Regaining the Advantage
New competitive realities continue to produce shock waves that topple corporate giants, but they also give rise to revolutionary winners. These best-in-class companies are forging entirely new strategies in an age of mass disruption, through fresh economic models, mergers and acquisitions, and e-commerce.
Advancing the Organisation through Sales and Management
Traditionally, a company could win long-term advantages with new products, or dominate with deep pockets and massive size, or capture markets with widespread brand recognition and global presence. The strategy was to create barriers in the marketplace and strive for stability. Today, these attributes may produce a temporary market advantage, but it is likely to be short-lived. It is not enough now to develop a new product to sustain advantage. Every competitor will quickly seize on its strengths and set about to replicate and improve it. “Deep pockets” (discounting) in most industries is equally duplicative, and global competition makes it harder and harder to capture a market. Brand recognition, while important, loses its impact in an environment where the customer expects excellence and where new and improved competitors surface daily. So how can organisations sustain advantage under these conditions?
The real advantage lies in being able to discover the business priorities of the customer’s executives—those things that keep the CEO, CFO, and CIO awake at night.
The truth is there are no sustainable market strongholds or long-term competitive advantages anywhere on the business horizon anymore. The traditional sources of advantage, even the strategy to sustain advantage, have proven to be too static for today’s tumultuous marketplace. It is a short-term market requiring organisational agility and know-how—in short, speed and surprise. Companies must gain and regain the right to the customer’s business, and gain and regain the advantage over their competitors.
According to Richard D’Aveni in his book Hyper-competition, traditional competition has been replaced by hyper-competition: “Now, instead of stable periods between disruptions, the environment is one of disruptions punctuated by rare stable periods.” As a result, he says, we are viewing the “twilight of strategic doctrines,” and sustainable advantage is being replaced by a strategy of “launching multiple unsustainable initiatives and using them to outmanoeuvre the old competitive position of rivals.” McKinsey’s original 7-S framework held that competitive advantage arises from creating a fit of organisational characteristics (structure, strategy, systems, style, skills, staff, and superordinate goals) and focusing them on purpose and mission. D’Aveni views these as obsolete in a hypercompetitive market, and his dynamic theory offers a new 7-S framework for finding and building temporary advantage. In hyper-competition, the old stabilising influences have given way to speed, disruption, and changing the game.
Companies acutely aware of external market pressures exerted by hyper-competition are altering how they go to market. Key to these initiatives is the redefinition and redeployment of the sales organisation.
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