Millions of new businesses are launched every year. Yet, only a portion of them survive, and of those, a tiny percentage manage to thrive.

You might think product fit or market demand has a lot to do with it. But believe it or not, it doesn’t.

The Main Killer of Businesses: Lack of Proper Strategy

What is Strategy?

Strategy is the means by which businesses, with or without the best products, can outshine their competitors and become industry leaders. Consider Zoom during the early COVID-19 pandemic.

Zoom entered a saturated market where established leaders like Skype had become complacent.

With a strategic approach, Zoom managed to seize the opportunity to become the primary communication tool for businesses.

Simply put, strategy is a roadmap for taking your product to market and achieving success.

A good strategy, like a map, shows you where you are, and highlights the journey towards success, where you want to go. Without a map, you’ll be lost, and without a strategy, you’ll be directionless.

“Strategy is about making an integrated set of choices that collectively position you on the playing field of your choice, in a way that you win. It is a map, with a clear highlight on the direction you need to take to succeed.” — Roger Martin.

A robust strategy must be a coherent theory, achievable, and convertible into actions.

Unlike planning, strategy requires putting yourself outside the comfort zone and specifying an outcome that is out of your control. You have to be content with uncertainty and not allow your fears to limit the speed of your operations.

How does Strategy differ to Planning?

Planning is about resource management, tasks, and budgets. It is within your control and outcomes are very predictable. It doesn’t have coherence with strategy and most of the time it is just a list of transactional activities that need to be done.

In the planning mindset, managers abandon strategic thinking and instead focus on transactional activities like:

• 20 cold calls a day
• 5 articles per month

These activities have nothing to do with a greater strategic goal and are single-purpose activities, not tied to much else.

To strategize, one has to be opportunistic, audit the landscape, think forward, deliberate an ambitious outcome, and craft a series of paths that will get you there.

Strategy in practice: RegTech

Start by researching what your prospects are looking up on Google. Say you do this and you find they are all looking up the keywords “Client Risk Assessment”, which conveniently for you has the lowest difficulty to rank for with minimal competition and very good traffic.

This gives you the idea to want to conquer this digital opportunity and rank first on google for Client Risk Assessment and some variations of it.

To achieve this, you need to improve your domain trust, build authority, produce great content, and get backlinks from other credible sources verifying that your content is decent. You also need to provide value to the person who searched for something and landed on your website.

Honestly, that is a lot!

But, through strategic thinking, we can skip years of guessing and pitfalls and find a path to success.

First, find out who the trusted advisors in this space are. It turns out it’s compliance consultants who provide their expertise to professional and financial service firms struggling with AML and client onboarding, the exact space you happen to sell to.

They are very well placed to write on these matters, and professionals are more likely to read their content than yours, due to the difference in expertise and services.

So, instead of spending 5 years building content, you decide to unite your commercial team and get them to find consultants, book meetings, work with them on potential collaborations to produce brand awareness and leads that turn into revenue.

A visual guide to a RevOps Partnership Play for RegTech start-ups

Actions

• Conduct cold outreach on compliance consultants for partnership opportunities
• Meet and qualify the potential collaboration opportunity, the goal being joint marketing and lead exchange
• Collaborate with partners on marketing efforts ranging from articles, videos, events, whitepapers, and more
• Create a content calendar, featuring different partners for webinars, articles, whitepapers, videos, events and social posts.
• Link your content calendar and plans with partner to your SEO strategy – target keywords that are high in demand within your realm. Like “Risk Assessment” or “Source of Funds”.
• This is what RevOps is about; creating systems for lead generation rather than chasing outcomes.
• RevOps plays are more important than individual performance and metrics. They passively create brand awareness and easy to close leads.

Rewards

• Your efforts now gives you credibility in the the market and positions you next to other credible figures. This enables sales to close deals faster.
• Your content is also ranking higher on google, improving your authority, domain trust and backlinks.
• Your partnership, marketing efforts and SEO ranking will all produce consistent leads over time. These leads take less time and cost less acquire.

This is a clear example of strategic thinking; auditing the landscape, looking at what others are doing, spotting an opportunity to win and formulating a strategy through an integrated set of choices involving all departments and efforts.

This is how you want your team to be thinking and working. Like an integrated opportunistic machine. Your team acting like project managers with niche specialties, working together to create systems and processes that achieve sustainable growth.

Honestly you guys should pay me for giving out this level of gold for free lol.