I had a great meeting last week with our new product marketing vice president, and our goal was to develop a new framework for making decisions at our company.

About a year ago, we played around with the idea of developing a marketing plan, integrating that  marketing plan into the budget by asking these questions:

1. What products should we develop?
2. What new markets should we look at?
3. What acquisitions should we make?

Well, after my meeting last week, we came up with a new framework for looking at decision making. This is a great way to come up with an idea at your company for increasing revenue, and based on your existing business, look at the potential risk/reward based on where that idea fits (new/existing/related product/market).

There are a number of factors that need to be considered when making these decisions, and based on which region of the matrix you’re in, the investment and risk is very different. Examples of these factors are:

1. Time – how long will this take?
2. Knowledge – what will we have to learn in order to launch this product?
3. Market – what is the market size and expected growth rate? how can we influence?
4. Path to customer – how do we get to the customer (channels, marketing, influencers)?
5. Cost – how much do we need to spend to get this off the ground?
6. People – who has the time/knowledge/desire to pursue this endeavor?

Informed decision making is key, and this framework is a very good start to determining at least what you need to feel comfortable with your decision.