You have a great product, a great team, and you're a market leader. What's next? For companies obsessed with growth, the answer is "market expansion."

But how do you decide on which market to target, why, and when? There's a useful tool that we can borrow from the software developer's toolkit - and it's called a prioritization matrix.

It's a tool that sorts and ranks various options into an order of importance using weighted criteria.

Steps 1-2 are relatively straightforward.

Step one: List the potential market opportunities as rows.

For example, assume you are a medical device company with a leading share within private clinics. Example market opportunities could be "urban hospitals" | "rural hospitals" | "government contracts." List each of these as separate rows.

Step two: List the company's goals as columns and give each goal an importance rating (IR).

Example goals could be "improve market share" (IR=3) | "reduce inventory" (IR=5) | "increase profitability" (IR=8) List each of these as separate columns

Step 3 is critical, and we recommend that you use third-party market research data to complete this step correctly.

Step three: Assign an Association Score (AS) of either 0,1,3 or 9 to each cell within the matrix.

Use the following legend to help you assign the score

9: Strong relationship

3: Moderate Relationship

1: Weak Relationship

0: No relationship

Step four: Finally, calculate the scores and sort by highest score.

Use the formula IR x AS (Importance Rating multiplied by the Association Score) for each cell to calculate a weighted score, then add up all the cells in each row to get a total weighted score by row. The row (market opportunity) with the highest weighted score is the market that you should prioritize for expansion.