A 360º framework for business growth

Aug 12, 2016 • Madhurima Singh & Mukti Kharga

Today’s market is fierce. Companies across sectors are faced with neck-to-neck competition, struggling to gain a competitive edge. In such a scenario, it’s imperative to have an all-encompassing market intelligence solution that ensures the confluence of industry dynamics, economic factors, and customer preferences. What organizations’ need is a 360-degree approach that can help synthesize all available data to provide a dynamic view that supports strategic decisions to enter markets, expand in new geographies, acquire and retain customers, as well as cross-sell. Let’s look at the five steps that constitute the 360-degree framework that companies must use to increase their business and market share:
  1. Panoramic view of macro environment: To remain competitive, companies must study major macro-economic indicators, such as GDP, inflation, unemployment, and interest rates and assess their impact on their particular industry. Forecasting future trends related to macro-economic variables and contextualizing industry information via secondary research and analyses is vital.
  2. Thorough industry environment analyses: Businesses must study growth trends and forecast future growth, analyze the market share of various players in the industry, evaluate changes in the competitive structure year on year, and review the performance of various product segments.
  3. Precision-driven competitor profiling: Analyzing the performance of product segments; studying peers and their current and long-term strategies; benchmarking peers on parameters such as efficiency, distribution, and financial performance; and identifying areas of improvement based on industry best practices are also key requirements for all businesses.
  4. Cross-channel customer behavior analyses: The next phase involves studying and comparing customer portfolio and distribution across key industries and regions. Various sources such as social media and satisfaction surveys form a part of such analyses.
  5. Actionable insights for effective market strategy: The final step of this framework aims at deriving answers to varied business questions such as:
    • Market expansion: Devising accurate go-to-market strategies for market penetration, diversification, and development
    • Sales strategy (new sales/cross/up-sell): Study of competitors’ customers to identify new target segments, thereby narrowing down the area for customer acquisition. Use of varied tools and techniques, such as market basket analysis predict the likelihood of the next probable product.
    • Retention and loyalty: Identification of retention targets by studying attitudinal behavior in order to segment customers on the basis of their life-time value and likelihood of churn and develop loyalty and retention strategies.
Now the obvious question is – does this framework really work? We used the 360-degree framework to develop a market intelligence solution for a major European commercial insurance company. The solution helped the client identify new sales value from competitor churn, estimated at 4–6% of its premium value; cross-sell opportunity estimated at 5–7% of its premium value; 4–5% premium savable by focusing on the high-value, likely-to-churn segment; gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior; and better track its own and competitor churn. This client’s positive experience confirms the success of this framework. It also validates the fact that when dealing with a loss of market share, external expertise may be a suitable approach toward finding an effective solution. For the client, the icing in the cake was Evalueserve’s mind+machine strategy, under which we created an automated dashboard that helped the client conduct regular analysis independently. Learn More