I’ve always enjoyed learning about different business best practices, strategy documents, and ways of thinking through a company game plan. One example I’ve seen more frequently over the last year is the concept of “right to win.”
Right to win is the idea of understanding your competitive positioning and what makes your product distinct from competitors. It is often broken down into a table with three columns. The first column is the capability or functionality provided. The second column is why it matters, which articulates why this particular capability or functionality is needed by the market and your specific customer base. The third column is why your competitors struggle with it. Here, the goal is to describe why other competing products in the market have a hard time doing the same thing.
Put more simply, the framework is: the capability, why it matters, and why competitors struggle with it.
My general approach to competition is to be competitor aware and customer obsessed. Even when obsessing over customers, there are often competitive new deals where, in order to win the business, you have to articulate how your product is different from others in the market. Merely being competitor aware doesn’t solve the entire issue. You really have to understand what makes your product unique and how that connects with the prospect and their goals.
The right to win strategy should be used to align team members, investors, partners, and advisors. Many entrepreneurs even include a right to win slide in their investor updates or board decks. It’s a great way to communicate the product strategy internally in the context of competition.
For entrepreneurs, my recommendation is to think through this right to win idea and use it to consistently deliver a winning strategy against the competition. Competition is what makes free markets such an incredible way to produce the best products. Regularly revisiting your right to win strategy and updating it in the context of the market is something every entrepreneur should do.