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.
Feb 18, 2010 | Change, Management, Marketing, Sales
As publishing goes electronic, and the hype about the Ipad, Kindle, and other reader technologies, evolves, and drives behavior changes, publishers need to consider how they are going to market, as most consumption of books is still generated by seeing it, physically in the bookstore. This is particularly true in the case of gifts, which is a very large part of the book market. As stores go out of business, how do publishers replace the awareness of a new book, the “feel” of it from the shelf, the pleasure of the interaction at point of purchase?
Amazons Kindle generally allows the first chapter to be downloaded before purchase, but will that be enough?
As in most other retail categories, the probable answer is that the generalist, mass market shops will decline radically in numbers, partly replaced by both specialist retailers who carry a depth of range of a particular genre, huge mega stores in cheap locations, and perhaps hole in the wall retailers with a printer/binder where you can order and print off the book, or part of the book wanted on the spot.
Whatever happens, the status quo has been busted wide open.
Feb 17, 2010 | Management, Operations, Sales
The gate keeper role is progressively becoming redundant as web tools evolve to offer many other avenues to get “inside” a prospective customer.
The most aggressive commercial gatekeepers have traditionally been in the acquisition roles, and finding ways to butter them up, or get around them consumes huge resources in many organsations selling B2B, and using the model successful last century, getting to know the purchasing manager, taking him to lunch, sending his kids a birthday card to show you care, and so on.
Nowadays, these people are almost redundant, the most they usually do is fill in the purchase order, and ensure delivery, they rarely now make the decision to buy yours, or the others.
The task now is to identify the decision maker, and market your product benefits to him/her, building the value of the benefits, by identifying what your product delivers in terms of three parameters:
- The sales benefit delivered.
- The cost benefit delivered
- The productivity benefit delivered.
If you are not delivering at least one of these three, preferably two, why would they waste their money buying from you.
Feb 15, 2010 | Marketing, Sales
The retail end of music industry as we currently know it continues to be in trouble.
This New York Times article is now a bit old, but I am pretty sure the marketing challenge has not gone away.
Imagine, 13 million songs for sale on the web in 2008, 10 million did not sell one, just one, not even to family and friends, and 80% of revenue came from just 52,000 songs, less than 1%.
The web has given us an amazing ability to “publish” but the marketing challenge of being relevant, noticed, engaging, and commercially successful has not changed at all.
Just because you can put it out there, does not mean it is any good, and because it is a big “market”, and you only have to sell to a tiny, tiny % of the punters to make a dollar, does not mean you will.
Feb 9, 2010 | Change, Management, OE, Operations, Sales
For a long time as a consultant, who has done a fair but of sales training in a B2B environment, I have fallen back on a foundation proposition made up of three parts.
When planning a sales strategy to sell a product that is not a cheap disposable commodity (like paper clips)to a customer, you can only really do three things:
- Assist the customer increase his sales
- Assist the customer reduce his costs
- Assist the customer increase the productivity of his assets.
If the product you are selling does not address at least one of these three parameters, why would someone buy from you?
Recently, undertaking an improvement exercise for a manufacturing client, it became clear the same three questions can be applied to any improvement process, not just sales.
If any activity, policy, assumption, or behavioral norm does not contribute to at least one of these three outcomes for your organization why are you still doing it? “How does that contribute to…..?” becomes a very powerful question.
