World Wise & Neighbourhood Smart
Is your organisation balanced to win both locally and across your region?
The author has developed, launched, sold, and managed physical and digital products globally.
TLDR
Balancing local adaptation with global efficiency becomes crucial as organisations grow across multiple markets. A World Wise & Neighbourhood Smart (WWNS) approach recommends regularly assessing market-specific metrics like customer satisfaction, acquisition costs, and time to value to guide strategy. Companies can track these metrics using a balanced scorecard and adapt their operations dynamically without rigid decision points. Organisations can better serve diverse customer needs by making regular, data-driven reviews a core habit and optimising value delivery across regions.
Introduction
How well is your organisation balanced between winning locally and across your region?
As your organisation grows, there comes an inflexion point where you could be more effective and efficient when serving multiple markets. You might have two copies of your organisation in two markets with all the duplication and lack of collaboration it creates. You might serve numerous markets from a central team without the local market insight and execution to maximise each opportunity.
This is the first in a trilogy of articles about identifying that inflexion point, understanding the challenges, and building an organisation that is effective at value delivery to your customers.
Though these situations can arise in different regions of a diverse country, we most commonly see this as serving multiple countries in a region. Now, let's look at driving this with some data.
Measurement
What is your products North Star?
We need a key metric (a North Star) to measure effectiveness as we develop our way of operating. Because I don't know your business, I'll settle on money. We'll be looking at the efficient value delivery to customers. In essence, organisations that take a long time to meet customer needs and those that don't meet the needs of large groups of customers could be more efficient at value delivery.
Central Development: For example, we could develop a central product, but each market would take time to launch it. At best, this would extend the time to value; at worst, local priorities would significantly delay this second activity. At worst, the central product would fail to meet the local needs, making it irrelevant.
Local development: For example, each market could develop a product to meet local needs. At best, we get maximum value from those customers. At worst, every market separately learns the hard way that customers don't want that service. In between, we discovered we spent markets x dev cost to meet a need that was the same in many markets.
With these basic development approaches clarified, the next step is evaluating market performance.
Assessment
A critical step is to assess your value delivery to your customers. If you already do this today, fantastic; for those doing this for the first time and to augment your current process, here are some suggestions for information that might help you have a great view.
Customer Feedback
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) or Net Promoter Score (NPS) will help you understand how your products fit in each market. Significant differences show opportunities for collaboration. Low numbers might show that you need to catch up in meeting customer needs compared to your competitors.
Performance metrics
Customer Retention Rates, Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) are outstanding starting points for assessing your product. You may have some product-specific KPIs to add to the mix. Also, look at Time to Value (TTV) and how fast the customer benefits from wanting to purchase your product/service. Also, consider return or churn rates and any conversion rates from free to paid and on to upgrades. Measuring problem tickets and interactions with the support services are also helpful here.
Context
You might be the dominant brand in one market and face challenges in another. You may face competition, and your product may have a different perception of value in other markets. The up-to-date context will increase the quality of your assessment.
Competitors
Compare your position to your competition regularly; this can also show any new or undervalued customer needs you should seek out.
Activity
Look at the effort/work required locally and globally to support your customers, including development, maintenance, and operations costs. Get these with some form of basic breakdown to see what you do. Get details on the number of people and specialities that they represent who build, operate, and maintain your product and customer value delivery process.
Income
Lastly, look at the income/revenue your product produces for the organisation to help you assess the profitability of your work. Note that this should not be your principal driver but should be used as a guide when other factors are unclear or when profitability is negative so that you can make good decisions for your organisation. With all these potential measures, let's recap them in a balanced scorecard.
A Balanced Scorecard
In time, create or update your balanced scorecard to bring the critical information together regularly—you will need this to keep you at the forefront of optimising the global vs. local set-up. Ensure you have a view of customer value and operational and financial views of your operation.
Review
This data can be hard to digest. Allocate time to put these stats on a real or virtual wall and review them together with your team. The combination will drive insight, but remember that you are reviewing data to assess how well you are operating globally compared to locally. Following this review, consider if it is time to decide to change how you operate.
Decision Time
There is likely no hard point at which you must decide to change your operating state. Instead, you'll discover that moving between Global and Local is an organic process. These articles explore the factors that drive your understanding and how you can move to a better state.
So, we recommend not having a decision point but considering whether your current approach is right for now. Do it rationally, collaboratively, and regularly* review your markets and organisation's ability to value deliver efficiently.
* Start with one at six months, just long enough to get good and learn but not far enough out that people will feel constrained and not want to try it for the first time. From there, look to do this annually, but don't be dogmatic; this will help you balance value delivery and efficiency.
Instead, find a good cadence and explain to the organisation why regular checking is an intelligent way to operate so that it becomes an organisational habit.
Summary
When your organisation serves more than one market, opportunities to be more efficient or effective through different value delivery activities locally or globally arise.
Practical Steps:
Measure the value you deliver by market and use this to guide your thinking.
Assess how effective you are at doing this in each market.
Understand where functions reside.
Assess if you can gain an advantage by changing to a new operating state.
Make a regular assessment a corporate habit; your customers will be better served, and you'll be the fitter for it.
For further reference consider reading this HBR article Inside Unilever: The Evolving Transnational Company where you can see some of this thinking in action.
Now read part 2: Local Differences - Real or Imagined