Where Do You Have the Right to Win?

Growth opportunities are rarely the problem. Most manufacturing companies can identify new markets, applications, customers or products that could potentially create growth.

The harder question is which opportunities they should actually pursue.

An attractive market does not automatically make it an attractive market for a given company. Customers may have a meaningful unmet need, but that doesn't mean the company is uniquely positioned to solve it. Competitors may have stronger capabilities, established relationships, or advantages that are difficult to overcome.

This is why growth strategy needs to go beyond asking, "Where can we grow?" It needs to ask, "Where do we have the right to win?"

Customer Need Is Only the Starting Point

Understanding customers and markets is critical. Where are customers dissatisfied? What problems are becoming more important? What creates unnecessary cost, risk, or complexity? How are their needs changing?

Those questions help identify opportunities. But customer need alone isn't enough.

The next step is looking internally. What is the company particularly good at? Where does it have differentiated technology, intellectual property, manufacturing capabilities, technical expertise, customer knowledge, or relationships? Which of those strengths are difficult for competitors to replicate?

Then the two perspectives need to come together.

The strongest growth opportunities are often found at the intersection of an important customer need and a capability the company can use to solve that need differently or better than the alternatives.

That's where an opportunity starts becoming a strategy.

Stop Competing on Someone Else’s Terms

This is a closer look at one of three examples referenced in Don't Just Get Better at Selling What You Have.

Consider a specialty filtration business competing against a company with a dominant market position.

The competitor had a broad product portfolio and strong customer relationships. For several years, the filtration company's strategy was to establish itself as a second source — spending significant time quoting opportunities, running trials, and working to convince customers to shift some of their existing business over.

It had capable people and a credible product.

But it won very little new business.

The fundamental problem was that the company was competing on the incumbent's terms. Customers already had a solution that worked, and the proposition was essentially to offer another source for something they were already buying.

The company needed a different reason for customers to engage with it.

Working closely with technical leadership, the team went deeper into the market and began focusing on challenges facing the end applications.

That changed how the company thought about the opportunity.

Instead of focusing primarily on duplicating existing products, it directed product development and intellectual property efforts toward solving those problems. It also changed whom it targeted — rather than focusing primarily on buyers, the company began engaging R&D and product teams, participating in technical conferences, developing technical papers, and working with industry thought leaders.

It wasn't simply trying to take existing business anymore. It was trying to create value in areas where its capabilities could make a meaningful difference.

Your Right to Win May Need to Be Built

There is another important part of this concept.

Having a right to win doesn't mean the company already possesses everything required to succeed.

Sometimes the opportunity is attractive enough that leadership should deliberately build the capabilities necessary to create an advantage. That could mean developing new technology or intellectual property. It could require adding technical expertise, changing manufacturing capabilities, creating a new service model, building a partnership, or even making an acquisition.

The strategic question becomes whether the company has a strong enough starting position, and whether the potential opportunity justifies the investment required to strengthen it.

This is very different from pursuing a market simply because it is large or growing.

The objective is to identify opportunities where customer value, market attractiveness, and company capabilities come together to create a defensible position.

The right-to-win question also creates discipline.

Companies have limited capital, technical resources, and leadership attention. Investing heavily in one opportunity means having fewer resources available for another. That requires choices.

Which customer problems are important enough to solve? Which markets have attractive economics? Where can the company's capabilities create meaningful differentiation? What would need to be built? How difficult would that advantage be for competitors to replicate? And is the potential return worth the investment?

Not every attractive opportunity will pass those tests. That's a good thing.

A strong growth strategy isn't designed to create the longest possible list of opportunities. It should identify the relatively small number where the company has the strongest combination of customer value, attractive economics and a meaningful right to win.