Recently, Petra Coach presented a webinar, “Armed for Success: How to Strategically Pivot Your Business to Survive (and Thrive) Post-COVID-19” featuring Kaihan Krippendorff.

The content is invaluable to leaders during this unprecedented time.

You can find the full recording here.

To augment the recording, we noted takeaways and tips from the presentation. The slides used in today’s session can be downloaded HERE. Kaihan has also provided his Outthinker Workbook for your personal use.

Visual by Kristin Mclane – The Vivid Ink Company

 

Top Takeaways

In times of crisis, people tend to do what they’ve done before. Now is the time to look for new options.

Questions to Ask Yourself:

  • What can you do that others choose not to do during this time?
  • What is it that stops great ideas from being ones that we adopt or that our competitors adopt?

 

Three Steps to Apply to Your Business:

  1. Explore an Unexpected Leverage Point
    • Don’t look only at your product or service, look all around your business model
  2. Which Area is Most Under Threat?
    • This is most important to rethink
  3. Brainstorm Options

Exploration – 8 Places to Look

Which area of your business model is most under threat? Which is most important for you to start rethink?

  • Positioning – who your core customer is and what your value proposition is to them
  • Product – not just your core product or service, but all the ancillary ones as well (i.e. how they pay, customer service, etc.)
  • Pricing – consider if you now need to have a membership or hourly charge
  • Placement – how you distribute your product
  • Promotion – marketing or sales
  • Processes – key processes, operations, how you track KPIs
  • Physical Experience – the customer journey
  • People – hiring, incentives, cultural norms

A Deeper Dive into Promotion

  • Appeal to a key weakness of desire – appeal to the most critical buyers
  • Sacrifice one front to win another – focus on your most important promotional tactics
  • Reveal your strategy – lay open what your goal is
  • Find a third-party influence – who has influence on your core customer and how can you create new promotions to?
  • Send a covert message – what is a secret message you can direct toward a non-target customer?

 

Brainstorm Options:

A Set of Patterns that You Can Apply to Brainstorming

  • Move early to the next battleground
  • “Go to where the puck is going, not where it’s been”

Be Good

  • Do good in the world
  • Show that your growth is good for the world

Create Something Out of Nothing

  • Who is a customer not currently in your market who you could seek out?
  • Instead of selling to the purchasing manager, sell to the CFO