Cross-Industry Success Importing
Import proven methods from other industries and combine them into an advantage
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 97%
Cross-Industry Success Importing treats other industries as a library of tested strategic options. First define the result you need, such as lead generation, conversion, distribution, or recurring revenue. Then examine unrelated markets for approaches that already produce an analogous result under different assumptions. Separate the mechanism from its original setting, adapt it to your customer and economics, and test it against the conventional industry baseline. The strongest version combines two or three compatible imports into a new hybrid rather than transplanting one tactic unchanged. Because competitors usually benchmark only against one another, a proven outside mechanism can look original inside the target market and create nonlinear gains without requiring an untested invention.
Origin
Jay developed the method while moving among unrelated industries early in his career. He noticed that firms followed their own industry's herd, while his exposure let him import and combine approaches their competitors had never considered.
Core principles
- 01Industry best practices usually reflect convention rather than the best possible method
- 02Unrelated markets contain proven approaches your competitors may never examine
- 03Combining several imported approaches creates a harder-to-copy hybrid advantage
How to run it
- 1
Define the target result
Name the business outcome you want to improve and document how your industry currently pursues it. Establish a baseline before searching for alternatives.
Pro tip Frame the target as a function such as trusted access, conversion, distribution, or retention rather than as a familiar tactic.
Watch out Do not start by collecting fashionable tactics with no defined problem.
- 2
Search unrelated industries
Look for sectors that solve the same functional problem under different conditions. Study their strategies, business models, value propositions, and access vehicles.
Pro tip Prioritize industries whose economics or constraints force them to solve the problem unusually well.
- 3
Extract the mechanism
Identify the causal logic beneath each successful approach: its inputs, process, incentives, and output. Separate that mechanism from industry-specific language and customs.
Watch out Copying surface features without understanding why they work produces cargo-cult strategy.
- 4
Adapt for fit
Translate the mechanism to your audience, offer, economics, and delivery constraints. Remove any component that undermines trust or operational feasibility.
Pro tip Preserve the causal mechanism while changing the presentation and execution details.
- 5
Build a hybrid
Combine two or three compatible imports into a distinctive operating model. Specify how the components reinforce rather than obstruct one another.
Pro tip A coherent hybrid is harder for competitors to recognize and copy than a single borrowed tactic.
Watch out More components do not automatically create more leverage.
- 6
Test against convention
Run a bounded test and compare its yield with the industry-standard approach. Keep, refine, or discard the hybrid based on measured performance.
Watch out Novelty inside your industry is not proof of effectiveness.
In the wild
Jay helped Icy Hot use underutilized media inventory as a customer-acquisition channel. Radio stations, television stations, newspapers, and magazines kept more than the entire first-order revenue, while Icy Hot received the buyer names and retained the valuable repeat-order stream. The arrangement imported performance-based distribution logic into a struggling mail-order product and later helped force retail demand.
→ The company grew from a few thousand buyers to more than 500,000 in under a year and was sold within 15 months for $60 million.
Common mistakes
Benchmarking only direct competitors
This confines the search to the same assumptions and usually produces incremental improvements rather than a strategic leap.
Copying without adapting
An approach can succeed elsewhere because of economics, trust, or infrastructure that your market does not share.
Confusing novelty with yield
An unfamiliar hybrid still needs to outperform the current method on a meaningful business measure.
Is it for you?
Best for
Operators in mature or homogeneous industries where competitors market, sell, and distribute in similar ways.
Not ideal for
Teams that have not yet understood their own customer, economics, or operating constraints well enough to adapt an outside method responsibly.
From the transcript
“i could borrow success approaches from outside an industry migrate them to an industry that was unfamiliar maybe borrow two or three and turn them…”
“the concept of best practices as it's taught most of the time even today is relatively flawed because it tends to be the best practices…”
From the episode
Jay Abraham: Dominate Your Industry
Jay Abraham