Another Inside Story
by Alexander Serre
May 2021
Updated June 2022
ANALYSIS – New tools are needed to help create, implement, and adjust ambitious development plans in markets that are in constant evolution.
Below is the story of how certain business models, concepts, techniques, and methodologies, influenced me, inspired me, and eventually became integrated into what is now my 21P International Business Development (IBD) methodology.
It all started many decades ago when, as a salesman, I was trying to understand how sales could be increased. I had gut feelings about what I should do, but there was no real structure or model available to me at that time. Just a few simple sales training courses. For me selling was instinctive, and the quest of maximising customer satisfaction seemed like a good guideline at that time.
After being involved in international sales for over 10 years, I decided that it was time to learn what was the “right” way of selling, and I needed to learn more about business in general, so I embarked on an MBA course.
During the course, I started to learn about Marketing and was struck by the pertinence of the 4P Marketing Mix model. It was simple yet described very well what I had encountered in my business experience up until then. Marketing was explained as being a combination of Product, Place, Price and Promotion, nicely complementing Neil Borden’s definition of Marketing as “Putting the right product, in the right place, at the right time, and at the right price.”
Then I learned about Michael Porter’s 5 Competitive Forces model which explained how competitive forces interact in a market with the threats of substitute products and new entrants, affecting the positioning of suppliers and their respective pricing. In addition, depending on the industry and technology, the bargaining power could be either in the hands of the customer or the supplier. As a salesman, I was particularly interested in ways to swing the bargaining power away from customers and more towards suppliers.
My MBA ultimately opened the door for me into the automobile industry, cars being one of my passions. Early in my new career in the automotive components industry, I learnt that it was one of the most competitive and ruthless industries, whether in OEM supplies to the car manufacturers or in the repairs market known as the Aftermarket.
And here I learnt about the power of brands. I had the fortune of working with several brands with very different perceptions. In Europe, Bendix and Jurid were market leaders, whilst Autolite was a challenger to the well-established Champion, NGK and Bosch brands. Being a leader in the morning and working as a challenger in the afternoon allowed me to understand the different strategies that need to be employed, depending on how your brand and your products are perceived.
My boss introduced me to the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) matrix, where products and services are defined as Stars, Cash cows, Dogs or Question marks, depending on their position on Market growth opportunities versus Market share chart. Bendix was an excellent Cash Cow and Autolite was most definitely a Question mark.
As I was putting together a business plan for the penetration of the Autolite brand in Europe when I heard about the SWOT analysis.
Again, a simple model which helps describe development projects in terms of perceived or known Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities or Threats of the company, brand, product, or service. I realised that the SWOT analysis for Autolite was completely different from the one for Bendix.
The quality of a product being a fundamental component of a product’s “sellability”, I became more and more interested in production techniques. Working closely with our production centres, in particular the spark plug factory in Treforest in Wales, I learnt about new techniques and models such as Six Sigma, a structured management method aimed at improving the quality and efficiency of processes and Total Quality Management (TQM) which integrates calculations of the cost of non-conformity.
And, last but not least, I read the book “The machine that changed the world” which describes concepts such as lean manufacturing and the Toyota Production System.
The Toyota Production System again focused on simple models to improve productivity such as Kaizen (Continuous Improvement), Kanban (Just in Time and lean production), Poka-yoke (mistake proofing), the 5S (workplace management) and the 5 Whys (root cause determination of failure).
In between time, the initial 4Ps “officially” became the 7Ps with the addition of People, Process and Physical evidence.
But there were still key elements that seemed to be missing in all these models which related to strategy, vision, and tactics such as doing the unexpected and taking your competitors by surprise. These were important parts of my gut feelings that shaped some of my most successful projects.
The explanation came when reading Edward de Bono’s book “Lateral thinking”. Today the terms of creative and lateral thinking have largely been replaced by “Thinking-out-of-the-box”, but the power of being able to visualise situations by looking at them from different and sometimes new angles is a very real gift.
Empathy is another important skill that allows one to see the world through other peoples’ eyes, and not just one’s own.
With the Digital Marketing revolution came new terms such Customer Experience or Customer Journey. These were new terms for what salespeople had been doing for decades before. But Digital Marketing, and in particular social media, also brought with it not just new selling and communication tools, but also new sales analysis tools. The results could then be fed into a CRM, allowing Personas and Customers Profiles to be more accurately understood, and their common needs better acted upon. These criteria would then flow through the Sales Funnel process and considerably increase efficiency and improve sales and profitability.
21P methodology
So, over time, with the above-mentioned tools and my own experience, I devised my own 21P model focused on International Business Development and used it in every new challenge that I have come across. And it worked every time in vastly different cases such as new a sale strategy leading to a JV in the automotive industry or the creation of a revolutionary Cloud-based computing service or creating original development plans for “me too” products in the distribution of technical metals, hand and power tools, new financial services, or revolutionary technologies in Bioscience.
So far, my 21P model, which interlinks to different business areas such as strategy, sales, marketing, communication, supply chain management, IT, finance, and management, has worked each time.
During the last 18 months, I have intensively researched other models, concepts, theories, techniques, matrices, processes, and methodologies in order to understand them, and select those that could be of most help when developing a business plan.
Although they haven’t fundamentally changed my overall 21P methodology, they have actually reinforced the pertinence of the 21Ps.
The ones that I think are the most pertinent are:
Dead horse theory,
SMarketing,
MarCom
Agile project management,
Value Proposition Design,
SCARF model,
Pivot,
Prototyping,
Canvas Business Model,
Minimum Viable Product (MVP),
Design Thinking,
Lean Startups.
I obtained my International Project Management Association (IPMA) certificate in June 2022, further adapting the fundamentals of my methodology to modern business development.
I am looking forward to the next opportunity to use my methodology on a new challenge!
Below is a link to download a PDF version of this blog.
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