Get-to-Market Plans

At Blue Canyon Partners, we recognize that a great strategy that only sits on the shelf gathering dust creates no value for shareholders or customers.  We therefore emphasize implementation from the start of a project until the point at which our clients assume responsibility for action.   Our methodology emphasizes the insights that are necessary to ensure a successful implementation process, including action plans that are developed at a “What-Who-When” level of detail.

Our contributions to implementation are based upon extensive research and experience working with leading business suppliers in diverse industries.  CoDestiny, authored by Blue Canyon’s founders, describes a detailed framework for managing strategy implementation, reflecting not only our own research and experience, but also insights from senior executives in numerous leading business organizations.  We have also published a series of articles on Best Practices in Strategy Implementation in collaboration with Business Excellence, and offered a webinar in collaboration with the Institute for the Study of Business Markets.  Both are available to clients and friends of Blue Canyon through our web-site.

Change Management

Recent Blue Canyon research provides an important foundation for change management.  In a detailed study of the challenges of implementing new business models, we learned that “By a very substantial margin, the two reasons cited as responsible for situations in which the new business model failed to deliver the hoped-for results were “Implementation process was poorly managed”  and “Internal resistance to the new business model”.  (See George F. Brown, Jr., You Know It Ain’t Easy, Business Excellence, September 2011.)  The insights gained from this research project provide one of the core foundations of our approach to change management.

We have identified seven explicit actions that leadership teams can take in order to avoid the problems that thwart change and derail new strategies designed to strengthen growth and improve the bottom line. Our approach to change management incorporates these actions into an overall framework that addresses the key elements of change management, both from a technical perspective and from an organizational perspective.  Our experience in working with leading corporations in managing change provides further best practice insights that can help future clients to smoothly navigate what can otherwise easily become troubled waters.

Creating a Customer-Facing Culture

Even from among firms that are best defined by the products of their R&D departments and laboratories, it is increasingly common to hear an executive state the goal of making his or her company one that is customer-facing.  That orientation is laudable.  The best companies thoroughly understand their customers and fully incorporate customer insights into their plans and priorities.  The challenge is implementing that vision.  It’s far easier to profess the desire to be a customer-facing company that it is to actually build such a culture.

Blue Canyon’s experience with companies that take on the challenge of building a customer-facing culture has yielded explicit ideas about how such a change can be successfully implemented. Among the many dimensions of the processes that we have developed are ones that bring the voice of the customer into the decision, steps that make customer relationships a meaningful part of the jobs of individuals across departments and functions, and ways of creating accountability for key elements of the action plan through a combination of dashboard structures and leadership forums. Our approach to make your entire company customer-facing can create a future in which the stories told about your firm will be ones that you’ll be delighted to repeat.

Best Practice Insights

Lessons from other environments offer a critical short cut to successfully implementing changes in strategy and structure. There are many dimensions of implementation to consider— from ways of ensuring that key third parties (like customers, channel partners, and suppliers) support a new direction to understanding approaches to specific decisions in areas like product development, service delivery, and pricing. Blue Canyon draws upon extensive experience working with leading companies in diverse businesses to catalog the practices that translate into success stories.

By sharing these benchmarks and best-in-class processes with our clients, we can speed and reinforce their ability to meet new challenges and avoid pitfalls that have thwarted other organizations. We have helped firms to strengthen their product development and innovation processes by drawing upon best practice insights, enabling them to take the contributions from such activities to a higher level.  We have developed a new framework for pricing decisions, built upon a set of analytics derived from research into how best practice firms manage pricing decisions on a product-market segment basis.

Competency Development

Building the skills necessary for success in new markets, with new business models, or in managing key customer and channel partner relationships is prerequisite to success in business markets.  Blue Canyon has invested significant resources in identifying the competencies that are most critical to success in areas such as those cited above.  We have translated those insights into in-career education programs that enable employees of our client organizations to take on these demanding tasks.

As one example, we’ve conducted extensive research, in part in collaboration with the Strategic Accounts Management Association (SAMA), to identify the competencies most critical to success with major customer relationships.  We have developed assessment tools to determine the level of performance vis-à-vis best practice benchmarks, and a number of toolkits and educational programs to remedy deficiencies and elevate performance to best-in-class levels.