OGSM, SCM and BCS: three acronyms that will change your strategic planning

What is OGSM's corporate strategy?

At first glance, OGSM is a simple but extremely useful strategy that can be applied to almost any business department or even the company as a whole. Its huge advantage is that it is concise - it usually fits on one page - yet very specific.

It originated in Japan in the 1950s and has since been used by many multinational brands such as Procter & Gamble, Honda and Coca-Cola.

The acronym comes from the words: objective, goals, strategy and measures, and the trick is to set specific business goals you want to achieve within a certain time period, along with very clear metrics. These will be used to measure whether you are getting closer to meeting your goals.

How to build an OGSM strategy?

Divide your paper into 4 sections, with each section representing one of the pillars of this business strategy, and complete them as per the instructions below.

Mission (objective)

First define your mission. What is your business mission? What is your vision? Be as specific as possible.

→ Example: We want our products to appeal to professional athletes and people who play sports in their spare time. In this way, we make sport more enjoyable and easier for those who have previously been put off."

→ Tip: Read also about how to benchmark in practice.

Goals

Set measurable (ideally numerical), long-term, medium-term and short-term goals for the business that you want to achieve. Again, try to be as specific as possible. "We want to be the best." is a nondescript and hard-to-measure goal.

Pay most attention to the medium-term goals - ask where you want to be in 3 years. These goals are the best to work with because they are close enough, but also contribute to the overall vision.

Strategy

It will take up the largest section on your paper. Break down the answers to these questions here:

• Where do we play? What market are we in or planning to be in? Who are our customers and competitors?
• How will we win? What specific steps do we need to take? E.g.: creating a sense of brand exclusivity (through the sequential implementation of steps A, B, C, ...).
• What do we need to win? E.g.: creating a team of specialists in XY.

Measures

Establish clear indicators (KPIs) to measure whether you are succeeding in meeting your objectives. For example, this could be turnover rate, number of leads, social media engagement rate, and so on.

→ Tip: Create OGSM separately as a marketing or business strategy.

What is Business Model Canvas (BMC)?

Another strategy you can use is BMC. The authors introduced it in 2010 in the book "Business Model Generation".

BMC breaks down a company's business strategy into nine key components that you should have clearly defined. You should also be able to fit the answers to all the questions on one paper, but feel free to expand more.

• Value proposition - what is your unique value proposition to customers? Which of the problems are you helping customers solve? Which customer needs are you meeting? How are you different than your competitors?
• Customer segments - who are the target customers? For whom do your services have value?
• Distribution channels - how does the company get its products or services to customers? Through what channels do you reach customers? Which ones are most effective? Is it appropriate to involve other channels? How are these channels linked to the business strategy?
• Customer relationships - what type of relationship does each of your target customer groups expect you to establish? Which ones have you already established? How are the relationships integrated with the rest of your business model? Are they costly?
• Key activities - what key activities are essential to the business model? What are your distribution channels? What are the customer relationships?
• Key resources - what resources are needed to run the business model?
• Key partners - who are your key partners? Who are your key suppliers? Which key resources do you source from partners? Which activities do partners perform for you?
• Revenue - how much are customers willing to pay for your products and services? How much are they paying now? What exactly are they paying you for? How would they like to pay? What are all of the company's revenue sources and their percentages?

→ Tip: See also the 4P and 7P marketing mix and its importance to the success of the business.

What is the Balanced Scorecard (BSC)?

The Balanced Scorecard is a strategic framework introduced in 1992 by Robert Kaplan and David Norton. It helps to monitor the achievement of business objectives in four basic areas of corporate strategy:

• Finance - here you should track and measure profits, costs, turnover and average order value. And if any of these don't match your plan, change your sales or marketing strategy.
• Customers - things like the number of leads, website traffic, customer retention rates, percentage of repeat purchases and the ratings your customers give you can be important. Again, this allows you to take timely action to effect change.
• Internal and business processes - keep an eye on how fast you are producing, how many suppliers you have, how many business partners you have and whether any of these need changing.
• Learning and growth - you should also be interested in how many employees you have, what the turnover rate is, how you train employees (number of training sessions and quality of results), whether you have effective team communication and clearly defined processes.

Each of these areas has equal weight in the company and should therefore be represented by the same number of set goals. Their achievement is then given equal priority. Remember that goals must be SMART: specific, measurable, acceptable, realistic and also time-bound.

Follow the corporate strategy

Whichever strategy you choose, or even a completely different one, stick to it (but keep measuring results and revise and update your strategy as needed). Make sure all employees know it and monitor compliance regularly. Then you will be successful.

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