STRATEGIC QUESTIONS TO ASK

ASSESSING CURRENT STRATEGY

1. Does your organization’s have CSR? Does your company’s corporate responsibility
strategy match the availability of your current resources?
This question addresses strategy in terms of the funding, time, people, and information
necessary to make the strategy work, determining its feasibility.
2. How often does your organization assess its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and
threats in order to understand the current business climate?
Measuring these aspects of the strategy will help to analyze the company’s current approach to
strategic evaluation and reveal if it is necessary to analyze it more often.
3. How effectively does your organization form and make profitable use of partnerships?
Can you provide us the list of your strategic partners?
Partnerships can be helpful assets to the company, but they must actively be sought out and
well-utilized.
4. If you were in charge of strategic planning for your organization, what changes would
you make?
With the high importance of strategic planning, it is crucial to ensure that the company is
creating analytical, actionable plans.
5. How efficient is your organization from an operational standpoint?
Determining operational efficiency can assist in revealing the reasons behind the success (or lack
thereof) of the current strategy. By discovering the operational inefficiencies inhibiting success,
the company can identify key process improvements.
6. How well does your organization utilize its people as an asset to help it improve, stay
competitive, and strategically meet goals? Are people used efficiently or is talent wasted
due to lack of effective strategy?
A major problem in many companies is a lack of utilization of existing resources, including the
use of people and their particular strengths.
ASSESSING COMPETITION

7. How often does your organization analyze the competition in order to understand
competitive advantages and disadvantages as well as identify areas for investment or needs
for improvement?
Regular assessment of the competitive landscape is a crucial determinant of corporate strategy,
and fine-tuning the frequency of this evaluation will help to reveal how the company’s doing in
terms of competitor analysis.
8. How well does your organization strategically differentiate from the competition in
terms of the capabilities of its product? How clear is your organization’s strategy for this?
This question helps to analyze and assess competition in a clear, specific way that will yield
insight into the differentiation strategy.
ASSESSING THE FUTURE

9. How clear is your vision for what corporate responsibility should be like in your
organization in the future? Is the direction that the organization wants to go in clear and
understandable?
Clarity is an important part of strategic success, and this question can help determine the
intelligibility of strategy from the perspective of employees.
10. Is your long-term view reflected in your short-term priorities? Are you pouring effort
into initiatives today that have connections with where you expect and the market to be in
the future?
Strategy without long-term perspective is useless, and clear, direct thinking about the future can
help ensure the durability of your strategy.
11. Is your organization pursuing growth and new business/market development with as
much passion as it does operational efficiency?
This question still addresses the importance of planning for the future, but also focuses on the
sense of urgency for growth. Finding the balance between day-to-day operations and new
developments is critical for the company’s future success.
12. How effective is your organization’s strategic vision?
A strategic vision involves a clear view of the desired future position of an organization within a
market, giving the company a goal to plan around that, when implemented correctly, will
produce results.
13. When developing and implementing strategy, does your organization effectively balance
short and long-term priorities?
This question further addresses the balance between concentrating on daily operations and on
future growth that must exist in the company.
14. How efficient and organized is your organization’s plan for how to improve and evolve
the strategic objectives over time?
Just having a set plan for the future is not enough; it must be structured, logical, and well-
communicated in order to help direct the company.
15. How do the potential negative consequences that could occur with the implementation
of a new strategy compare to the potential positive outcomes?
If the results of these questions suggest that a new strategy is necessary, the company must
ensure that this new plan will not cost the company more than it will benefit it. This return
analysis helps to evaluate if the pros of new strategic implementations can outweigh the cons.

DISTRIBUTION

ASSESSING THEIR CONNECTIONS

16. How many established outlets does your organization have through the Internet (social
media, websites, etc.)?
By assessing the Internet outlets of the company, you can discover insight into how well your
business is utilizing available online resources.
17. How many established connections to other businesses does your organization have?
Connections with other businesses can be used to create new partnerships and go-to-market
opportunities, and therefore determining how many connections already exist for the company
can help assess current strategy.
18. How many established connections does your organization have with consistent and
dependable customers?
Customer advocates can be a lucrative avenue for the company to sell products and thus generate
revenue, so determining the extent to which the company capitalizes on these relationships can
help assess the effectiveness of distribution strategy as a whole.

ASSESSING THEIR OUTLETS OVERALL

19. How effective is your organization’s delivery model?

The company’s delivery model is the method for getting the product offering to the customer,
and a successful model is a key aspect of go-to-market strategy.
20. How much potential benefit for the organization does the distribution strategy have?
It is crucial to determine the positive outcomes that the current distribution strategy permits in
order to analyze if the company is effectively utilizing its delivery outlets.
21. Considering all possible outcomes, how much risk does the distribution strategy have?
On the other hand, it is important to determine the risk in this strategy. Answering these
questions separately then comparing the results can help to fully analyze both sides of the issue.

PRODUCT OFFERING

ASSESSING THEIR MARKET

22. To what degree are your offerings clearly differentiated in their market?
This question is important to ask in order to analyze how ther company is distinguishing its
products from that of competitors and thus working to permeate the market as much as possible.
This type of question is important to ask when assessing your competition (see also #8), as well
as when analyzing product itself.
23. How much ease and expense is required for your customer to switch to a competitor’s
offering?
It is important to understand product stickiness and customer switching costs to determine how
the customer values their product.
24. How often does your organization analyze the competition in order to understand
competitive advantages and disadvantages as well as identify areas for investment or needs
for improvement?
This question can reveal whether or not the company is evaluating their competition often and in
a thorough manner.
25. Based on your knowledge of current efforts to promote your services, what are the
major internal barriers to selling your services to clients?
By determining impediments to selling services, the company can find ways to avoid these
hindrances and strategize better as a whole.
26. How well does your organization maximize existing resources in order to deliver the
product offering?
This question evaluates the method for getting the offering to their customer in order to reveal
certain resources that the company could be better utilizing.
27. How aligned are your organization’s offerings to meet market demand?
Not only do you want to be producing the offerings that leverage the organization’s resources,
but you also want to be delivering the right products for the target market.
ASSESSING THE VALUE TO THEIR CUSTOMERS

28. Does your product offering encourage innovation for the customer through versatility,
usability, and efficiency?
The more innovative the company’s offerings are, the more valuable they can be to their
customers, for innovation is key in any product.
29. How well do the organization’s products solve the customers’ problems and meet their
expectations?
Evaluate how the product meets the expectations of their customers in order to ensure the value
in their offerings.
30. How frequently does your organization deliver new value-adding ideas to your
customers to keep them engaged?
This question addresses how fresh the company is staying with their product and their
customers, which is crucial in terms of retaining them as clients.
ASSESSING THE FUTURE

31. What is the direction and state of your innovations? Is the direction right for now, 5
years from now, and 10 years in the future?
A great tactic to use when analyzing the strategy of the company is to envision their product
years from now and determine if their product roadmap is truly innovative.
32. Does your organization have several strategies for differentiation, innovation, customer
alignment, and a detailed plan of forecasted strategies?
This multifaceted question assesses how well the company is planning for the future in terms of
product offerings.

PRICING & PROMOTION

ASSESSING PRICING

33. Considering factors such as competition and timing of discounts, does your
organization provide the right amount of discounts and at the right price?
Discounting, when executed correctly, can be a great tactic to utilize, and this question addresses
how well the company is using this strategy.
34. Does your organization’s pricing strategy match with the availability of your current
resources?
This question addresses prime optimization, which is how well the organization prices its work
in comparison to other organizations without forfeiting profit.
ASSESSING YOUR PROMOTIONS

35. Does your organization promote itself through its people? Do the people actively
promote your organization?
One of the greatest resources that many companies fail to use is their own people. Employees of
an organization can be a company’s best proponents if they are actively and enthusiastically
promoting the organization.
36. How effective is your organization at using product placement to subtly appeal to the
customer?
Product placement deals with strategically implementing product offerings in context without
advertisements, and can be a useful promotion strategy when employed correctly.
37. How often are your organization’s web strategies updated in order align with current
organization news and capabilities?
Web strategy must be updated frequently in order to be useful to the company, and this question
addresses the regularity of these revisions.
38. Is your organization’s website professional, visually pleasing, and effective at
generating customer revisits?
Analyze their website design in order to determine if the company is fully optimizing its web
presence.

ASSESSING YOUR SALES

39. How effective is your organization at ensuring loyalty of current customers by

extending various incentives for loyalty to your offerings?
Loyalty marketing is a promotional tool that can help their strategic advancements, as long as the
incentives are right for their market, customers, and product.
40. How often does your organization convert leads for potential sales into actual sales in
the long run?
This question, though basic, must be asked in order to reveal any problems in the current sales
strategy that could be modified in order to better your company’s sales overall.

Reference : https://www.9lenses.com/40-strategic-questions-to-ask/