Turning findings into a 30/60/90 plan

Three blocks force a first choice

Competitor findings tend to arrive as a long list, and long lists stall. Splitting your plan into three blocks, days 1–30, days 31–60 and days 61–90, forces you to choose what goes first, keeps quick wins from being blocked by big projects, and builds in natural points to check progress.

This is your plan, run by your team at your pace. The blocks are a planning device, not a promise about how long any particular fix will take or what it will deliver.

Step one: rate every finding

List each finding on its own row. For each, rate two things as low, medium or high:

• Effort: time, money and skills needed, including anyone outside your team
• Impact: how much the gap is likely to matter to customers, judged from the evidence and your own knowledge of your buyers

Then sort. Low effort with high impact are your quick wins. High effort with high impact are your bigger opportunities. Low impact items, whatever the effort, go to the bottom or off the list. An Intel loop rates its findings low, medium or high on effort and impact for this reason, with quoted evidence for each.

Rate impact as a guess you will test. Findings from a comparison are observations of public pages. Anything about conversion or traffic is a hypothesis to test, not a proven cause. If you have your own analytics, use them to sharpen the rating.

Days 1–30: quick wins

The first 30-day block is for fixes your team can make without a redesign or a new supplier. Typical quick wins from a comparison include:

• A vague or buried value proposition on the homepage
• Thin product or service pages: little copy, few images, no reviews shown, unclear delivery or returns information
• Trust signals rivals display that you do not, such as guarantees, review widgets or accreditation badges
• No email capture or sign-up incentive where rivals have one
• Unoptimised images, weak page titles and meta descriptions
• Checkout friction: forced account creation, delivery costs revealed late, missing payment options
• Confusing navigation or weak on-site search

Pick the handful you can finish in the block. Start nothing else. A finished small fix is worth more than five half-done ones.

Days 31–60 and 61–90: bigger opportunities

The middle and final blocks are for the items that need more thought, more people or more money. Typical examples:

• A poor mobile experience that needs design and development work
• No loyalty, referral or subscription offer where rivals have one
• No bundles, upsell or cross-sell where rivals use them
• Thin content or weak site structure compared with rivals
• An outdated theme or platform limits holding back speed or features
• Weak post-purchase and retention emails (see building a seed inbox)
• No sign of ongoing testing of offers or landing pages

Use days 31–60 to scope, quote and start the most important one or two, and days 61–90 to deliver and measure them. If an item is too big to finish by the end of the quarter, break it into a first deliverable that is.

Owners and evidence

Every row in the plan needs four things:

1. An owner. One named person, not a team. They do not have to do the work, but they make sure it happens.
2. The evidence. The quote, screenshot or observation from the comparison that justifies the item, so nobody has to re-argue why it is on the list.
3. What done looks like. A specific, checkable change, such as “delivery cost shown on every product page”.
4. How you will judge it. The measure you will look at afterwards, accepting that outside factors will move it too. Any expected lift is a range or a benchmark, never a promise.

Keep the plan on one page. If it needs scrolling to read, it has too much in it.

Re-check the comparison after each phase

At the end of each block, run the comparison again against the same three rivals, using the same categories. You are asking two questions: did the gap we targeted close, and did a rival move while we were working?

• If the gap closed and your own numbers moved in the right direction, note it and move on.
• If the gap closed but nothing else changed, the finding may have mattered less than you thought. That is useful to know.
• If a rival moved ahead somewhere new, add it to the next block's list and re-rate.

Keep the same rivals for the whole plan where you can, so the before and after are comparable. See choosing which rivals to compare for when it is right to swap one.

Common patterns and how to respond

• Behind on most categories. Start with the five most obvious quick wins and do not start a big project until they are done.
• Mixed results. Protect what you do well, and focus the plan on the categories where rivals are pulling ahead.
• Ahead on most categories. The basics are covered, so put more of the plan into advertising, retention and testing.
• One rival dominates. Use that rival as the benchmark and ask what they are doing differently in each category.

No comparison yet: run the free Insight Report on your own site first.