5 Secrets Successful Disrupters Have in Common
The number of private start-up companies and unicorns is rapidly growing. If there isn’t a start-up disruptor in your industry today, there soon will be.
What is a disrupter and how do they succeed?
To understand what a disrupter is, we must first look at the idea of disruptive innovation. To be a disrupter is to create a product, service, or way of doing things which displaces the existing market leaders and eventually replaces them at the helm of the sector.
Disruptors are generally entrepreneurs, outsiders, and idealists rather than industry insiders or market specialists. Disruptors are often linked to the fast-moving technology industry but can be found in almost any area of business.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that a disruptive idea takes the existing market by storm almost instantly, making dramatic changes overnight. The reality is that the disrupters and disruptive technology is successful over a significant period. First, the disruptor must gain a foothold in the market from where to progress.
Once the disrupter has a foothold, they seek to penetrate the medium and higher quality portion to increase profit margins. Eventually, the disrupter will challenge the most profitable part of the sector by offering a new alternative to the established market favourite.
4 Common Traits of a Disrupter
- Purpose Obsessed - All disrupters have a purpose and are obsessed with it.
- Unique Customer Experience - Often customer experience is their biggest differentiator.
- Entrepreneurial Culture - They all have an entrepreneurial culture and practice what they preach.
- Dynamic and Agile – Ability to review, react and implement change quickly.
5 Factors for Success
We work with many market disrupters and have found that the common secrets behind their success often include the following 5 factors:
- Highly Customer-Centric
The most disruptive businesses are highly customer centric. This means that instead of simply integrating customer thinking into product development and marketing, they also find ways to bring this to life in the culture of the organisation.
This way of thinking is also known as ‘being a day one company’ (treat every day like it’s the company’s first) – a phrase that comes from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and his mission to “start with the customer and work backward”.
- Designing Exceptional Customer Interactions
Service design (or service design-thinking) can be defined as a discipline involving consideration if the whole scope of a customer’s interactions with your business.
Breaking the concept down further, there are many elements which make good service design. Some of these include creating services that are easily accessible and that require the minimum steps to complete.
Until recently, one of the major challenges for businesses was to come up with great customer insights. Today four key steps are commonly used to help, which include observation of customer behaviour, pain points, reflection, and experimentation.
The customer pain point, for example, could be wanting to eat great food at home from a restaurant that does not offer a traditional delivery service. Until the likes of Just Eat and Deliveroo this was not possible, who were able to bridge the gap using a mobile app.
- Focused on Customer Insights
Many of today’s disruptors have no less than redrawn entire industry boundaries by focusing on consumer insights.
Today, thanks to big data, it’s easier than it used to be to scientifically identify trends and spot new consumer behaviour. Big data has been at the core of web marketing and the success of most modern-day disruptors.
You may think of disrupters as being new tech start-up’s, which many of them are, however, established companies are also trying to hold on to their top spots by creating their own disruptive sub-brands and more.
- Attracting the Right Finance Team
In addition to technology, to be a successful disruptor, businesses need employees who can think and act for themselves and can be trusted to do a good job.
No matter how great the idea, it is the people that make the change. Disrupters are all about challenging convention and a team that look beyond the status quo and push for better is essential. Empowering the right team will pay dividends back.
When provided with the right tools, your finance team will elevate your business to new heights by delivering business insights, reports, forecasts, and recommendations without being asked. Most ideas for change don’t come from the leadership, but from the workers who are dealing directly with customers or finances.
- Cloud-based Business Planning Software
Most disrupters are ‘born in the cloud’, meaning their foundations have been built on modern technology that resides in datacentres rather than a physical location, enabling the rapid rollout of customer services on a global level.
This cloud-based approach also provides a dynamic and collaborative approach to working for all employees.
Traditionally, finance departments have suffered when it comes to taking advantage of cloud-based technology platforms by continuing to utilise manual spreadsheets.
Finance teams are rapidly discovering the limitations of Excel to deliver plans, models, budgets, and forecasts in the timeframes expected by market disrupters. In addition, frustrations caused by spreadsheet errors and multiple revisions creates uncertainty and lack of confidence in the numbers.
To keep pace in a dynamic and agile environment, finance teams are being revolutionised with cloud-based FP&A tools such as Workday Adaptive Planning, the modern cloud-based business planning software that is built for business agility.
The Future of Disruption
Understanding these five principles is a good start to getting ready to disrupt the market, whether you’re in a start-up or an established company. This is the new way of doing business and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. As modern technology advances at a staggering rate, the opportunities for disruptive innovation continue to increase.