Don’t look for oranges; look for vitamin C

As the owner of a variety store in 1954, Sam Walton made a habit of sticking his nose into other stores to see what they did well. The spying worked for Sam. It led to Walmart and things that made Walmart Walmart: central checkout line, discounting, category segmentation.

Since Walton’s time, these practices have become industry benchmarks. Today they offer no competitive edge.

Organizations and humans are naturally imitative. Imitation reduces uncertainty.

As a decision-maker in your organization, more often than not, when you track competition, you ignore the full range of choices open to you. You train your spotlight on what you see others doing.

Copy-pasting best practices worked for Sam Walton because the context across supermarket chains did not change much. But the same behavior in your industry may backfire if the context is different.

How to match context?

✔Don’t look for oranges; look for vitamin C

We are often drawn to best-in-class competitors, not best-in-class growth levers. If you can via automation drive your costs down, which competitors cannot fight you with, you should align your strategy to do more of that and less of what your opponents are doing. For that, find companies that have used automation to drive up efficiencies even if they aren’t from your core industry.

The same principle of a context match works in hiring as well.

✔Hire vitamin C, not oranges

Emily Kramer has this advice for founders and leaders looking to hire marketers: Pick those with the right business model experience. It is more important than having same-industry or same-audience experience.

With a manuscript checker my team and I were building, our model relied on outbound marketing to drive leads directly to a sales demo. We looked to pivot to a self-serve model. In the end we got a marketer without experience in self-serve and it became a case of too many firsts–it was our first time building a self-serve product and the marketer’s first time working with such a business model.

The set of marketing activities your hire has to do varies with the business model and so it’s important to put a big tick there. This hiring strategy also happens to expand your talent pool in the same way you can get vitamin C from twenty different fruits if you stop fixating on oranges.