Businesses and organisations have been using SWOT as a strategic planning tool for decades. A SWOT analysis can help you make great decisions about your business and prevent you from making costly mistakes. However, it can only do these things if you take some time to understand what it is telling you.
Carrying out a SWOT analysis
If you Google ‘SWOT analysis’, you’ll find hundreds of articles, videos and graphics explaining how to conduct a SWOT analysis and what you should include. This article isn’t about how to complete one; it’s about how to get value from it afterwards. However, if you have never done one before, here are the basics.
Strengths and weaknesses relate to internal factors. Strengths could include a strong sales team, excellent reputation, market-leading products or high-staff retention. Weaknesses are areas for improvement such as poor client retention, low conversions, high level of returns or no online presence.
Opportunities and threats relate to external factors. These are the things you can influence but can’t control. Opportunities could include new technologies, government funding initiatives, increased demand. Threats might be competitors, supplier price increases, changes in consumer behaviour.
Getting more from your SWOT analysis
Once you’ve completed your SWOT, you should be able to work out how to capitalise on opportunities to reduce weaknesses, and play to your strengths to minimise threats. However, the real value is in understanding the whys and hows of your SWOT.
Let’s say one of your strengths is your high-performing sales team. The next step is to work out why their performance is so good. Is it because you have excellent in-house training programmes? Is it because your sales manager is brilliant? Is it because your price is so competitive or because you offer big discounts?
If you understand the why, you can learn how to maintain your strengths. If you have a strong sales team because you have good training, you need to continue to invest in that training. If it’s because you have an excellent sales manager, you need to retain them or train other sales managers to the same standard.
Weaknesses work in the same way. If one of your weaknesses is poor sales conversion, look at the why. Is it because your sales team lack product knowledge or because of inadequate leadership? Is it because the leads you get aren’t the right type of leads or because your pricing is too high? Once you understand the why behind a weakness, you can understand how to improve it.
If you don’t look at the whys behind your SWOT analysis, it can be easy for strengths to be lost, weaknesses to get worse, opportunities to be missed and threats to become problems. When you carry out your next SWOT analysis, ask yourself why is that a strength and how can you maintain it? Why is that a weakness and how can you improve it? Why is that an opportunity and how can you capitalise on it? Why is that a threat and how can you reduce it?
Spend time understanding the whys and hows, not just the whats, and you’ll be more likely to meet your business objectives.
If you’d like to find out more about how I can help your business grow and thrive, then I’d love to have a chat. Contact me on 0113 418 2579 or sandy@thesystemslink.co.uk
