Capture teams in the government contracting world spend a lot of time trying to determine the right balance of solutions and strategies that will differentiate them from their competitors and make them more attractive to their customers. Deciding how best to position your company, understanding what your competitors know about you, and analyzing how that is likely to impact any potential decisions means challenging all your assumptions about your business. Our experience is that the best way to do that is through an unbiased view of your capabilities that is free from internal influence.
Traditionally, businesses have evaluated their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats from an internal vantage point. Known as an “inside out” strategy, this approach looks at what the company can accomplish using existing resources, typically by streamlining operations and reducing spending. While the “inside out” strategy may create short-term shareholder gains, this focus ultimately limits the company’s ability to note emerging trends and adapt to changing markets.
A landmark book entitled Strategy from the Outside In: Profiting from Customer Value upended conventional wisdom about how to analyze a company and make improvements. This is the first reference in print to the concept of “outside in” thinking, an approach that uses customer trends as benchmarks for product and service development. Its premise is built on the idea that studying customer trends from an external perspective is the most effective way to design their strategy.
At Richter & Company, we have adapted these strategies into a service called OutsideIn™ Analysis. By turning our proven competitive intelligence-gathering process onto you instead of your colleagues in the marketplace, we can leverage open-source research to identify how you, your team, your capabilities, and your solutions are being perceived.
Our OutsideIn™ Analysis provides you with a third-party, objective assessment based on our independent research, interpreted using our sophisticated tools in light of our extensive experience. Only open-source material is collected and analyzed; no proprietary information is gathered. The earlier an OutsideIn™ Analysis can be performed in the capture process, the more effective it can be.
Businesses can be slow to adopt an outside-in analysis because it goes against the grain of traditional systems planning. Whereas “inside out” thinking leverages software to smooth processes and increase efficiency for back-end systems, an “outside in” approach embraces forward-compatibility with an emphasis on designing systems based on emerging data to create value for the end user and solve evolving customer issues.
As fast as the market changes, it’s increasingly important to know and understand your customers. In a down market, it’s a temptation to overlook the long view, instead of focusing on short-term strategies that will increase revenue and decrease costs. It’s proving more effective, however, for companies to focus on external trends, customer behaviors, and new technologies that are changing the industry landscape going forward.
OutsideIn™ Analysis is one of the best ways to help you see what your competitors are seeing, and in many cases, deliver the eye you need to win.
