Devising a strategy is about identifying the key challenge facing your organization and finding the best way to surmount it. Using the strategy-making processes described here will help you do both.

You should have a differentiation strategy. Differentiation is about being different in a way that causes customers to prefer you to your competitors. You can be different by doing something unique, doing something uniquely well, or both. But the difference must provide customer-perceived value.

Customer-perceived value is summarized by the equation Value = Benefits - Costs. But we can “cheat” our way to the simpler equation Value = Benefits. It’s much easier to think about a benefit proposition than a value proposition.

There are four kinds of strategy. A differentiation strategy is one kind of competitive strategy. A competitive strategy is one kind of growth strategy. And a growth strategy is one kind of problem-solving strategy.

Companies have a lot to gain by doing a better job of customer experience management, including the revenue gains driven by incremental sales from existing customers, revenue saved by lower churn (loss of customers), and new sales driven by word-of-mouth.

The next time you’re thinking about acting on an alternative (alternative-focused thinking), first stop and think about the objectives of that action (objective-focused thinking).

Strategic issue diagnosis (SID) is about monitoring the problems and opportunities that are coming down the road. In essence, SID is a thought process in which the inputs are diffuse, ambiguous signals and the outputs are focused, interpreted issues.