25 Business Strategy Tools to Help Grow Your Business

Are you looking to get a handle on your business strategy?

An effective strategic direction is crucial to any business in order to achieve your desired success. This article gives you 25 top strategy tools used by experts that will help facilitate the creation of your business’ next winning strategy.

You don’t need to use them all, in fact you shouldn’t try to use them all else you wont get any other work done! However, scan through them to see which tools might be best to help you with your challenges right now.

1 – Scale-up Growth Diagnostic

The Scale-up Growth Diagnostic is an interactive tool that asks questions about your business strategy, sales strategy and marketing strategy. It instantly provides gives you a personalised report for your business with scores for each section and a prioritised action plan as to how you could improve your business growth.

Business strategy tools

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2 – Lafley and Martin’s Five-Step Strategy Model

This five step model simply asks your business the questions it needs to answer in order to develop a clear and focused strategy:

  1. What is our winning aspiration?
  2. Where will we play?
  3. How will we win?
  4. What capabilities must we have in place to win?
  5. What management systems are required to support our choices?

Business Strategy Tools

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3 – SWOT Analysis

SWOT Analysis is a classic tool that helps your business identify its strengths and weaknesses as well as listing potential opportunities and threats that might come your way. Don’t underestimate the power of this mighty little tool.

Business Strategy Tools

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4 – Hambrick and Fredrickson’s Strategy Diamond

This tool shows how parts of your business strategy should fit together. It is hugely useful for developing a cohesive strategy.

  • Where will we be active? (Arenas)
  • How will we get there? (Vehicles)
  • How will we win in the marketplace? (Differentiators)
  • What will be our speed and sequence of moves? (Sequencing)
  • How will we make our returns? (Economic logic)

Business Strategy Tools

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5 – MOST Analysis

The MOST Analysis tool facilitates the creation of an actionable strategic plan by creating business missions, objectives, strategy and tactics. 

Business strategy tools

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6 – The Business Model Canvas

Separating aspects of your business could help you see things from a different angle and develop a dynamic strategy plan. The business Model Canvas breaks down your business into 9 simple sections namely:

  1. Customer segments
  2. Value proposition
  3. Revenue streams
  4. Channels
  5. Customer relationships
  6. Key activities
  7. Key resources
  8. Key partners
  9. Cost structure

Business strategy tools

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7 – SOAR Analysis 

This tool helps your business to identify: Strengths, Aspirations, Opportunities and Results. 

Business Strategy Tools

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8 – Porter’s Five Forces

This tool is a framework for analysing a business’ competitive environment from which you can develop your strategy. Brainstorm ideas under these 5 sections and you will have a greater understanding of the environment your business operates in. 

  1. Competition in the industry
  2. Potential of new entrants into the industry
  3. Power of suppliers
  4. Power of customers
  5. Threat of substitute products

Find out more here.

9 – PEST Analysis 

PEST is used to assess the external factors that might affect your company’s profitability. Often used with SWOT. List the potential effects of these factors:
Political
Economic
Social
Technological.

Find out more here.

10 – Critical Success Factors (CFS)

This helps decide on and list the events or actions your business needs to implement to achieve its overall goal. Best used when ideas are brainstormed with the business’ leadership team. 

Business strategy tools

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11 – Finance Diagnostic 

The interactive Finance Diagnostic asks questions about your financial reporting, profit improvement and liquidity and instantly provides a personalised report on your scores for each section together with a prioritised action plan for improving your financial strategy.

Business strategy tools

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12 – RFM Segmentation

With RFM segmentation you can develop customer marketing plans. Analyse your customers through:

Recency
Frequency
Monetary analysis. 

Business Strategy tools

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13 – Ansoff’s Matrix

Ansoff’s Matrix helps you develop four different branches of strategy quickly. By looking at your products and the markets, you can decide which strategy will help you achieve your goals.

Business Strategy Tools

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14 – Core Competence Analysis

This tool is used in identifying the main unique strengths of your business and working out how to use these to stand out from your competitors. You should use these unique strengths to strategise and ensure sustainable growth.

Business Strategy Tools

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15 – Crisis Strategy Assessment

This tool can help you navigate any crisis on any scale regarding your business. It breaks up the crisis into smaller manageable chunks from which you can develop a strategy. 

Business strategy tools

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16 – Porter’s Four Corner Analysis

This tool helps you assess your competitor’s strategy and future strategy which is crucial to know and understand in a competitive market.

Business Strategy Tools

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17 – ADL Matrix

This is a quick tool for listing and organising your products.

Business Strategy Tools

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18 – PESTEL

PESTEL analysis is a tool that helps you to analyse environmental factors that might have a great affect on your business in the future.

Business strategy Tools

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19 – Brand Boxes

A way of evaluating your business’ value proposition in relation to competitors and looking at where you can improve is through the Brand Boxes.

Business Strategy Tools

20 – Mintzberg’s 5 Ps of Strategy

Plan, Ploy, Pattern, Position, Perspective.

These 5 different ‘Ps’ can be the basis for the creation of strategy for your business. Depending on what you want your business to achieve, you may use a different ‘P’ as a jumping off point for creating your strategy. 

Find out more here.

21 – McKinsey’s 7 S

This framework assesses internal strategic alignment and analyses strengths and weaknesses of your company.

Business Strategy Tools

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22 – Scenario Planning 

A tool that facilitates the evaluation of potentialities, which could affect your business and therefore allows you to strategise accordingly.

Find out more here.

23 – The Brand Pyramid

The Brand Pyramid is a simple graph that facilitates the groundwork in developing a strong value proposition.

Business Strategy Tools

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24 – Empathy Map

This tool helps to visualise the needs and behaviours of your customers in order to understand them better which will then inform your business strategy.

Business Strategy Tool

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25 – Porter’s Value Chain

This tool helps your business assess where value is created in your company and where improvements can be made. This is done by separating your business into different sections covering its strategically relevant activities.

Business strategy tools

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To sum up

These tools are designed to help and simplify the process of developing a strategy for your business. It is not advised to do all of them at once but one or two may resonate immediately as something that can help you now.

Find the tools that work for you and watch your strategic direction improve from today. 

Contact your Regional Director of Boardroom Advisors

Written by: John Courtney

John is highly ranked in the Top 100 UK Entrepreneurs list by City AM and is winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award from techSPARK. He has been a Board Director himself for over 40 years and first started placing Non-Executive Directors over 25 years ago. John founded and ran seven of his own businesses including a Management Consultancy for 10 years, a Corporate Finance offering for 10 years and a mid-sized Digital Agency for another 10 years.