By Paul Allen in how to conduct swot analysis — 27 Oct 2025

How to Conduct SWOT Analysis for Business Leverage

Mapping out your internal and external factors is the first real step in a SWOT analysis that actually moves the needle. This is where you find the leverage points that lead to smarter, more impactful decisions.

Mastering How to Conduct a SWOT Analysis for Real Business Leverage

A powerful strategic analysis goes way beyond just filling out a four-quadrant grid. It's about getting brutally honest about your strengths, uncovering those pesky hidden weaknesses, and seeing how they stack up against what's happening in the market. This is the core of finding business leverage.

You can't do this in a vacuum. The best insights come from pulling in diverse perspectives to identify where your true leverage lies. When you get cross-functional input—from finance's forecasts to the unfiltered feedback coming from your customer service team—you start to build a much richer, more accurate picture of reality and your potential leverage points.

And remember, numbers matter just as much as observations. By blending hard data with qualitative insights, you create a SWOT that's not just insightful but also persuasive enough to get buy-in for your leverage-focused strategies from the boardroom down to the front lines.

Crafting Tough Questions for Leverage

To get to the good stuff, you have to ask uncomfortable questions that uncover leverage. Don't be afraid to poke the bear.

What can our team do that our scrappiest new competitor simply can't? This identifies a key leverage point.
Which of our processes are resource hogs but deliver mediocre results? Fixing this frees up capital—a form of leverage.
How are our customers' behaviors changing, and what new service models could that open up for us? This is about leveraging market shifts.
What’s the biggest external risk that could realistically derail our supply chain next quarter? Understanding this helps protect your operational leverage.

Getting your key stakeholders to have an honest conversation around these questions is what sets the stage for discovering genuine business leverage.

Too many SWOT sessions get stuck at the surface level. I've seen it happen time and time again. The common pitfalls include:

Listing vague strengths like "brand reputation" without analyzing how that reputation can be leveraged for market expansion.
Completely ignoring emerging threats like AI-driven disruptors that could make your current business model irrelevant, negating all your leverage.
Treating opportunities as generic trends ("more people are online!") instead of specific, actionable initiatives where you can apply leverage.

Elevating Insights With Real Data

Your conclusions are only as strong as the evidence backing them up. This isn't about guesswork; it's about finding factual leverage points. In fact, over 90% of Fortune 500 companies use SWOT analysis as a core part of their strategic planning. They know it’s one of the best ways to pinpoint opportunities for leverage.

Take Google, for example. They constantly analyze their dominance in digital ads (a strength) against the backdrop of evolving consumer privacy concerns (a threat). That tension is where strategic leverage is born.

When you treat your SWOT as an evolving roadmap for finding leverage instead of a static picture, your team shifts from analysis paralysis to proactive execution.

Integrating SWOT Into Your Workflow

An analysis gathering dust on a shelf is worthless. To add real value, you have to weave its insights into your company's daily rhythm, always with an eye on leverage. Embed them into your quarterly reviews, project kick-offs, and performance dashboards.

Want to go deeper on this? Check out our guide on how to find and exploit these kinds of leverage points in your business systems: Leverage Thinking: The Definitive Guide to Finding and Exploiting Leverage Points in Business Systems.

Make sure every strategic initiative that comes out of your SWOT has a clear owner and a follow-up date. This turns your analysis into a living document that helps you adapt as the market shifts, giving you a continuous competitive edge through superior leverage.

Tracking Progress Over Time

Your SWOT isn't a "one-and-done" exercise. Set up regular check-ins to see how your initial findings are holding up and if new leverage points have emerged. Are new threats emerging? Have new opportunities popped up?

Capture your key metrics in a centralized dashboard so you can see, at a glance, if you're shoring up your weak spots and capitalizing on your leverage.

Keep a close eye on metrics like customer satisfaction scores. A downward trend can signal a weakness that’s about to become a major threat, eroding your leverage.

Tracking these metrics transforms SWOT from a yearly chore into a tool for continuously measuring your strategic advantage and leverage.

Next Steps to Activate Your Insights

The final step is turning talk into action. Assign measurable KPIs to every strategy you've derived from your SWOT. Then, commit to reviewing and adjusting your tactics quarterly. This ensures your strategic roadmap stays relevant and aligned with reality.

Small, regular course corrections are what prevent major strategic drift and keep your momentum going.

In the end, it’s all about embracing adaptability. That’s where lasting leverage comes from.

Gathering Intelligence for an Accurate Analysis

The insights you get from a SWOT analysis are only as good as the information you put into it. Period. A powerful analysis starts with objective, comprehensive data—not just boardroom opinions. Shallow insights lead to flawed strategies and missed leverage, so this initial intelligence-gathering phase is absolutely critical for building a solid foundation.

The process is about looking both inward and outward with a critical eye for leverage. For internal factors—your strengths and weaknesses—you have to move past assumptions and dig into the real evidence. For external factors—opportunities and threats—you need a crystal-clear picture of the market you’re actually operating in to find external leverage points.

Tapping into Internal Data Sources

Your organization is a goldmine of data. The trick is knowing where to look and what to collect to identify points of leverage. Start by pulling together information that tells the true story of your business performance, efficiency, and culture.

To get a complete picture, you'll want to gather a mix of quantitative and qualitative data:

Financial Reports: Pull your profit and loss statements, cash flow, and sales trends over the past few quarters. A consistent dip in margins isn't just a number; it's a potential weakness staring you in the face, a loss of financial leverage.
Operational Metrics: Look at production costs, supply chain efficiency, and employee turnover rates. High turnover, for example, points to a clear internal weakness that erodes your operational leverage.
Customer Feedback: Go beyond simple satisfaction scores. Dive into the raw feedback from support tickets, sales call notes, and online reviews to find recurring complaints (weaknesses) or consistent praise (strengths you can leverage).
Employee Surveys: Anonymous feedback from your own team can uncover cultural strengths or hidden process-related weaknesses that leadership might be completely blind to, revealing hidden leverage.

Gathering all this information often requires specific tools. If you're looking for ways to consolidate and analyze this data, you might want to explore a guide on business intelligence tools. The right platforms can help turn those raw numbers into actionable leverage points.

A SWOT analysis fueled by opinion is just a brainstorming session. A SWOT analysis fueled by data is a strategic planning session. Choose to be strategic and find your leverage.

Scanning the External Environment

Once you have a clear view of your internal reality, it's time to look outside your own four walls. The external environment is where opportunities and threats live, shaped by forces you can't control but absolutely must respond to in order to gain or maintain leverage.

Before you even start listing threats, it's crucial to first conduct comprehensive market research. This requires a systematic approach to scanning the horizon for shifts that could impact your business and create new avenues for leverage. A well-rounded external analysis should cover a few key areas.

Key Areas for External Investigation

Category	Data to Collect	Example Insight for Leverage
Competitor Analysis	Pricing strategies, marketing campaigns, product roadmaps, customer reviews.	A competitor's successful launch of a lower-priced subscription tier is a direct threat to your market leverage.
Market Trends	Industry reports, consumer behavior studies, technological advancements.	The growing consumer demand for sustainable products presents a major opportunity to leverage your eco-friendly supply chain.
Economic Factors	Inflation rates, consumer spending habits, interest rate changes.	Rising raw material costs could threaten your current pricing model and profitability, reducing your financial leverage.

The evolution of SWOT analysis itself highlights just how important this external focus has become. Its application has expanded way beyond simple corporate planning. Today, companies use SWOT to evaluate everything from supply chain resilience to social media strategies, reflecting its incredible versatility in finding leverage.

This whole intelligence-gathering phase is about replacing "I think" with "I know." Arming your team with concrete evidence before the SWOT workshop begins is the single most effective way to ensure the conversation is productive, honest, and strategically valuable. You'll move from debating opinions to discussing facts—and that's the only way to uncover true business leverage.

Facilitating a Breakthrough SWOT Workshop

A great SWOT analysis isn't a top-down lecture—it's a collaborative discovery. The real magic happens when you get the right people in a room, ready for an honest, structured conversation. Think of it less as another meeting and more as a workshop designed to unearth the ground-truth insights that will actually shape your strategy and reveal your leverage.

Your mission is to push past the obvious, surface-level stuff and find the genuine leverage points hiding within your business. This takes a specific kind of environment, a hand-picked team, and a facilitator who can steer the discussion toward productive—and sometimes uncomfortable—truths.

Assembling Your Workshop Dream Team

The insights you get from a SWOT workshop are only as good as the perspectives in the room. A classic mistake is inviting only senior leadership. That’s a fast track to echo-chamber thinking and a dangerously incomplete picture of your business leverage. You need a 360-degree view.

For a session that delivers real value, make sure your team includes people who live the different realities of your business every day:

Sales & Marketing: These folks are on the front lines. They know customer objections, competitor tactics, and market sentiment better than anyone. They understand where your marketing message has the most leverage.
Operations & Product: This group understands your internal engine—which processes are humming along, where the bottlenecks are, and the true capabilities (and limitations) of what you sell. They know your operational leverage points.
Customer Service: They’re sitting on a goldmine of unfiltered customer feedback. They hear the raw complaints, the feature requests, and the moments of delight that expose both hidden weaknesses and unappreciated strengths that can be leveraged.

Getting these different groups talking to each other is fundamental to a smart, leverage-focused strategy. The right mix of people ensures your analysis is grounded in the full reality of your operations, not just a C-suite summary.

Structuring the Session for Maximum Insight

A well-run workshop needs a clear structure that sparks open brainstorming without letting the conversation fly off the rails. Just asking "What are our strengths?" is way too broad. You have to guide the team with prompts that force them to think more critically about leverage. Knowing how to facilitate workshops effectively is crucial for managing group dynamics and making sure every voice is heard.

Kick off the session by laying down some ground rules: no bad ideas, honesty is mandatory, and we're focusing on evidence, not just opinions, to find our leverage.

A great trick is to give everyone sticky notes and have them brainstorm ideas for each quadrant silently for 5-10 minutes. This little step is a game-changer. It short-circuits "groupthink" and gives quieter team members a chance to contribute equally before the open discussion kicks off.

Once the silent brainstorm is done, have everyone stick their notes on a wall and start grouping similar themes. This visual approach is powerful; it helps the team instantly see patterns and start prioritizing the most important leverage points.

The objective isn't to create an exhaustive laundry list for each quadrant. The real goal is to identify the vital few factors that hold the most strategic leverage for your business.

Asking Questions That Dig Deeper

Generic questions get you generic answers. If you want to uncover real business leverage, you have to push your team with specific, probing questions for each quadrant. Your job as a facilitator is to challenge assumptions and demand specifics.

Here are a few examples of questions designed to get you past the surface-level fluff:

For Strengths

What do we do that our competitors constantly try—and fail—to copy? This is a key point of competitive leverage.
Which specific internal process or asset gives us a measurable cost or speed advantage we can leverage?
What's the one thing our most loyal customers say they absolutely can't get from anyone else, and how can we leverage that?

For Weaknesses

Where do we consistently lose deals to competitors, and what’s the real reason we lack leverage in those situations?
If we had to slash 20% of our operational budget, which inefficient process would be the first to go? This identifies negative leverage.
What’s the single biggest complaint our customer service team hears every single week? This points to a weakness that erodes customer leverage.

For Opportunities

Which underserved customer segment could we realistically capture by leveraging the strengths we already have?
What emerging tech shift could radically lower our cost of acquiring a customer, giving us financial leverage?
Is there a regulatory change on the horizon that could open up a whole new market for us to leverage?

For Threats

What's the one assumption our entire business model is built on that, if it turned out to be wrong, would cripple us and destroy our leverage?
Which smaller, nimbler competitor is quietly eating up market share in a niche we’ve been ignoring, using a leverage point we've missed?
How would a 15% spike in our key material or labor costs hammer our profitability and weaken our financial leverage?

By running a workshop with this level of rigor, you turn the SWOT from a simple checklist exercise into a powerful engine for strategic discovery. You create an environment where the team can collectively pinpoint the leverage points that will truly move the needle for the business.

Connecting the Dots to Find Strategic Leverage

This is the part where most teams pack up and call it a day. They’ve got a neat grid with four lists of bullet points. But if you stop here, you’re leaving all the value on the table. The real work—and the real strategic payoff—is just getting started.

The magic of a SWOT analysis isn't in the lists themselves. It's in connecting the dots between your internal world (what you can control) and the external landscape (what you can't). This is how you turn a simple grid of observations into a dynamic playbook for growth and identify true strategic leverage.

Pairing Strengths with Opportunities for Growth

Let's start with the exciting stuff. Linking your internal strengths to external opportunities is where your most aggressive and powerful strategies come from. These are your SO Strategies—sometimes called "Maxi-Maxi" strategies—because you're maximizing both what you're good at and the chances in front of you to create maximum leverage.

This isn't about wishful thinking. It's about finding that perfect intersection where you are uniquely positioned to win.

Imagine a B2B software company whose biggest strength is a highly skilled, in-house content team. They spot a trend: their target audience is getting tired of short blog posts and is now craving in-depth, expert-led webinars. The SO Strategy writes itself—leverage the content team to create a high-value webinar series. This move captures leads, builds authority, and leverages a core strength to seize a market opening.

The question to ask here is simple but powerful: "How can we use our core strengths to seize the biggest opportunities available to us?" This proactive stance is what separates market leaders from followers.

You have to get specific, though. "Strong brand" paired with a "growing market" is too vague to be useful. Instead, think more granularly. Connect a specific strength like "brand recognition for reliability among enterprise clients" with an opportunity like "an increase in enterprise budgets for cybersecurity solutions." Now that is a real strategy for leveraging your brand equity.

Using Strengths to Neutralize Threats

Next, it's time to put on your defensive hat. ST Strategies, or "Maxi-Mini" strategies, are all about using what you're good at to protect yourself from external threats. Think of it as using your leverage to build a strategic moat around your business.

Here, you're identifying how your core competencies can shield you from market shifts, competitive pressure, or disruptive new technologies.

Consider a local restaurant known for its incredible customer service and loyal regulars—that's a huge leverage point. A major threat appears: a new, low-cost chain restaurant opens up just down the street. The ST Strategy isn't to get into a price war; that's a battle they'll lose. Instead, they leverage their strength. They launch an exclusive loyalty program and host members-only tasting events, deepening their community connection. Service becomes a competitive advantage the chain simply can't copy.

This approach forces you to see your strengths not just as tools for growth, but as strategic shields to protect your existing leverage. It’s a vital risk management exercise that builds resilience.

Addressing Weaknesses That Block Opportunities

This might be the toughest part of the process because it requires brutal honesty. WO Strategies, or "Mini-Maxi" strategies, focus on fixing the internal weaknesses that are preventing you from grabbing clear opportunities. This is all about strategic improvement and smart investment to unlock potential leverage.

Let's say a SaaS company has an amazing, innovative product (a massive opportunity) but suffers from a clunky, outdated user interface (a glaring weakness). Customers are churning because the user experience is frustrating. The obvious WO Strategy is to prioritize and invest in a complete UI/UX overhaul. By fixing that internal flaw, they unlock the product's true potential and capture the market that's just waiting for them.

Find the Bottleneck: Pinpoint the specific weakness that’s holding back your leverage the most.
Prioritize the Fix: Is the investment needed to fix the weakness worth the size of the opportunity? Not all weaknesses are created equal—focus on the ones with the highest strategic cost.
Create a Plan: Develop a clear, actionable plan to address the weakness, complete with timelines and metrics to track success.

This kind of analysis benefits from a systems-thinking mindset, where you see how different parts of your business are all interconnected to create or destroy leverage. To dive deeper into this, you can find some great resources on applying a systems thinking approach to business challenges.

The following table breaks down how to turn these pairings into concrete strategies.

SWOT Matrix Strategy Development

This framework helps you systematically connect your internal factors (Strengths, Weaknesses) with external factors (Opportunities, Threats) to generate actionable strategies that create and protect business leverage.

Strategy Type	Quadrant Combination	Strategic Goal	Example Action for a SaaS Company for Leverage
SO (Maxi-Maxi)	Strengths + Opportunities	Use strengths to maximize opportunities.	Leverage a strong engineering team to build a new feature that meets emerging customer demand.
ST (Maxi-Mini)	Strengths + Threats	Use strengths to minimize threats.	Use a loyal customer base and strong brand to fend off a new, lower-priced competitor, leveraging brand equity.
WO (Mini-Maxi)	Weaknesses + Opportunities	Overcome weaknesses to capitalize on opportunities.	Invest in sales training to better capture a growing market segment, creating new sales leverage.
WT (Mini-Mini)	Weaknesses + Threats	Minimize weaknesses and avoid threats.	Divest from an unprofitable product line that is facing intense competition, cutting losses to preserve capital leverage elsewhere.

By systematically working through these combinations, you move beyond just listing ideas. You start building a robust, multi-faceted strategy. You create a clear, prioritized set of actions designed to push your business forward while protecting it from what lies ahead. This is how a simple SWOT analysis becomes the bedrock of a winning strategy built on leverage.

Turning Your SWOT Analysis Into an Action Plan

An analysis without a clear action plan is just a conversation. After all the hard work—gathering data, running workshops, connecting the dots—this final phase is where your strategic insights become real results. It’s the moment you transform the potential you’ve uncovered into tangible business leverage.

The goal here isn't to create a report that gathers dust on a shelf. You need a living document that guides every decision and tells you where to put your resources. A smooth transition from analysis to action boils down to three things: ruthless prioritization, clear ownership, and measurable outcomes. This is how you ensure the leverage you found gets pursued, not just documented and forgotten.

Prioritizing for Maximum Impact

You're going to walk away from your SWOT with a long list of potential strategies. If you try to tackle everything at once, you’re setting yourself up to accomplish nothing. The real key is to prioritize with brutal honesty, focusing your energy on the initiatives that promise the biggest leverage.

To get this right, run each potential action through a simple two-part filter:

Impact: How much will this actually move the needle on our most important goals? Is it going to drive serious revenue, slash major costs, or lock in a big market advantage? This measures the potential leverage.
Effort: What will this really cost us in time, money, and people? Is this a quick win we can knock out next month, or is it a multi-quarter beast of a project?

Plotting these on a simple matrix is a game-changer. Your high-impact, low-effort ideas are your "no-brainers"—the obvious starting points. They deliver immediate value and build the momentum your team needs to see.

Assigning Clear Ownership and Timelines

An action item without an owner is an orphan. It will never get done. For every single initiative you decide to move forward with, you have to assign one accountable owner. This isn't always the person doing all the work, but they are the one person responsible for driving it forward and reporting back.

Alongside ownership, every action needs a real deadline. Vague timelines like "by the end of the year" are just invitations to procrastinate. Break down those big initiatives into smaller, bite-sized milestones with specific due dates.

A goal without a deadline is just a wish. Assigning clear ownership and realistic timelines turns strategic hope into an operational reality, creating a culture of accountability around leverage.

This step is the absolute bedrock of effective planning. If you want to go deeper on this, our guide on the strategic planning process offers a more detailed look at structuring these crucial steps.

Setting Measurable KPIs

How will you know if your plan is actually working? The answer is in your KPIs—Key Performance Indicators. These metrics translate your abstract goals into cold, hard numbers, giving you an objective way to track progress and know what success looks like.

For instance, if your strategy is to "leverage customer loyalty" (a classic ST strategy pairing a strength with a threat), your KPIs might be:

Increase customer retention rate by 10% in the next six months.
Achieve a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 50 or higher by the end of Q3.
Reduce customer churn by 5% quarter-over-quarter.

These specific targets cut through the ambiguity. They give the entire team a clear finish line to run toward, making success something you can measure, not just feel.

By prioritizing ruthlessly, assigning clear owners, and defining success with hard numbers, you build a powerful action plan. This is what transforms your SWOT analysis from a static assessment into a dynamic engine for growth, ensuring every strategic insight is put to work building a stronger, more resilient business with superior leverage.

Got Questions About Your SWOT Analysis? Let's Clear Them Up.

Even with a solid plan, a few practical questions always pop up when it's time to actually run a SWOT analysis. Let's tackle the most common ones I hear. Getting these cleared up will help turn your SWOT from a one-off project into a core part of your strategic rhythm.

The whole point is to move this framework from a textbook theory into your company's DNA for finding and exploiting leverage.

How Often Should We Really Be Doing a SWOT Analysis?

A big, deep-dive SWOT analysis is perfect to do annually. Think of it as your yearly strategic health check-up, the kind of thing that anchors your big planning cycle for the year ahead and recalibrates your understanding of your business leverage.

But here’s where most companies get it wrong: they treat it like a static, one-and-done event. That's a huge mistake. Your market isn't standing still, so your strategy can't afford to, either.

Treat your SWOT as a living document. You need to pull it out and refresh it whenever something big changes, either inside or outside your company walls. What kind of changes?

A disruptive new competitor suddenly appears on your turf, changing the leverage dynamics.
A major tech breakthrough happens that could change your industry.
There's a big shift in company leadership or a pivot in direction.
The economy gets shaky or your customers' buying habits change overnight.

This kind of agility keeps your strategy grounded in reality, letting you pivot quickly and hold onto your competitive edge and leverage.

Who Exactly Should Be in the Room for This?

If you want a truly honest and complete picture, you have to look beyond the executive boardroom. The most valuable insights rarely come from a single department. A powerful SWOT analysis is fueled by different perspectives from across the company to find all angles of leverage.

Your workshop shouldn't just be the C-suite. It needs to be a cross-functional team of leaders and key players.

When you only involve executives, you create strategic blind spots. Your sales team knows your competitors' real weaknesses because they hear it from customers every day. Your support team knows your product's most frustrating flaws. Leaving those voices out means you're flying blind and missing leverage points.

Pull in people from sales, marketing, product, customer service, and operations. It's also smart to get a mix of tenured employees and newer hires. The veterans bring historical context, while new folks can offer a fresh perspective without being tied to "the way we've always done it."

What's the Single Biggest Mistake People Make?

The most common pitfall, hands down, is a lack of brutal honesty. It’s just human nature. Teams want to pump up their strengths and gloss over the weaknesses. But this kind of corporate vanity kills the whole process, leading to a flawed analysis and, ultimately, a useless strategy that fails to create leverage.

The second biggest mistake is failing to connect the dots between the four boxes. Just making four separate lists—strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats—is a complete waste of time. The real magic happens in the overlap between them where leverage is found.

The goal isn't just to list things out. It's to answer the tough questions:

How can we use our strengths to shut down these specific threats and maintain our leverage?
Which weaknesses are holding us back from jumping on these major opportunities and gaining new leverage?

Here's a pro tip: consider bringing in a neutral, third-party facilitator. They can push the team past the comfortable, easy answers, ensure everyone is being objective, and keep the focus squarely on turning those connections into real, actionable strategies that build business leverage.