In industrial age naval combat ships would often travel in parallel lines to each other firing cannons and guns at enemy ships across the way directly in front of them. To defeat the enemy a fleet would instead ‘cross the T’ where they would move their line of ships perpendicular to the opposing force making a T-like shape. This allowed the ships at the top of the T to use all of their firepower and train it on the enemy from both fore and aft parts of the ship, where as the ships in the bottom part of the T were limited and could only train their fore guns on the opposing force. Think about this, you have two fleets of 4 identical ships each with 2 guns, one at the aft and one at the fore of the ship, for a total of 8 guns in each fleet. Lining up directly across from each other and firing would eventually destroy one fleet while the other is only barely not destroyed. If one of those fleets though made a T across the top of the other fleet’s line they could shoot the lead ship with all 8 guns while the opposing fleet could only fire one gun at them.

For this strategy you need to define the ‘guns’ and the standards of how they operate among your competition. Look for cracks in the performance of those guns and focus your energy on the ones you happen to be better at than your competition that also have the potential to grow revenues. Then look for way to limit their firepower down to only one or two guns.

For example let’s look at digital marketing. Every single business has the same exact opportunity to win at SEO, PPC, Facebook Organic, Facebook Ads, Twitter, Snapchat, Email Marketing, Digital PR, YouTube, Reddit, Podcasting, and technological innovation – but winning in all of these spaces can be expensive, a strain on resources, and a time consuming headache.

Line these up with and score them on a scale of 1-10 for you and your competition on how well you’re currently doing them and what you estimate the potential returns will be for each channel. Now go through and pick the ones you’re doing the best at currently that have the highest potential returns and focus most (80% plus) of your firepower on these. Now look at the ones your competitor is focusing on and that have high returns but that you’re not putting all of your effort in and put the rest of your budget into disrupting their performance.

To disrupt performance you can do things like try and take away their Twitter audience or start a small PPC campaign designed to drive up their costs more so than to bring in your own revenues.

Pros vs. Cons
Pros: Crossing the T is very effective at putting all of your focus on the channels best suited for your company and short-term growth.

Cons: While focusing your firepower on a few things you may miss opportunities that may have been valuable or your could miss major changes in the market you weren’t prepared for. There’s also the chance that while trying to minimize your opponents firepower you do not accomplish this and only end up burning your budget.