Marketing Effectiveness | XLR8 Marketing

How ‘Market Ready’ is Your Business?

In the first of a new series of blogs that considers the key aspects of achieving a sustainable revenue stream, from customer acquisition through to customer retention, we begin by asking the all important question – How ‘Market Ready’ is Your Business?

The failure of a number of established businesses illustrates the fact that existing strategies and management approaches can become ineffective in these challenging economic times.

Surviving and thriving in the current climate, therefore, requires a rethinking of your business approach – being fully aware of the strengths and weaknesses of your ‘market readiness’ in order to develop your strategy to suit and beat market conditions.

Computacenter looked at their market, adapted their business accordingly and are almost unrecognisable from 5 years ago, and doing very well. Find out more how Computacenter is delivering against its ‘Journey to Success’ strategy.

What is Market Readiness?

‘Market Readiness’ refers to having the products, services, or experiences you offer to your target market, aligned to your target market , in order to delight your customers and increase profitability.

There are four fundamentals that your organisation must get right to achieve on-going success:

Market Alignment – Understand Your Market and Align Your Offering

Understanding your market, your customers and your competition is fundamental to sales success. All three are constantly changing, especially in today’s economic climate. When did your senior management team last spend a day reviewing your target market, its wants/needs, what it will pay and the ever-changing competitive threat? If you didn’t review this fully last year, these key elements are almost certainly misaligned.

Only once your organisation fully understands these three critical market components can you accurately align what you sell and what you charge for it (aligned capability and pricing), maximising your chances of making a sale – and a profit. Failure to do this can be fatal. Consider how many companies went under in the last few years and how prices have dropped for so many products and services; that’s market forces at work!

The need for market alignment seems logical and obvious; but still there are companies who don’t do it or do it badly – and suffer the consequences on a daily basis. Why? Perhaps they don’t recognise the problem, don’t know how to fix it or, worse, are burying their heads in the sand and hoping that things will right themselves automatically. As the maxim goes, do what you always did and you will get what you always got.

How Can I Assess Our ‘Market Readiness’?

Using a tried and tested benchmarking methodology proven to deliver quick results – a Get to Great® winning and retaining customers workshop is a facilitated one day activity that enables your organisation to more clearly assess your ‘Market Readiness’ for yourselves and identify quickly and objectively the key areas for improvement across the end to end process of finding, winning and retaining customers. The one day workshop captures agreed actions that hone in on addressing the gaps and the overall assessment forms the basis for measuring ongoing performance improvement.

17
FEB

Get to Great, Marketing Effectiveness, Sales Effectiveness

What Does Success Look Like To You?

Happy New Year to you all from XLR8 Marketing!

The New Year’s resolution is a tradition that goes back to Ancient Rome. It’s also a great time for planning and goal setting in the workplace.

One of the biggest obstacles in driving successful outcomes is in developing consensus of not only what you want to achieve, but also what needs to change in order to deliver a solid strategy to get there.

Internal planning processes are well established in most organisations, but how can you be absolutely sure that you and your team have reached consensus?

Are you confident that everyone is suitably motivated and will work together to focus on the things that will deliver maximum impact?

By applying an end to end diagnostic approach that is externally facilitated, you will gain a measurable and objective view of your organisation’s capability for Finding, Winning and Retaining customers enabling you to reach that all important consensus on prioritising the things that will deliver the greatest impact.

Contact us to find out more about how Get to Great drives performance improvement that is immediate, objective, collaborative and cost effective.

1
JAN

Get to Great, Marketing Effectiveness, Sales Effectiveness

Another year beckons – another sales challenge looms: How do you give your business the best chance to succeed?

We have all experienced the long hard slog to year end to squeeze every pip out of the pipeline to hit/exceed the year-end number. Some years back, I remember one particularly tenacious MD who insisted on face to face meetings with each business manager every day in December and the questions were always the same.

What is going to close today?
What have you added to your pipeline since yesterday?
What will your final number be?

It was always the middle question that bemused me the most – the idea that there were loads of IT decision makers sitting at their desks just waiting for a sales guy to pick up the phone and ask them to spend over a hundred thousand pounds on a new IT solution that they didn’t even know they needed – oh, and could you do it before year end please? Yes this year end…

Not only did it burn around 50% of every day for the entire sales management team focused internally chasing their sales guys and providing reports ready to receive a kicking for not finding a bluebird, it also demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of sustainable pipeline management and lead nurturing.

Of course, times have moved on now. There are sophisticated CRM systems with integrated pipeline reporting and digital marketing solutions which provide end to end visibility from an initial unidentified website visitor, through visitor identification, to qualified prospect, a forecasted opportunity through to a converted sale.

Well at least the tools exist to make the job easier now. But is your organisation taking advantage of the opportunity to find new organic leads and gain early visibility of potential buyers? And if you have more level 1 leads than you know what to do with, how well are you nurturing those leads and prioritising how to qualify and engage with them? Having got to your “best few”, how many do you convert, or are your competitors getting the lion’s share?

With the adoption of the internet as a fundamental tool for both buyers and sellers, the line between sales and marketing is more blurred than ever. Organisations which deploy a joined up and aligned approach to sales and marketing are able to engage early in the buying cycle and deliver highest sales conversion.

Here’s 6 top tips adopted by organisations with best in class B2B sales and marketing processes:

Consider the end-to-end sales cycle process from finding the lead, through nurturing the lead to closing the sale. Do the marketing initiatives support the sales function in providing valuable leads and sales enablement assets that align to your sales focus? Similarly, does the sales function give priority to qualifying and nurturing marketing ready leads?

Establish a two-way, closed loop process for engaging the lead, which moves the responsibility between sales and marketing in line with the buying cycle. The lead owner is responsible for employing appropriate engagement activities which best support the lead nurturing process to qualify the lead and move it through the sales funnel (or back to marketing to nurture).

Align the objectives of sales and marketing personnel to ensure they are all driving for the same goals and measured against the same metrics. After all, it doesn’t matter how many marketing leads are generated if they are opportunities for deals the sales team can’t convert! Both groups will consider the other to have added no value to the overall goal.

Measure the end to end revenue cycle from initial identification of a suspect through to closing the sale – what is the revenue potential at each stage of the process from identification, nurturing, qualification, quoting, conversion?

Establish joint accountability around the aligned objectives to support the common outcome of increased revenue with a focus on measuring marketing ROI as a percentage of revenue.

Gradually develop a collaborative and symbiotic culture between the two functions which creates common goals and vocabulary, rather than misaligned targets and miscommunication.

Organisations which recognise the benefits of joined up and collaborative sales and marketing systems and processes, will be in the best position to find new opportunities and convert the highest proportion of sales.

Is your organisation embracing the opportunity for finding and winning customers? Or are you already lining up for a kicking next year-end, too….

16
DEC

Get to Great, Marketing Effectiveness, Sales Effectiveness

I’m Lost and It’s Your Fault!

A man in a hot air balloon realised he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted,” Excuse me, can you help? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The woman below replied, “You are in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You are between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude.”

“You must be an engineer,” said the balloonist.

“I am,” replied the woman. “How did you know?”

“Well,” answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of you, and the fact is I am still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help so far.”

The woman below responded, “You must be in management.”

“I am,” replied the balloonist, “but how did you know?”

“Well,” said the woman, “you don’t know where you are or where you are going. You have risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it’s my fault!”

It does highlight how people assess situations in different ways and the how different “personas” apply their own expertise to solve what may be their own perception of the problem.

Find out more how Get to Great can be applied to enable your sales AND marketing team to collectively identify performance inefficiencies and agree appropriate actions to resolve them.

http://www.gettogreat.com/how-it-works/

Get to Great® – Performance Improvement which is immediate, objective, collaborative and cost-effective.

We welcome your comments and feedback.

13
DEC

Blog, Get to Great, Marketing Effectiveness, Sales Effectiveness

Attracting and converting sales opportunities – are you even on the buyer’s radar?

When I think about how straight forward finding sales opportunities used to be, it makes me smile. Reminiscing back to the days when you leafed through various directories to identify target organisations, kept up to date with the business news by reading the FT and researched a company by reading their annual accounts.

Then having identified a potential target, you would pick up the phone, relying on charm and charisma to get past the receptionist / PA to the main decision maker to sniff out a potential opportunity and schmooze your way to an appointment.

These days, the boot is completely on the other foot. Thanks to the internet, the buyer will be so well informed, often the first you will know of an opportunity is when you are approached to provide a proposal – non-ideal on so many levels! The likelihood is you will have no insight, no relationship, no influence – and quite likely, no bid!

On the other hand, companies who have recognised and executed on a digital marketing strategy that connects with current buyer behaviour will be loving the fact that their cost of sale has dramatically reduced and their win rate has increased.

To test which camp your company is likely to be in, start by answering these simple questions:

• Are you easily found on Google – does your website rank highly for search phrases your target customers are using?

• Do you capture visitor details – for example newsletter subscriptions or to download content of value?

• Do you have ways of showcasing your solution – for example online webinars, YouTube videos or explainer animations?

• Do you regularly update your blog with interesting and relevant content?

• Do you publish white papers or e-books which influence the market?

• Are you active on relevant social media channels or within specialist interest groups?

• Is your company LinkedIn profile current and presenting a positive experience of your company?

Will you feature on the shortlist?

Find Out More

25
NOV

Get to Great, Marketing Effectiveness, Marketing Tips, Sales Effectiveness

Get to Great, Marketing Effectiveness, Sales Effectiveness

The single biggest reason why you don’t win bids…

Over the years I’ve read many articles about why companies don’t win bids and they all seem to focus on what people do during the bid process. In my experience, this is wrong, because everything that happens DURING the bid largely impacts where you end up in the also-rans, rather than the final result – assuming you don’t make complete hash of the bid process, of course.

The single biggest reason people don’t win bids is based on the work they do BEFORE the buyer goes to market. Some people call this ‘early-positioning’, getting ‘written-in’, ‘influencing the buyer’ any many other things and these phrases describe the activity well.

Think about some of the deals you’ve won – and as importantly, some you’ve lost – and analyse the work you did BEFORE the opportunity came to market. Did you meet all the stakeholders? Did they ask for ideas, or did you offer them? Did you take them on customer visits? Did you do proof-of-concept work? Did they ask you for indicative costs?

And equally important is how well your company and its propositions are represented on-line, through your website and use of social media. Research shows that today’s buyer completes around 70% of their selection to shortlist on-line, before ever reaching out to a company representative.

The benefits to the supplier who engages early are huge; insight, influence (solution and budget), COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE, deal shaping, the list goes on, and on. The cost of not doing it are also huge; you’re bidding blind against someone who has done all the above. I hope you have the sense to no bid, or that you lose early.

During a recent Get to Great® workshop for a major IT services company, they assessed themselves as over 80% overall against the model, but ‘only’ 65% on Understanding and Influencing, and then put in place a programme to improve that score considerably. The priority question for them was:

How well does your organisation understand and influence the prospect and their business issues / requirement prior to them issuing a tender to the market?

What would your answer be?

Find Out More

19
NOV

Marketing Effectiveness, Sales Effectiveness