Are you looking at growth strategies from a customer’s viewpoint?

We find our greatest growth opportunities on the edges of the use of our product/services. We must make a concentrated effort to identify and participate in relevant knowledge flows on the edge (EDCA). In the book The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, the authors discuss the relationship between the core and the edge. In the excerpt below, think about the core being the standard work (SDCA) of your growth strategy. PDCA provides the bridge between the core (SDCA) and the edge (EDCA).

Knowledge flows naturally flourishes on the edge. Why? Because by definition, participants on these edges are wrestling with how to match unmet needs with unexploited capabilities and all the uncertainty that implies. Edge participants therefore focus on ways to innovate and create value by connecting unmet needs with unexploited capabilities and then scaling these opportunities as rapidly as possible. In the process, they create significant new knowledge.

Since much of the most relevant knowledge on the edge is tacit knowledge, edge participants naturally place a heavy emphasis on building diverse networks of relationships that will help them to collaborate more effectively with others in the creation of new knowledge. For this reason, gatherings where participants can share stories and experiences, learn from each other, and identify potential collaborators become particularly prominent on the edges.

Edge participants often reach out to participants in the core in an effort to build relationships and enhance knowledge flows. But those efforts are often frustrated or at best to marginalize because where participants are too busy concentrating on defensive strategies within the core, trying to protect their profits and position, to understand the true growth opportunities represented by relevant edges. Or participants tend to focus on transactions rather than investing in a long-term effort to build sustainable, trust-based relationships on the edge.

When we envision tomorrow’s best product or service being used in our customer’s future it creates far-reaching possibilities. Our most successful sales people are already thinking in these terms. Recently, I wrote a blog post, Lean Salespeople are Challengers, not Problem Solvers, about how The Challenger type salespeople are willing to challenge a customer’s thinking to create new opportunities through more effectiveness or innovative ways. It is this type of thinking of your customer’s business, the edges of their business that we must strive to achieve through the methods of SDCA, PDCA and EDCA.