers into ten lessons. 

The number one thing was to create a diverse team. Almost everyone said, “If you want to have good competitive insight, you need people who look at the problem from different angles, whether that’s cultures, genders, or functional or educational backgrounds. The more people with different voices actively participating, the better answers you will get.”

Emma Gibbs: What advantages can technology bring to getting into the minds of competitors? And how do you combine it with the human aspects?

John Horn: It’s hard to do competitive insight without having a good database of what companies have done in the past and are doing currently so you can see patterns. Competitive insight or business analytics dashboards are very helpful for collecting and codifying that information. When you’re trying to predict your competitor’s actions, you need to know two things. 

First, are they following patterns? For pattern tracking, artificial intelligence and dashboards are helpful as long as AI recognizes the pattern. For example, if I want to know how a competitor will react when I change my prices or when another competitor changes its prices, I have to train the AI tool not only to recognize when the competitor I’m tracking changes its prices, but when others in the industry change their prices. I’m not sure AI has reached the level of being systemic and holistic in tracking multiple competitors relative to one other.

‘Knowing competitors’ historical patterns doesn’t tell us whether those patterns will continue. That’s where the human element comes in. Given what you know about what the competitors are saying and doing, do you expect them to continue those patterns or change direction because they want different outcomes?

The second element, which AI is not good at right now, is predicting changes. I used to do an exercise with my students to prepare them for consulting interviews. It was a consumer goods case, where one company’s market share went from 33 percent to 30 to 27, and another’s went from 27 percent to 30 to 33. The client company stayed flat. I asked the students which company they should be worried about, the one whose market share went up or the one whose market share went down. Most said the one that went up, because that competitor got stronger. I asked, “Do we know that this company wants its market share to continue to go up, or are they happy with where it is? Or did their market share go up without them doing anything and it will fall back because they’re not paying attention to it?” Similarly, the company whose market share went down could continue to go down because the company plans to exit that market. Alternately, its leaders could aggressively try to regain that market share, or they could try to merely stabilize things because they’re focused on other areas.

This shows that knowing historical patterns doesn’t tell us whether those patterns will continue or change. That’s where psychology and the human element comes in. Given what you know about what the competitors are saying and doing, do you expect them to continue those patterns or change direction because they want different outcomes? Technology is not yet good enough to make and track predictions without that human intervention.

Emma Gibbs: On your point about codifying patterns, what information should companies track?

John Horn: It’s a good question because companies doing competitive intelligence often try to do everything. They collect all data about all competitors all at once but lack the staff or the ability to analyze the information and develop insights. It goes back to my earlier point that when you start a competitive insights function, you should start small. Who are the major competitors you want to track and what do you want to track about them? Is it about product innovation, pricing moves, acquisitions, talent management, or supply chain? You figure that out by asking people in the organization where they have seen the competitor surprise or challenge them in terms of their response.

Coming up with a small set of competitors and strategic factors will help you focus the data collection. If I’m focusing on acquisitions, I don’t need to reverse-engineer the competitor’s product portfolio, but I do need to track how often they made acquisitions. How big were the deals? Were they bolt-ons? As you build up that information, you start to get feedback. “That’s great. Can you also look at this other question?” You earn the right to expand the function. It’s similar to the idea of a minimum viable product for entrepreneurs. You start with the MVP, get feedback from the people in your organization, and continue to develop and refine it.

Emma Gibbs: Does John Nash’s equilibrium theory, and game theory in general, play a role in predicting competitors’ moves?

John Horn: The Nash equilibrium essentially says, “I’m going to make the best response in reaction to you, and you will make the best response in reaction to me.” But Nash and the theory of economics always starts from the idea that we want to maximize profit. In the real world, sometimes we are trying to maximize market share in the hopes of getting profits down the road, or to maximize short-term earnings, or to integrate an acquisition as quickly as possible. All Nash would say is, “If that’s your objective, will the competitors have the same response as in other scenarios?” It’s a reminder that we have to consider not what we want other players to do, but what those players will do that’s in their own best interests.

Emma Gibbs: Can you offer some examples of organizations that have effectively generated competitive insights?

John Horn: One financial services company gained support from the CEO. Anytime someone proposed a new strategic initiative, the CEO would ask, “Did you talk to the competitive insight group?” Working with that group became part of how the company did business. The company was also deliberate in ensuring that information flowed up and down throughout the organization.

In another company I worked with, regional managers initially didn’t talk to each other. Since competitors applied similar strategies across regions, there were a lot of missed opportunities. The competitive insights group asked the regional managers to provide information about their main competitors and shared with them information they received from others. When the first reports started trickling in, the managers realized that when a competitor lowered prices in one country, they might lower prices in their regions. The company started small and then created a virtuous feedback loop: “If you want more information, give us more information.” Once you start providing information that helps people do their job better, they will want more of it.

Emma Gibbs: Do you find that companies tend to prioritize customer insights over competitive insights? Are there techniques used for customer research that could be applied to generating competitive insights?

John Horn: I think companies do a better job of understanding customers than competitors. I have led strategy workshops where we asked the client what makes the company distinctive, and the participants said things like high quality and customer responsiveness. The CEO said, “All our competitors would say the same thing, so how are we different?” We have to apply those same empathetic techniques to competitors, as well as supply chain partners and ecosystem stakeholders. For example, why are regulators making the moves they are making? Companies are good at scanning social media to understand how customers are responding to their products, but they don’t apply those techniques to reviewing how customers respond to competitors’ products. What is the competitor’s customer experience score? Are positive or negative responses changing for competitors? That can help you gain insight into what the competitor will do.

https://tinyurl.com/4udtzde2

Purple Cow

 

Alexey Cherkasov

Now we live in a world where the consumer faces not just one type of product, but dozens. Therefore, when a new product or advertising enters the market, they may suffer a lot in the level of noise and diversity that now surrounds the modern consumer.

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin

The world changed. Modern consumers are too busy to pay attention to annoying ads. There are more opportunities to choose, and less time. If we are satisfied with the current product or service, we do not seek to find an alternative, and, therefore, we simply weed out unnecessary and irrelevant information.

The world changed. Modern consumers are too busy to pay attention to annoying ads

The reason for this approach: the congestion of the media and goods/services as such. Therefore, the past ways of doing business have become, if not irrelevant, then significantly lost their effectiveness. And here we need a new approach. Seth Godin suggests a new approach in his book “Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable”.

The main idea of the book is that each of our product, brand, just entering the market or modified, should be like a purple cow and cause exactly the same reaction as if you were out of the house, you would meet her on the street.

The essence of the purple cow is that it should be special, outstanding. This book answers the questions: What? Where? When? in relation to the concept of ” remarkable”.  Remarkable marketing is the art of bringing something new to your product or service that attracts attention. Your business, your product or service should if not radically, be quite different from competitors. You need to stand out from the crowd.

The essence of the purple cow is that it should be special, outstanding

So, what does it mean to be visible? For the most part, the author insists on increasing attention and money in terms of design. According to the author, one of the main tools through which you can enlist the support of consumers is good design. And not just successful, but unforgettable.

But it must be remembered that outrageous does not mean outstanding. Further, when we have received an unusual design for our product, the author recommends paying attention not to all consumers, not to all potential audience, and, mainly, to “innovators”, i.e.  those who are the first to try a new product, who then begins to talk about it and who, at the same time, is the leader of opinions.

Successfully entrenched in this position, we can expect that a favorite product, with a high probability, will go through the “early adopters” in the direction of the “early majority” and “late majority”, i.e. the main group of consumers who make a product or service profitable. In this case, the author refers to the work of Geoffrey A. Moore “Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling high-tech products to mainstream customers”.

As for the advertising of the product, according to Seth Godin, it is necessary to advertise the product when consumers are really looking for it, and in the place where they can find it.

As for the situation when it comes to services, there is also a rule of “differ”. It may not be the service itself as such that may be unique, but for example, the method of conveying information to the target audience, i.e. amazing PR-actions, the memorable appearance of employees, an unusual building and etc.

It is necessary to advertise the product when consumers are really looking for it

Everything that would make people talk about the company and/or its products. Since the more ordinary the company, the more unattractive its activities, the more difficult it will be to break through the noise of competitors that surround it.

Being boring is the riskiest strategy.  According to the author, only something unusual attracts attention in today’s world. They criticize and scold those who take a step forward or to the side.  If you do not have anything to stand out in the crowded market square – you are doomed to failure, you just no one will notice.

We mistakenly believe that criticism leads to failure. When people criticize your project, it does not mean that they criticize you. Peace and security are very risky.

People are often afraid of the purple cow, so it is very rare. But if you do not stand out in the market, you can go unnoticed and fail.

It should also be remembered that the purple cow is just part of the product life cycle. You can’t live with her all the time. But when you want to expand your business or introduce a new product to the market, the purple cow is the right choice.

If you do not stand out in the market, you can go unnoticed and fail

The book is written in simple and understandable language, and can be read very easily. The book will be useful for business owners, sales directors, brand managers, marketing managers.

https://tinyurl.com/3wckz5fm

Dave Ulrich: The Market Oriented Ecosystem

 

This is my second post reviewing and providing my insights on Arthur Yeung and Dave Ulrich’s new book, Reinventing the Organization.

My last post on this suggested that Dave’s new organisational logic means that we need to think about what happens outside of an organisation before we look at its internal arrangements.

However, for me, my logic from The Social Organization (TSO) still applies, ie we need to understand the capabilities an ecosystem will provide and the principles it uses in doing this in order to identify the most optimal organisational solution for a particular environmental context.

For Dave and Arthur, the key thing about the external environment is that it is uncertain and fast changing - or superdynamic. This means organisations need to be more market oriented, and they suggest the key ecosystem capabilities an ecosystem needs to provide are information, customer, innovation and agility.

Josh Bersin - network of teams

They also suggests some ecosystem principles (which provide a basis for an ecosystem’s common shared values / style) to respond to the new environment:

• Establish a consistent set of priorities
• Create the future by anticipating what the market will be
• Win through a focus on growth
• Stay a step ahead of the market by anticipating targeted and future customers
• Effectively use different options to execute a growth pathway: buy, build or borrow
• Seek and inspire agile employees
• Use scorecards and data to drive a growth mindset
• Always reinvent strategy because strategy is never finished.

In this environment, and with these capabilities and principles, they suggests the best organisational solution for any company is a Market Oriented Ecosystem (MOE).

The book reviews seven main case studies of this organisational form - Amazon, Facebook and Google in Silicon Valley and their digital cousins - Alibaba, DiDi, Huawei and Tencent  in China (as well as Supercell in Finland, which is a bit of an outlier, organisationally as well as geographically, as explained below).

The MOE is first of all, an ecosystem (generally defined to mean a network which extends beyond an individual firm). Given the logic reviewed above, a MOE is deliberately designed to involve external allies - partners providing staff, skills, structures and systems and stakes in the ecosystem.

Niels Pflaeging - value creation structure

But the MOE resembles an ecosystem within the orchestrating organisation too, with autonomous teams (cells) working alongside each other through a network rather than as a result of hierarchical coordination. Amazon’s single threaded teams is a great example. And I think this logic works - if an organisation is cellular internally, it also makes it easy to work with cells which are outside. It also provides the customer focus required by the MOE (see TSO on horizontal teams).

The other distinguishing feature of the MOE is that this uses a digital platform to support the operating network. As I noted in TSO, it’s quite hard to scale a network without a common platform, so this makes good sense too. It also provides most of the required information and agility, and together with the cells, innovation. The use of a platform makes the MOE a highly centralised ecosystem though. (Work is done autonomously within the cells, but the leadership of the ecosystem is centralised under the platform owning part of the MOE.)

Note, however, that I don’t think Dave and Arthur are referring to what I would call a platform based organisation where a digital platform enables autonomous groups to work together without hierarchical management or other forms of co-ordination. (I think the best example of a platform based organisation is Haier who also presented at the Drucker Forum last year. If you’ve not seen it, then Gary Hamel has provided a great case study of this company / platform / ecosystem in HBR recently. I particularly like this example because Haier’s platform treats internal and external micro enterprises in just about the same way, so it’s much more similar to a biological ecosystem than a MOE.)

Dave Gray - podular organisation

Instead of this, MOEs just use platforms to support the network (rather than the network being constructed on the platform). For example, Facebook’s internal use of Workplace is included as an example. Workplace as a product is a digital platform as it provides apps through the system, and it’s also an organisational platform as it enables cell based and multi-company networking, but it’s not a platform based organisation platform (!).

My favourite case study is Tencent as I think this makes Dave and Arthur’s ideas about platforms very clear. “Tencent shares its expertise and resources in technology, legal affairs, government affairs, and talent and organisation management with its strategic partners. For instance, Tencent offers technological and service infrastucture through Tencent Cloud…” In addition, Arthur's in-house consulting team “offers consulting, training, and coaching support to help key strategic partners upgrade their leadership, key talent, and organisational capabilities”.

Therefore, although the platform fits mainly within the structure element of an organisational systems model, there can also be an aspect which is more about the style that people work in, within and across their organisations, too.

Of course, none of this that new. That's not a criticism of the idea or the book, in fact it reinforces the suggestion that this is happening, and it is important.

Michael Arena - adaptive space

However, if you've not come across some of these examples of platform enabled organisation, then firstly, it already exists in Dave and Arthur’s case study organisations, even if this is largely limited to two main geographies.

But it’s also not that new in terms of the ideas being articulated as an organisation form. Eg the book's platform enabled organisations are similar to the following models which I have illustrated throughout this post:

Josh Bersin's network of teams (though this doesn't demand a platform)

• Niels Pflaeging's value creation structure (with the informal network formalised through the platform)
• Dave Gray's podular organisation (with a more formalised version of the technological part of his backbone making up for a less significant cultural aspect) 
• Michael Arena's entrepreneurial teams and communities (once again, with the adaptive space network formalised through the platform)
• McKinsey's agile organisation
• BCG's dynamic platform structure
• My own melded network organisation, from TSO.

In TSO, I focus internally within organisations so I only touch on external ecosystems. (I also don’t put much focus on internal platforms as I wanted to write about organisational management rather than the use of market mechanisms. In fact, for me, this is the best thing about Dave’s book - it’s packed full of case study evidence about platform enabled organisations and closely linked organisation forms.)

McKinsey - agile organisation

I agree, and do state, that internal and external are becoming more blurred. But for me, the best thing for most organisations to do is sort out their internal organisation - before they grapple with the additional complexity outside. These organisations can still create internal networks of teams, and use internal platforms.
 
In fact, although Dave’s organisational logic suggests we need to look externally, beyond a single organisation, before we look internally, most of the book’s examples focus on their internal networks of teams, not the way their ecosystem involve allies from outside the organisation.

In particular, the book’s other main case study, Supercell in Helsinki, is a great example of a network of teams approach. However, this company doesn’t really do much externally. Yes, it has partners with shared resources, as most organisations do these days, but I don’t see any evidence of an external ecosystem. And the company’s website provides interesting points about its team focus but says nothing to suggest it followed Dave’s new organisational logic in developing this.

Dave also suggests Amazon first created its capabilities within the organisation and only later magnified this throughout its ecosystem.

BCG - dynamic platform structure

Dave’s case studies also demonstrate that the model is fairly flexible in the way it is applied and suggests that it can be extended to other, non digital sectors, including retail, manufacturing, healthcare, finance, consulting and other professional services. For example, Walgreens / WBA’s stores and organisational management systems are seen as MOE cells and platform too. Now I’ve worked with Boots here, which is a great company, but not what I would understand as an ecosystem or even less so, a platform enabled organisation. But then if the model is going to potentially extend to any organisation I think you do need to interpret it quite loosely.

My insights from this are:

• I do think it will be useful to look externally at potential parters and the opportunities for creating an ecosystem before focusing on internal organisation design (see TSO for how to do this internal piece). I’m fully persuaded of this evolution in organisational thinking.
• This won’t always result in creating a MOE or even an external ecosystem and that is fine.
• Regardless of this, creating an internal network of teams is an increasingly good idea. It provides many of the benefits of an MOE with less bother, and provides a great basis to extend externally later on as well (and one again, see TSO for how to create this internal network of teams, or other melded network options).

Jon Ingham - melded network organisation

https://tinyurl.com/49bzch4u

Do it! Marketing

 

Alexey Cherkasov

The book of David Newman «Do it! Marketing. 77 instant- action ideas to boost sales, maximize profits, and crush your competition» is a detailed step-by-step guide on how to set up marketing in a business. The author says that marketing of a small business is not a secret, but rather a set of simple and well-known solutions that help to gain clarity and control over the situation.

David Newman writes about the same as the other authors – about the message of value, about inbound marketing, about increasing sales, about the formation of the image and brand – but he does this in a style that literally on every page you can find a practical, applicable practice advice or idea for your company.

The book consists of 13 main parts. First, we consider 77 steps to improve the business, then on the basis of their proposed plan, launch marketing activities for 21 days.

Part one. Marketing rocks

It is an introductory part. The author advises: first WHO, then WHY- and your WHAT comes last, before you sell something, you need to build a relationship. Even if you are sure that you have the coolest product, your main task is to prove it to customers, because they do not think so.

Part two. It’s about them, really

This part helps the entrepreneur to answer the question: who are you? who is your client? how can you really be useful to your customers? why do they trust you? In order to understand what you want to become famous, you need to create your own platform of intellectual leadership. At a basic level, it’s just a set of concepts, methods, advertising slogans, and guidelines according to which you deliver your products.

Part three. Learn to speak prospect

This part talks about the importance of marketing communication. To communicate with the client in one language, the author advises building your marketing language bank (a set of verbal means that affect the most important customers, appealing to their specific problems, difficulties, before they feel the improvement through the use of your products). David Newman also talks about the concept of the three “P”. Its essence is that you and your company can solve only three problems: people, process, profit.

Part four. Expert positioning

This part reveals marketing secrets, how to improve your positioning, what tools to strengthen it so that your income will increase. Attention is also paid to the concept of 3PR (Personalized Professional Relations, or personalized professional public relations). The 3PR concept reveals your experience to potential customers – this is what you need if you want to attract more new customers.

Expert Positioning

Part five. Dominate social media

Already from the name it is clear that it is devoted to social networks, it also refers to the work with e-mail — specific steps are given, how to facilitate the work with e-mails, how to interact with customers in social networks, special attention is paid to writing sales texts.

Part six. The “S” word and Part seven. Get more leads

In these parts of the study questions: how to competently sell and configure this process. The task of how to competently expand business contacts and scale business is fully revealed. To do this, you need a personal sales strategy that naturally connects your inner “Self” with your strongest message, best potential customers, highest value and at the same time requires the least time and effort.

Part eight. Get better prospects

Here the author advises doing your own recommendations. It is necessary to monitor not only the number of recommendations but also quality. It is also worth developing a network of your business contacts.

Part nine. Eliminate roadblocks

This part is devoted to the obstacles that may arise in your way, for example, denial of ignorance, and how to resist them, for example, the method of supplement and expand internal efforts.

Eliminate all Roadblocks

Part ten. Your business DNA

David Newman reveals the secret of how to competently build its positioning in the market. Your name is your support in everything you do. It should become your methodology, approach, brand. The author advises to diversify the business and to keep specialization. You need to focus on strategy, not tactics.

Part eleven. Personal success strategies

Keywords of this part: self-confidence, charm, personal effectiveness, perseverance, doing what you love for those you love. You need allies. Partners. You need people who are ready and able to support you on the road to success, as you support them.

Part twelve. Taking action

David Newman talks about 5 marketing moves for business success:

• Move up: become more valuable
• Move in: get closer to customers
• Move ahead: become smarter – you have to do what will distinguish you from just a seller and make an equal partner
• Move aside: specialize – you need to find your niche and gain credibility in a narrow area
• Move alone: become noticeable

Part thirteen. Your 21-Day launch plan

The author paints a plan for each day of marketing activities while giving a number of exercises that can help your business.

Plan Your Activities

The book of David Newman “Do it! Marketing. 77 instant- action ideas to boost sales, maximize profits, and crush your competition” is universal in all respects. The book can be read from any chapter. And it’s very easy to read. Each chapter provides tips and references to other authors.

Some of these tools are not unique, but they are well structured and built into the overall process, so the book can in some sense be attributed to the category of textbooks. The presented book is supplemented by the author’s website with working marketing tools, schemes, templates. The book is intended not only for marketers but also for those who have their own business or just thinking about creating it.

https://tinyurl.com/y93kx2v9