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Introducing The Strategic CVM Alignment Tool

Senior executives use the Strategic CVM Alignment Tool for strategic marketing decisions. It comprises a set of 20 difficult-to-answer questions that require discussion and written answers in order to create a shared understanding between senior leadership and team leaders driving CVM on daily basis. Assuming the business has at least an informally aligned and mostly coherent strategy the tool can be fully utilized in about 4 weeks with 1-2 workshops per week plus several days of work every week to fill in the gaps between the sessions.

Review each question as follows:

This question is about narrowing down the scope further work. The market may be defined geographically, linguistically, by type of customer, by type of service, etc. Setting clear boundaries improves creativity and productivity of the exercise that follows.

These 3 questions are related, and aim to better understand the market the organization chose to play in, the unique sets of needs and accordingly the set of customer types (“segments” or “personas”) that are there in the market. We recommend to use the Jobs-to-be-done framework [4] for this part of analysis. At the heart of Jobs-to-be-done framework is the customer Persona, characterized by a range of needs (jobs-to-be-done) that can be addressed in multiple ways (Alternatives).

• Persona
  Who are the typical customers and what are their distinguishing characteristics?
• Jobs to be Done
  What are the primary needs and expectations of these personas?
• Alternatives
  Given the specific job-to-be-done, what alternatives might the persona consider and why?

Please note that Customer segments or personas are defined by virtue of having a unique set of needs and characteristics – so the discovery of needs goes first, and then they are grouped into personas afterwards. However it may be easier to proceed in iterative fashion and revise personas & jobs-to-be-done together.

These 2 questions begin to position the business in light of the persona and his needs – the answers to these two questions are usually the outcome of the company’s founders’ work and historical business evolution, but it is crucial to have clarity here as they may need to be refreshed from time to time.

Here we recommend to conduct the P.E.S.T.L (Political, Economical, Social, Technological, Legal) trend analysis to capture the major trends as they will have predictable influence over time. They will have impact across the board, both on the business and on the persona, and also on all of the alternatives.

The team should take a look at which of these trends are likely to impact the business and the target persona in the future and potentially rank the trends by magnitude of impact.

Here the team should evaluate the long list of possible changes to the services/products by linking them to the customer jobs to be done, alternatives and identify a few candidate value propositions.

Here the team should further elaborate the long list of possible changes to the services/products in a way that accommodates the PESTL trends.

Here the team should continue to evaluate the long list of possible changes to the services/products by evaluating them from competitive standpoint and identifying the characteristics that make your offering stand out.

The senior management team should then consider the expectations of shareholders and the financial goals of the organization, as well as the organizational capabilities to fulfill those goals using a tool like strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT).

The team lists candidate ideas, formulating them as specific ‘bets’ based on the identified opportunities and previous analysis. This is the crux of strategic thinking process as it aims to synthesize the answers obtained previously into a short strategy “kernel” that pics a specific shortcut to achieve the goal. There should be multiple bets produced and they are narrowed down to top 1-3 bets as main priorities.

Here the team further clarifies progress on top strategic bets by translating them into long term goals as well as establish intermediate medium and short term targets to keep everyone focused. This sets the stage for further resource allocation and operational planning.

Capabilities are the vehicles to bring the strategy and objectives to life. They involve investment, require effort and have a direct impact on the customer base and on revenue streams. This section creates a high level plan that identifies the major building blocks needed/missing and high level investments needed to obtain them. This forms the basis for a variety of programs and projects that transform the business.

Strategic CVM Alignment Tool Limitations

As we see from the example, Strategic CVM Alignment tool aims to structure the business context into information that can be made actionable by CVM leaders in the 1-2 year scale with clarity on the 3-5 year goals and some general feeling for the overall 10 year direction. It is common to find various pieces of information missing and collect them during Strategic CVM Alignment exercise, but it is too risky to attempt it if there is no prior work on business strategy in place. Strategic CVM alignment requires that the overall business strategy is available in a usable form or can be documented easily. If this aspect is missing, it is recommended to conduct a high level business strategic planning exercise prior to CVM Strategic alignment work, because the scope otherwise becomes too large and falls outside the scope of CVM area.

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