What Is the Best Use of Strategy in Business?

Developing a strategy is always about maximizing your potential to go into a situation and leave with what you want. Building a solid business strategy optimizes the odds of gaining your desired outcome.

Strategy is Part Of Your Life

Discussing a business strategy can make some people nervous because they don't understand what a business strategy is and often are unsure how to develop a strategic plan. Whether you realize it or not, strategy is used every day of your life, and it is nothing to be afraid of. Strategy is about asking yourself questions to go into a situation and leave with the outcome you desire. For instance, if the goal is an exploratory meeting – What is my objective? How should I approach the conversation to get the information I need? When you answer these questions, you are developing a strategy.

Know Your Objective

It is almost impossible to reach the outcome you are looking for without a specific objective guiding your efforts. Developing a strategy based on results means that you are particular to the person or audience you are working with. Without an adequate strategy that adjusts your approach to different situations, you rarely reach your desired outcomes. This is true both face-to-face and in the digital world. If you are using LinkedIn, your strategy needs to be connecting with new people in a specific industry. Your approach is to connect and build a relationship and let them discover why they need you. It should not be to connect and then come in with a hard sales pitch. This rarely works because the person knows nothing about you, has never heard of you, and there is no relationship at all – this is bad form. A better LinkedIn strategy is to connect and tell them why you wanted to make a connection with them – make it about them – not you.

Maximize Your Results

Strategy in business is always about maximizing your potential to go into a situation and get something out of it. So you must go in with a strategic approach focused on your desired results. Once you know the desired outcome, you can reverse engineer your strategy. When conducting business, you always want to keep your desired outcome in mind – How can I get where I need to go? To create a clear, ideal result, you must focus on what the other person wants and needs and how they can benefit from what you have to offer. This reverse engineering allows you to develop a tight strategy focused on outcomes to maximize your results.  

Impact Responses

Developing a strategy focused on outcomes also allows you to plan meetings that put you in control of emotional reactions. Going into a meeting with clear objectives focused on the end result enables you to reduce the number of emotional responses people on your team might have because it emphasizes outcomes. One of the critical parts of strategy is that you can ensure others understand clearly, and precisely that you showed up with a plan and you mean business.

At the Growth Architect, my goal is to help you develop a business strategy that will give you the map you need for success. If you want to learn more about building a better business strategy, then watch my video, and contact me when you are ready to create your growth strategy!

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