WHAT ARE YOU PREPARING FOR?

A tactical training business that could describe its work in detail without ever saying why it mattered.

• THE SITUATION

A newly established tactical training company had built something unusual: realistic, scenario-based training in which people find out how they actually perform under pressure.

The company could describe its work accurately. Courses, formats, disciplines, everything a prospective customer might want to know about what happens on a training day. What none of that did was explain why any of it mattered to the person reading it. The audiences made things harder still. Customers arrived from several different worlds, some of them private individuals and some of them working professionals, and each group looked as though it needed a message of its own, which threatened to split the marketing several ways before it had properly started.

• THE THINKING

Most of the engagement went into a distinction the company had never had to make: the difference between what it does and what a customer is actually buying.

Someone booking a course may already own equipment, know the theory, and have trained somewhere before. Underneath all of that sits a question most people would rather not put to themselves, about how they would actually perform if it ever came to it. The scenarios answer that question, and the answer is what people are paying for.

The same distinction dissolved the audience problem. Someone who does this for a living and someone protecting a family look like separate markets, and underneath they are close to the same person: someone who has taken responsibility for protecting something, and who would rather not find out the hard way whether they can.

• WHAT WAS MADE

Two documents. A diagnosis of what the business is actually selling, and an application setting out what that means in practice.

The most consequential recommendation concerned something the company already owned. An assessment it had been offering as one option among several was, on this reading, the natural way into everything else, and the strategy proposed rebuilding the customer journey around it, so that what the assessment reveals decides what gets recommended next. That one move changes the shape of the business rather than the wording on its website.

The rest of the application carries the same idea through positioning, the first sales conversation, the website, advertising, the content the business can make out of its own training days, and the way it gathers evidence from customers afterwards. Each section sets out what to change and why, so the work could be picked up and acted on.

Two documents

A DIAGNOSIS OF WHAT THE BUSINESS SELLS, AND AN APPLICATION OF WHAT TO CHANGE

Six areas of the business

POSITIONING, JOURNEY, WEBSITE, ADVERTISING, CONTENT, EVIDENCE

One product repositioned

AN EXISTING ASSESSMENT, MOVED TO THE FRONT

• WHAT CHANGED

This is recent work and it would be premature to attach commercial results to it. What the engagement produced is a clear account of what the business is selling and a specific set of changes that follow from it, starting with the assessment as the way in. Implementation sits with the company.

The recommendations are concrete enough that their value does not depend on taking anyone’s word for it.

The company came away knowing what it actually sells, and what to change because of it.

• CASE 03 • END