Strategic White Space Exercise
Map How Your Industry Competes
Identify the factors companies in your industry compete on, where competitors cluster and which long-standing assumptions may be limiting innovation.
STRATEGIC WHITE SPACE
BUILD
ENTERPRISE
VALUE.
GO WHERE THE
COMPETITION ISN’T.
Growth is nice. Value is better. More customers, profits and customer value create a business that gives you more strategic options - - both now and in the future.
Schedule an Exploratory Call
Everyone’s Making
Ice Cream . . . Just
Different Flavors.
Companies benchmark against competitors, improve the same things and compete on many of the same factors—price, quality, features and service.
The result? Lots of variation. Not much innovation.
Meanwhile, customer frustrations, unmet needs and overlooked opportunities can remain untouched because everyone is still working from the same industry playbook.
If everyone is solving the same problems, what unique opportunities is everyone missing?
You Don’t Need
Someone Who
Knows Your
Business Better
Than You Do.
When you’ve spent years inside an industry, it’s easy to get caught up in assumptions everyone has stopped questioning.
A fresh set of eyes can help you step outside the “That’s the way it’s done in our industry” mentality. This shift opens the door to unleveraged opportunities hiding in plain sight.
You benefit from the integration of two skill sets:
Strategic White
Space
Space
— identifying and leveraging unsolved industry pain points
Value Building
— determining how those opportunities can strengthen transferable enterprise value
This integration fosters the shifting of your perspective and the creation of an offering designed to increase customers, profits (≈≥ 12x) and enterprise value (≈≥ 15% - 30%).
What you do is as important as how you do it - - and how you do it becomes the secret sauce your soon-to-be-former competitors struggle to decode.
My clients don’t beat the
competition.
They eliminate it.
Break Some “Rules” - -
Think Like a Maverick!
1. Understand the
Current Industry
Landscape
Challenge convention. Identify your industry’s common competitive factors, unsolved customer pain points, normalized customer frustrations and underserved customers.
2. Identify Where Your
Competition Isn’t
Shift your perspective beyond imaginary industry boundaries to uncover new solutions and opportunities.
3. Make Your Maverick
Move
You’ve identified unaddressed industry pain points. Now, create a unique offering that positions your company as the easy & only option for your customers—while simultaneously increasing profits - - typically by about 12x.
Not a generic strategy.
Not a new twist on the industry playbook.
Your Maverick Move.
Fitting In
Was Cool
in
School.
It’s Expensive in
Business.
Business.
As kids, we learned quickly: wear the "cool" clothes. Use the "cool" words. Join the "cool" clubs & teams. Don’t be the one who stands out.
Even though we’re not kids anymore, most businesses still follow those same unwritten rules.
In business, the goal is different.
Stand out.
Be different.
Step out of line.
Be different.
Step out of line.
Great ideas aren’t rare. You probably have a few yourself.
What’s rare is the courage to challenge convention, pursue a different opportunity and act before the rest of the industry agrees it’s a good idea.
One clear path to leading your industry is to do just that:
Lead.
Because if you’re not leading . . .
you’re following.
Explore Industry White Spaces
Visualize Common Competitive Patterns—and the Buyer Pain Points Currently Unaddressed.
White-space opportunities become easier to recognize when you examine two things side by side:
The factors your industry competes on and the frustrations customers experience throughout their journey.
Start with either map. The strongest opportunities may emerge where the two overlap.
Strategic White Space Exercise
Buyer Experience Pain-Point Map
Step into the buyer’s experience to uncover friction, frustrations, barriers and unmet needs the industry has learned to tolerate—or stopped noticing.