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SWOT factor prioritization

Once you have identified the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your business, you need to
evaluate and rank these factors based on certain criteria. Without prioritizing, you might give some factors too much
emphasis while overlooking the most important and urgent ones. The table below provides a simple 15 ranking
system to help you prioritize the SWOT factors. After the ranking is done, pay more attention to the factors that
receive the highest scores and use them in your SWOT analysis matrix. Ignore the factors that will not likely affect
your business.

When scoring the strengths and weaknesses, keep in mind the following:

How important is a strength or a weakness for your organization in the context of the industry?

Compared with your competitors, which strength gives you the most advantage? Which weakness makes
you the most vulnerable?

Give high scores to your major strengths/weaknesses and lower scores for the minor ones.

When scoring the opportunities and threats, consider the following:

To what degree might the opportunity or threat impact your business? Give a higher score to the ones that
would impact your business the most.

How likely will the opportunity or threat have any impact on your business? In other words, whats the
probability of occurrence of an opportunity or a threat? Give a higher score to the ones that are more likely
to happen.

SWOT Analysis
Internal Strengths
a.
b.
c.
d.
Internal Weaknesses
a.
b.
c.
d.
External Opportunities
a.
b.
c.
d.
External Threats
a.
b.
c.
d.

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Score (1 = low, 5 = high)

1