Business strategists build strategic business strategies that achieve business goals. These goals could be revenue, branding, marketing or anything else. Keeping available resources in mind, these professionals make plans. This depends on their area of expertise and experience.
A business strategist performs various tasks before devising a plan. This includes performing competitor analysis, market trends, future forecasting, and gathering existing business information. Some tasks performed by them are explained below —
- Understanding current strategic plan – Business strategists gather, organize, and analyze data on current business strategy, to draw insights and conclusion on workings of the business.
- Track industry and competitive trends – For developing robust plans, it is important to understand the inner workings of competitors and their functioning. This eliminates any hypothetical solutions or proposed solutions under consideration.
- Develop forecasting models – For consistent growth to happen, it is important to foresee what can happen with the existing resources. And see if the desired outcome is possible. Good strategists always depend on forecasting models before building a growth plan.
- Feasibility analysis—Before proposing a solution, strategist check the feasibility of a solution. Whether the proposed solution is feasible or not. Unless the proposed solution is feasible, it isn’t implemented.
- Market Analysis – A lot of times business strategists are required to build growth plans to enter new market. Hence, it is required for them to understand market and make plans accordingly.
Clearly, Business Strategists are required to do a lot. This requires them to have a strong set of skills. Besides a degree in business management, they are required to have substantial proven experience in business management role. Hence, many people are taking business strategy certification and moving to strategist roles. Following are some skills, which good business strategists have —
- Business acumen-– Knowledge of business management and generating revenue within a business environment is a strong skill for strategists. Many business strategists have several years of experience working in business development or manager role.
- Analytical mindset — In a growth-oriented business set-up, decision-making is based data outputs derived from several business function. To be able to derive correlation among various business function is required to build better plans.
- Communication skills – Strategists are required to communicate their plans to managers in different business functions, chief executives, and other stakeholders. This requires them to be clear in conveying their ideas and plans. At times, they are required to gather information on various teams, which requires them to talk to staff. For this, they are required to be clear in their communication and articulate.
- Organizational behavior — Workforce mobility is extremely resistant to change. Even though, execution of proposed plans isn’t a responsibility of strategists. However, good business strategists understand the nuances of workforce mobility and consider it make better plans.
- Knowledge of finance – Strong knowledge of finance is mandatory for good strategists. Experience with financial planning, analysis, and budgeting comes handy while making plans.
Many large corporations hire top business graduates for a strategist role.
However, many senior managers also transition to this role, after having
substantial experience is managing and growing a business.
