Why SWOT Analysis important
With the help of SWOT analysis you can uncover opportunities
that you can capitalize on and you can learn and understand about the weaknesses
of your business. It also help you detect potential threats and allows you to
manage it well in advance and eliminate it. Furthermore, it enables you to
formulate a strategy that gives you an edge over your competitor.
SWOT analysis can be used in a simple way or as a Strategy tool.
Strengths and weaknesses are often internal to your organization, while
opportunities and threats generally relate to external factors.SWOT is
sometimes called Internal-External Analysis and SWOT Matrix also called an IE
Matrix.
Strengths
Important questions to
be considered:
- · What advantages does your organization have?
- · What do you do better than anyone else?
- · What unique or lowest-cost resources can you draw upon that others can't?
- · What do people in your market see as your strengths?
- · What factors really mean that you "get the sale"?
- · What is your organization's Unique Selling Proposition such as:
- · Understand the characteristics that customer’s value
- · Rank yourself and your competitors by these criteria
- · Identify where you rank well
- · Preserve your USP and use it.
You must consider your business strengths from both internal and
external prospective. You can write down a list of your organization's characteristics.
Some of these characteristics would hopefully be strengths of your business.
You must look at your strength in relation to your competitors.
Weaknesses
Important questions to
be considered:
·
What
could you improve?
·
What
should you avoid?
·
What
are people in your market likely to see as weaknesses?
·
What
factors lose you sales?
·
You
must consider your weaknesses from both internal and external prospective.
Opportunities
Important questions to
be considered:
·
What
good opportunities can you spot?
·
What
interesting trends are you aware of?
Useful opportunities
can come from such things as:
·
Changes
in technology and markets on both broad and narrow scale.
·
Changes
in government policy related to your field.
·
Changes
in social patterns, population profiles, lifestyle changes, and so on.
·
Local
events.
Look
at your strengths and see whether these open up any opportunities.
Alternatively, look at your weaknesses and see whether you could open up
opportunities by eliminating them.
Threats
Important questions to
be considered:
·
What
obstacles do you face?
·
What
are your competitors doing?
·
Are
quality standards or specifications for your job, products or services
changing?
·
Is
changing technology threatening your position?
·
Do
you have bad debt or cash-flow problems?
·
Could
any of your weaknesses seriously threaten your business?
When
looking at opportunities and threats, PEST Analysis can help to
ensure that you don't overlook external factors, such as new government
regulations, or technological changes in your industry. This helps you understand the "big picture"
forces of change that you're exposed to and from this take advantage of the
opportunities that they present.
Please comment what factors/questions would you like to be added from your business/Industry point of view while conducting SWOT Analysis?
ReplyDeleteThis article gave me some good ideas for questions to drive my analysis of my business. As the new year approaches I will be evaluating 2018 and deciding what my goals will be for 2019. I look forward to using the information in this article to help me do that.
ReplyDeleteThanks indeed.
DeleteVery insightful information, i will ponder on each and every analysis.
ReplyDeleteThanks indeed.
Delete