Breakthrough thinking inside the box

They helped us understand how the commercial environment is changing, analysed performance data and diagnosed key issues and their cause-and-effect relationships. The standard of work and insight was high, focused and thought provoking. We saw things differently afterwards

Strategy is often about seeing the same things but differently; thinking about products, customers, processes, systems, etc. in different ways that enable the company to sell more products/ services to more customers, more often, for more money and more efficiently. It’s what we call thinking inside the box and it has six areas of focus.

De-averaging Buyers and Users
Looks at how customers use and purchase product in unusual ways, where support costs are unusually high or low, costs that are misaligned with customer value, and where customers spend time adapting product to meet their specific needs.

Unexpected Successes
Looks at how the product is used in unexpected ways by customers and those who use the product in surprisingly large volume.

Beyond Boundaries
Looks at ways other industries are solving similar problems for entirely different reasons and information about customers and product use that can be used in different ways to improve another industry.

Constraints
Looks at the biggest hassle in purchasing and using the product, examples of ad-hoc modifications by customers, customers over-served and under-served by the product, and the removal of singular barriers that would create new or bigger customers.

Underpinning Assumptions
Looks at which customer’s needs are changing most rapidly and the changes taking place in the way customers want to be served.

Perfection
Looks at how the company might choose to do things differently if it had perfect information about buyers, usage, distribution and so on, and how the product might change if it were tailored to the needs of every customer.