Jun 21, 2010 | Management, Sales, Social Media
In this digital age, the first contact in most situations is digital, where the marginal cost is approaching zero.
This simple fact has changed the sales cycle, as this contact can evolve into an offer to become closer, or it can become a barrier, but each party understands implicitly that the rules have changed.
The question now is not one of how quickly can a sale be closed, or indeed, the process brought to an end, there is more dancing involved, largely because the dancing is cheap, non threatening, and easy. For a sales organisation, there are a few simple questions:
- What sort of digital tools do we need to engage key prospect groups?
- How much time and effort should be spent on developing a sale before we reach the go/no go point?
- How much do we need to give away?
“Give away” now more often than ever strays into the arena of proprietary IP, as efforts to differentiate and add value in a commoditised world accelerates
Apr 27, 2010 | Category, Customers, Innovation, Sales
Running a qualitative consumer research group recently, one of the participants surprised me with a metaphor that made great sense.
She said that the web had taught her to “forage”, her term, looking for stuff of interest, checking out the Sku’s available in a category far more widely than previously, when she had a modest “basket” of regulars, with a pecking order, and that did not change much from month to month. This reminded her of the behavior of the farm dogs she had as a kid, always looking for something to eat, in different places, and always nuzzling something new when it became available, and then deciding if it had any interest.
The implications are pretty clear. Experimentation within categories, and into adjacent categories may have been encouraged by the transfer of the “nuzzling” behavior we undertake every day as we cruise the web, looking for tit-bits of interest.
Sku numbers in supermarkets have exploded over the last 20 years, and I always thought it was just the drive for shelf presence and often minor differentiation in an effort to attract consumers that had driven it, but perhaps there is something more primal in our reaction to variety.
Mar 28, 2010 | Management, Sales
The only way to win is to attack, you can prevent being beaten by defense, but as any football coach knows, defense will not win.
Same in business, you need to understand your strengths and weaknesses compared to the opposition, and exploit the strengths, whilst covering for the weaknesses.
Having an intimate understanding of the key customers, those who will spread the word of your product or service is as good as having the opposition playbook
The only way to get a crystal clear picture of the oppositions position is to experiment, continually ask the questions of them by experimenting, testing, & understanding their response, be restless, and inquisitive, probe, analyse, question, form and test hypothesis. Sounds a bit like the scientific method, and continuous improvement.
Mar 16, 2010 | Marketing, Sales
For fifty years, good marketing meant efficient use of advertising funds, driving distribution, segmenting markets, usually on socio-economic status and usage patterns, development of brand awareness and purchase intention, a flow of range extensions, and staying out of trouble.
The last 10 years have seen a sea change, and none of the above really counts any more, because everyone knows how to do it, marketing has become commoditised, and being just as able at “marketing” as everyone else leads to punishment in the market.
What is needed now are genuine insights, new connections, stuff that cannot be copied, customers who are advocates of your brand, and true creativity, not just another colour.
Lip service has been given for many years to the concept of “Customer Value Proposition”, but it was in the context of mass marketing, and mass markets where it evolved. The concept is still valid, it is just far more difficult to execute, as it needs to be applied many times to market segments, often approaching one customer only.
Failure to recognise the new individual focus of marketing, and reacting by enabling a conversation between yourself and your customers, will lead to punishment in the marketplace by way of increasing irrelevance.
Feb 28, 2010 | Change, Management, Sales, Strategy
How many times have we heard this as a smart front line operator expresses frustration with the attitudes of the executive suite, the redundancy of the business model, or the strategy being pursued, as again, the “bosses” appear to fail to understand the coal face drivers of success.
The most common cause of this cry is becoming the rapid commoditisation of many markets, and those that see it first are usually on the front lines. Suddenly, long term customers are turning away, a new competitor emerges, and the only tool the troops have left is price, and they are pushed to do more with less.
Short term responses to a fundamental change in the business model necessary to be commercially sustainable won’t get you far, at best it will put off the inevitable. You need to ask yourself a couple of key questions:
- How can I differentiate my commodity product to a smaller market, instead of being all things to all people?
- How can I solve a problem someone has with the existing commodity product and service?
- How do I deploy my resources to make it happen, recognising , often this will mean adding a different type of resource.
Feb 22, 2010 | Branding, Marketing, Sales, Small business
What will be the continuing impact of the development of housebrands by retailers, and the current heightened value awareness of consumers? Most FMCG suppliers lose sleep over the retailers undermining their profitability by hogging shelf space with far cheaper imitations of their brands, brought to market overnight without much concern about the long term health and development of the category, but delivering short term profitability to them at the expense of their suppliers.
This apparent duplicity, retailers demanding innovation and category building activity from their suppliers, whilst undermining their ability and willingness to invest has to have its limits. Clearly, the old mass market model of branding is over, but what has replaced it?
Increasingly I see the evolution of focused brands and retailers serving the more niche markets, and segments of larger markets where something different is being delivered to customers. Retailers are enabling a new breed of supplier with deep category expertise to emerge at the expense of the older mass market model, and they are in turn fuelling the growth of specialist retailers.
