By now, you might have realised that the frameworks are effective tools to solve a business problem. With a wide range of issues that can occur in different phases of the business, the companies might need help in:

Selling the desired quantity of the products (sales),
Reducing losses (operations),
Retaining the customers (competition), etc.

Based on the problem your company or the client is facing, you need to select a relevant framework and try to solve the problem as early as possible. Here, you are provided with some useful frameworks based on different issues that you may get in your job roles.

Frameworks: Strategy/Finance

Porter's Five Forces

This framework helps in understanding the strength of a business in terms of the competitive position. This is specailly useful if you need to decide about entering into a new market/ launch a new product. The five forces in the framework are:

Bargaining power of suppliers
Bargaining power of buyers
Existing competitors
Threat of substitutes
Threat of new entrants

You can use this framework with the issue tree by breaking the problem into these five forces and then go deeper into each branch to identify where the problem lies.

$$/$$

Business Segmentation

This framework is useful when the company or client has a spread over multiple businesses. Like in issue tree, you will be required to break the entire company into the respective businesses in which it operates. For example, e-commerce giants like Amazon, Flipkart, etc. provide a wide range of products like clothing, electronics, etc. If the company is facing any problems, you will analyse these segments separately because the characteristics of each business can be different from one another.

Profitability Analysis

This is also an extension of the issue tree framework. When you are trying to break a branch into further sub-components, one way to segment is based on the profitability of the products or services. Here, the main aim will be to analyse the high yield products prior to others.

Frameworks: Operations

SWOT Analysis

The SWOT analysis helps you segment the processes in the company based on the capabilities and points out the critical concern areas for the company. The four branches in SWOT analysis are:

Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunities
Threats

All the points that fall under "weakness" and "threats" will help you to figure out the problem that is being faced by the company. You can build multiple hypotheses around the points in these quadrants and test them later. On the other hand, you can explore the opportunities branch for coming up with expansion plans etc.

$$/$$

The Balanced Scorecard

This framework helps to assess the business by looking into four key areas:

Financial
Customer
Internal Business Processes
Learning and Growth

The idea around the framework is that your learning and growth will help you to handle the internal processes better. The betterment of operations will result in a reduction in the process costs and improve customer experience. Better customer experience will drive the revenues upwards. Hence, the financial aspect of the company will grow. You can analyse these four aspects of the company and formulate hypotheses around them which can be tested in the later phases.

Frameworks: Sales

BANT Framework

The BANT is a framework that helps you identify good leads from the customer pool. It stands for:

Budget: Can the person afford the products/services offered
Authority: Whether the authority to make the buying decision lies with him/her
Need: Helps to understand the pain points that the lead is facing
Timeframe: How early person wants to have your product/services delivered

The framework helps you measure the quality of sales prospects and analyse their likelihood of converting into successful customers.

Frameworks: Marketing

Market Segmentation - STP Model

This framework helps you to analyse the marketing strategy of the company. STP stands for:

Market Segmentation: Dividing customers based on demographics (geography, age, gender, income, education, ethnicity, marital status, profession or occupation), lifestyle, behaviour, consumption levels, etc.
Market Targeting: Evaluating the created segments and selecting the target customers.
Product Positioning: Selects the value proposition of product or service you want to offer to the segments. The segment that you have chosen may have one of these priorities in their mind: the utility of the product, the market reputation of the brand or product, the experience of the product.

The framework helps you validate whether the product/service offered to the customer matches the respective segment. You will end with multiple hypotheses when the customers are not mapped to the section you believe they should be.

With this, you have seen multiple frameworks that can be applied in various domains to reach a hypothesis finally. The following sections will help you understand how to use these frameworks on the problems with the help of a problem case. In the next segment, we will take you through a few frameworks, which are amongst the most important and easy to use, namely 4Ps and 5Cs.

There is a document attached below. It summarises all the frameworks covered for Hypothesis Formulation. You can use it as a reference for the future to solve the problems.