SWOT Analysis Components
A SWOT analysis is a high-level summary that details your business’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats at the time you conduct the analysis. A SWOT analysis allows you to holistically assess the current state of your business—including both the internal and external factors that impact your business performance—so that you can plan strategically for a better future.
STRENGTHS: Factors within an organization that lead to its unique standing among competitors
Sample Questions to Uncover Strengths
- Why do customers like us?
- What is the one thing we do best?
- What do we do better than our top competitor?
- What makes our company a place where someone would want to work?
- What makes us unique?
WEAKNESSES: Factors within an organization that need improvement and hinder it from reaching its full potential
Sample Questions to Uncover Weaknesses
- What do customers complain about?
- What does our top competitor do better than us?
- Why wouldn’t someone want to work with us?
- Are we wasting money on something that does not help drive sales?
- Why do we lose sales?
Strengths and weaknesses are factors of internal origin including human capital, resources and brand awareness. Opportunities and threats are external elements out of our control, such as the state of the economy and market trends.
OPPORTUNITIES: External factors that could be maximized for the benefit of the organization.
Sample Questions to Uncover Opportunities
- What’s the latest and greatest trend in our business?
- What else can we offer customers?
- What are new platforms we can utilize to market ourselves?
- Are there companies outside of our business line that we can partner with?
- What are new technologies we can use to be better and faster?
THREATS: External factors that put the organization at risk and need to be mitigated.
Sample Questions to Uncover Threats
- Who is doing business better than us?
- What trends are going against what our business offers?
- What is occurring in the economy that could affect our costs?
- What are competitors doing now that we are not?
- What obstacles are we facing?