An Introduction to ‘Where to Play’ and ‘How to Win’
Determining Where to Play and How to Win. Together.
In his influential book Playing to Win, Roger Martin outlines a strategic framework known as the Strategy Choice Cascade, which provides a structured approach to decision-making. Whilst undoubtedly an effective strategy methodology, the Choice Cascade should not be restricted to the rarified air of dedicated strategy practitioners.
We have found the approach ideal for developing the foundations of a well-crafted B2B technology Go to Market (GTM), the success of which is largely determined by a small number of critcal decisions. Though there are five choices in the Choice Cascade, the appeal across the revenue team is the development of matched pair of a ‘Where to Play’ (WTP) and a ‘How to Win’ (HTW).
The Choice Challenge
Making the choices necessary to establish a B2B GTM is usually exceptionally difficult to make and agree on, not least because saying ‘no’ to a wide variety of opportunities and activities is one of the hardest things to do in business. This is especially the case across the diverse set of stakeholders in the revenue team.
Moreover, in some organisations, no GTM opportunity is ever truly discounted; it is just placed lower down on the list and assigned fewer resources than those further up. Everyone then competes to get more resources, and the result is usually failure.
A Better Way – Where to Play and How to Win
Playing to Win helps avoid this unfortunate outcome by setting up a set of choices that can be made by leading members of the revenue team collaboratively, breaking down the silos that often beset GTM decision-making.
Whilst it easy to agree that developing a GTM is a strategic activitity that requires the contributions and buy-in from from Sales, Marketing and Product teams, each bringing distinct insights and perspectives to the table, in practice this is challenging. In most organisations, the teams simply do not share the common understanding necessary to collaborate effectively.
Over the course of our engagements, we have learned that implementing the Choice Cascade of Playing to Win can help foster a common understanding across the revenue team making progress significantly faster and easier.
The Choice Cascade
The Choice Cascade is composed of five interconnected stages that guide you through the aligned choices that will help you achieve sustainable success with your Go To Market efforts.
1. Winning Aspiration
The first stage, “Winning Aspiration,” requires you to define what success looks like for the organisation. It involves articulating a clear and inspiring vision that reflects the company’s ultimate goal and purpose. This stage is foundational because it sets the direction for all subsequent choices, ensuring that every action taken is aligned with the overarching ambition to win in the chosen market.
It also establishes that your company must play to win. In one organisation I worked in, this sentiment was reflected in the CEO’s mantra that in any market we participated in, “We have to be number one or number two in the market or get the $%&@ out.”
The reason you need a Winning Aspiration is that while every organisation needs to set a clear and ambitious direction in order to succeed, the convention of creating multiple mission, vision and values statements makes this much more difficult.
The concept of the Winning Aspiration is a singular replacement for multiple directional statements such as mission and vision. You can read more on the foundational stage of the cascade in What is a Winning Aspiration and Why Do You Need One?
2. Where to Play
Once the winning aspiration is clear, the next step is determining “Where to Play.” This stage requires you to decide which specific markets, segments, and customer groups your company will target. It’s about choosing the playing field where the company has the best chance to succeed, focusing resources on the most promising opportunities while avoiding less favourable areas.
Determining where to play requires a combination of segmentation data and targeting logic, which in our implementation, we build into the Where to Play/How to Win workflow.
A decision of where to play is, of course, accompanied by the decision of where not to play. This topic is covered in our article Where Not to Play – The Power of Strategic Exclusion.
3. How to Win
After selecting the playing field, you need to determine “How to Win” in the markets or segments you have selected. Unless you are pursuing a cost leadership strategy, this stage requires you to develop a clear and compelling value proposition that differentiates the company from its competitors and offers superior value to your target customers.
As part of this work, you will need to make strategic decisions on how to position your company and its offerings in a way that provides a competitive advantage. We often use Value Curves to visualise and assess the competitive landscape during this phase.
It’s important to remember that WTP and HTW are, in Roger Martin’s words – ‘inseparable’ and form ‘a matched air’. He makes this abundantly clear in the Medium article On the Inseparability of Where-to-Play and How-to-Win, subtitled Why Thinking about Them Independently will Wreck Your Strategy!
4. Core Capabilities
To execute the “How to Win” strategy effectively, you need to identify and, if necessary, build the “Core Capabilities” required to deliver on your value proposition consistently. This stage ensures that your organisation has the necessary internal strengths to compete successfully in the market and will crystallise decisions on areas of focus and investment. To be effective, core capabilities need to work together and operate as a system of reinforcing activities.
Here, we can apply the test of what Roger Martin calls ‘the most important question in strategy’: What Would Have to Be True? to both our Where to Play and How to Win to determine precisely what is needed for success.
5. Management Systems
The final stage, “Management Systems,” involves establishing the structures, processes, and metrics needed to support and sustain the strategy. This enables you to monitor progress, make adjustments as needed, and maintain alignment across all functions. Playing to Win argues for three types of systems:
- Systems to review strategy
- Systems to communicate strategy throughout the organisation
- A system to measure progress toward your goals
This can be complex, but we have used OKRs as the basis of a simple approach to these three management requirements. OKRs are well proven as a system to assist measurement towards a set of goals, and this can form the basis of both the review and communication of progress.
Conclusion – Where to Play and How to Win Works!
Creating a successful Go To Market requires making coherent, aligned decisions that drive competitive advantage. That’s exactly what Playing to Win does, and why we’ve embraced it.
By way of further endorsement, Martin’s approach is well aligned with another well-respected strategy practitioner – Richard Rummelt of ‘Good Strategy, Bad Strategy’ fame. The two approaches are compared in our article Kernel and Cascade: Using ‘Good Strategy, Bad Strategy’ and ‘Playing to Win’.
We use several different canvases to support that decision-making, such as The Three Cs Model to determine What Needs to Be True and Value Curves for competitive analysis, but the spine of the approach we take at B2B Navigator is based on the choices outlined in Playing to Win.