Article by Nadia Caretti, Business Relationships Developer at Marcopolo, a communication agency with over thirty years of experience in the Turin area, focusing mainly on B2B and sector associations. She collaborates with Marcopolo since several years, dedicating herself to the creation of texts and contents. Her passion for content design and the collaborative approach drives her to continue learning from others and, at the same time, to share her knowledge with them.

Introduction

You had a brilliant idea and together with your team chose to invest all your skills and energy in creating a unique start-up? Congratulations! Believing deeply in one's own potential and working seriously and enthusiastically on it are key ingredients for approaching this complex entrepreneurial path. At this early stage, however, it is essential to clarify some very important aspects, which will form the backbone of your project. We are talking about identity, objectives, targets and milestones, which must be clearly identified and shared by the entire team and which must guide you in defining an effective and sustainable growth strategy.

The reason why this topic is so important is obvious: in an increasingly crowded competitive landscape, standing out and growing significantly requires a focused and well-planned strategic approach. And mind you, it's not just newly founded companies that will benefit from this: this article is aimed at everyone involved in the startup ecosystem, including more established companies that are looking for a system that will strengthen their foundations before making a further growth spurt.

In this post, we will provide a detailed overview of five essential practical tools for developing a winning growth strategy. We will explore the importance of each tool and how to apply them successfully to achieve tangible results in your industry. Ready to work together? Then read on!

Building an identity: why is it important to use practical and collaborative tools?

Let us begin with a small premise, which has to do with the choice of approaching the issue of the identity and strategic foundations of a start-up through collaborative methods based on a design thinking approach. As you will discover, using participative tools that involve the entire team in clearly defining the identity, target and foundations of the start-up is a functional choice for several reasons:

1. Team Involvement and Belonging: By involving all team members in the decision-making process, a deeper sense of belonging and involvement is created. This leads to greater commitment to common goals and fosters a cohesive and collaborative corporate culture.

2. Diversity of Perspectives: Each team member brings unique experiences, skills and perspectives. By involving everyone in the decision-making process, one has access to a variety of viewpoints, which can lead to more innovative and comprehensive solutions.

3. Better Understanding of the Market and Customers: By involving the team in targeting and analysing the market, a deeper understanding of customer needs and wants is gained. This enables the development of products and services that are better suited to market demands.

4. Corporate Identity Awareness: Clearly defining the corporate identity together with the team helps create a shared vision of the company's mission, values and culture. This fosters consistency and authenticity in corporate actions and communications, increasing the trust of customers and business partners.

5. Improved Adaptability: By involving the entire team in the decision-making process, greater flexibility and adaptability is fostered. This allows the startup to react more readily to market changes and unforeseen challenges, increasing its resilience in the long run.

Using workshops (in-person or online, whichever is more functional) and group activities is, in short, a useful solution both to define in a clear, shared and consistent manner the who, what, how and why of your startup, and to work on internal communication, doing dissemination and sharing work that will make your team more cohesive.

5 Practical tools recommended by Marcopolo

Here are the 5 tools we want to offer you to indagare insieme al vostro team le radici uniche dell’idea imprenditoriale che state sviluppando and build a solid growth and promotion strategy. Take note, because these tips will really help!

1. Value Proposition: The Golden Circle

First of all, it is important to understand what makes your start-up unique. Using the Golden Circle (what, how, why), you can clearly and compellingly define what you offer and why customers should choose you. It is a tool devised by marketing expert Simon Sinek, who, based on a comparative analysis of how big companies communicate, came to the conclusion that "people don't buy what you do but why you do it". Precisely for this reason, it is very important to be clear about what your start-up has to offer, how it works and, above all, why it has decided to 'take the field' and enter the fray: if you are not clear about it, how can you tell the world about it?

TIPS & TRICKS: Use a poster-guide showing the 3 concentric circles of the Golden Circle and then work section by section using individual post-its and subsequent group clustering to get to the essence of your identity and identify your added value in a simple and direct way.

2. Positioning: Finding Your Space

Analysing your competitors and finding their place within your sector. With the help of a matrix, you can stand out and find your unique space or position yourself next to realities you would like to be inspired by.

Think about what makes you unique and why customers should prefer you over your competitors.

TIPS & TRICKS: Precede this activity with a small survey in which competitors are identified by the participants and, in the workshop, propose parameters to place them in the Cartesian plane. Together you then place your start-up, where it is now and, if you want to go deeper, where you would see it in the future. You can make many different matrices, depending on the characteristics of your competitors and what you want to investigate: approach to communication, working method, specific products...

3. Target Identification: Know Your Customers

From personas to financiers, understand who are the profiles interested in your start-up. Use empathy maps to better understand their needs and offer targeted solutions. Speak directly to your ideal customers and show how your product or service can solve their problems or fulfil their wishes.

TIPS & TRICKS: Completing an Empathy Map can be complex. You can possibly opt for a simplified version or work directly on the 'identity cards' of your target personas. Also, if you cannot talk directly to customers, real or potential, ask lots of questions to those who have the most to do with them (marketing department, salespeople, distributors) and do not forget to also investigate the profiles of those who are not direct customers, but may be an interesting interlocutor/interlocutor, for example an organisation that could host a promotional event or an influencer.

4. Abell's model: Turning Problems into Opportunities

Use the Abell model to identify how you can meet your customers' needs in a unique and effective way. Abell's model, also known as Abell's three-dimensional matrix, helps companies identify the best business area to develop their project. This model considers three key factors: customers, their needs and available technologies.

In practice, instead of focusing only on the product and the market, Abell's model also looks at how customers' needs are met. It introduces the concept of a 'strategic business area' (SAA), which represents the market segment in which the company chooses to focus. The ASA is represented on a three-dimensional grid and guides business decisions on how to meet the specific needs of customers in that market segment.

Analyses their problems and turn them into opportunities to innovate and stand out in the market. Focus on unmet needs and how you can fill them.

5. Feasibility and relevance: From theory to practice

Having reached this point, you are probably clear about the state of the art of your start-up. What do you already have? What would you like to achieve? To try to get everything down to earth it may be useful to use a new matrix, which this time has the preset feasibility/importance values. It will help you to understand what your priorities are and discuss together what you need to achieve the changes you consider most important. 

TIPS & TRICKS: Place the things you already have in a separate section so that you can keep an eye on them at all times. Once you have placed the various innovations, concentrate on the top right quadrant, the one with the highest importance and maximum feasibility. To make everything more concrete you can assign a team of purpose to each activity and try to imagine specific KPIs and Gantt charts, which give a target and a time horizon to the various activities, providing useful yardsticks to keep track of their evolution.

Conclusions

Here we come to the end of our article on 5 practical tools to give your startup a solid foundation! We hope that they will help you set up functional strategies to grow your startup effectively and sustainably. Organise a workshop with your team and put these ideas into practice.

Should you need materials or further insights, we are there to support you, also as facilitators.

Remember that success comes from action, so don't hesitate to put what you have learnt into practice. Good luck!