Tag Archives: Advertising

How Do You Increase Lead Generation and Motivate Sales Development? Seven Points

Situation: A company needs to generate more leads and increase new business closure rates to make plan. Their customers are primarily tech companies and they use advertising, trade shows and customer lists to develop leads. What advice do others have to help the company meet their objectives? How do you increase lead generation and motivate sales development?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Look closely at the definition of your market. Refine the definition of the market in light of new technology developments and opportunities. If necessary, rewrite the value proposition and the characterization of the company’s typical customer.
  • Hire a Marketing Director to take charge of this effort.
  • For each of key customer or key customer category, develop the important features and benefits that will appeal to that customer or group. Think, through their eyes, “what’s in it for me?”
  • Focus on one or two areas where the company adds the best value. Don’t attempt to be all things to all people.
  • Define the behaviors that will generate sales and inquiries. Assure that these are up to date with the market. Train or retrain your salespeople as necessary and manage those behaviors.
  • Select and manage a sales process. If necessary seek outside help to develop this. Options include; Sales Solutions, Miller Heiman, and similar sales training companies.
  • Use a wide array of resources to develop potential customer lists and to identify the needs of each of those customers:
    • Business partners
    • LinkedIn.com
    • Google Ads
    • Salesforce.com or Jigsaw
    • Webinars and Social Media

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How Do You Create Buzz? Six Suggestions

Situation: A company wants to quickly create high profile buzz around a new offering. What have other companies done or seen that could help the company quickly create this type of market presence? How do you create buzz?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Buzz is hard to measure. It is also difficult to link buzz directly to sales.
  • Getting press, assuming that it is positive, is often called “free advertising.”
    • If a company is paying a professional public relations (PR) consultant, positive press is not free. When PR is successful and sustained, however, it arguably has a better ROI than advertising.
    • Published articles, particularly those by authors not associated with the company, are viewed by the customer as more legitimate than advertising. Additionally, with the Internet, the longevity of these articles can be quite long. The reach extends far beyond publications’ off-line circulation, and search engines make the articles easy to access.
  • Successful companies want to do business with other successful companies. What can the company highlight to show prospective clients that it is successful?
    • Substantiation is critical to getting positive coverage – assure that there is no “vaporware.” Given the power of social media vaporware can quickly destroy an offering.
  • One member of the group suggested that the ownership of patents might generate positive press and social media coverage.
  • Leverage in-house thought leaders.
  • Seek help from celebrities – “Hollywood” investors and individuals with substantial social media followings.

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Do You Need a Formal Marketing Function? Four Points

Situation: A small company serves a specialized, targeted group of customers. The founder/CEO seeks advice from the group on whether it is time for the company to create and staff a formal marketing function or can this be outsourced. Do you need a formal marketing function?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The company services a specialized and targeted group of customers. However, they target the high end of this market, so the target market is smaller.
    • A highly targeted promotional and marketing strategy will work best.
  • There are two principal functions within marketing: providing direction to guide product development efforts and creating awareness of the company’s products through promotions and advertisements.
    • To serve a narrow market, the information and insight gathered from trade shows, technical meetings, the company’s sales and design engineers may be sufficient to drive product development efforts.
    • It may not be necessary to do more than this unless the company is planning for substantial growth and wishes to diversify the product offering in a short period of time.
  • To handle promotions and advertising there are two options: hire an individual to do this or utilize the resources of an outside agency.
    • The marketing plan should be refreshed and updated on a regular basis – at least annually.
    • A good task for the company’s marketing committee is to become aware of local resources that could help.
    • Identify marketing themes to guide advertising in specialty magazines, supported by trade shows, technical conferences, and on-site training session for key customers.
    • Create and maintain a calendar of marketing activities and assure that that messaging is consistent across promotional events.
  • If the strategic plan calls for substantially increasing the revenue base or broadening the product offering, consider a merger with a competitor that already has the ability and resources to meet these needs.
    • Just the planning exercise for a merger will help the company to evaluate the issues involved in market expansion.

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How Do You Plan for Market Evolution? Three Suggestions

Situation: A tech company competes in a rapidly changing marketplace. The companies they serve constantly evolve their platforms. The company must respond rapidly to assure compatibility with both hardware and software innovations. Users adapt to new platforms at different rates, and the company must address their needs, as well. With so much time spent tending these diverse needs, how do they plan for market evolution?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • In the market you serve you must constantly reinvent yourselves as technology changes. Some platforms make changes on a 5-year cycle, while mobile platforms are currently on a 6-month cycle. This may force choices as to which platforms to serve. You also may want to focus on platforms where what you bring to the table is most useful.
  • You have made the strategic choice to tie the future of your company to a few large companies that dominate their markets. It is imperative that you cultivate close relationships with the technology as well as strategic leadership of those companies. This will give you more advanced insight into their plans, and they may even involve you in discussions about how the market evolves. If so, you will have positioned yourself for that evolution. These relationships may also become your exit strategy.
  • Businesses run on cash, or access to cash. As you cultivate relationships with your key customer companies, look for opportunities to invest in developing markets on a subscription basis which will provide ongoing annuity revenue. Figuring out how to leverage advertising or positioning options into your offering offers an additional revenue stream.

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How Do You Survive a Maelström? Seven Strategies

Situation: Edgar Allen Poe’s “Surviving the Maelström,” is a tale is of three brothers whose fishing boat is caught in a monstrous whirlpool, and how the reaction of each brother determines his fate. Similarly, in times of uncertainty, our ability to react with either panic or a rational, reasoned response determines our fate. How do you survive a maelström?

Advice of the CEOs:

  • Based on Poe’s story, you need to replace fear with assurance, uncertainty with boldness, and doubt with conviction.
  • There are several potential financial bubbles forming including student loans and negative interest rate loans to sovereign governments. Both, in their own way, pose a threat to the international and domestic financial systems and could rapidly impact borrowing costs for companies. The solutions are to stay in ongoing contact with customers, and to stay light and flexible as companies so that you can adapt to market changes.
  • For Internet companies, the shift to Freemium offerings (a base product for free with pay as you go functional add-ons) makes it more difficult to design viable business models, and means new competition for established companies in low capital cost businesses. Again, a solution is to stay in ongoing contact with customers, constantly reinforcing your value proposition and the reality of switching costs.
  • Creative Destruction – particularly the emergence of new companies that threaten large customers and can change the value perception of suppliers’ core competencies. Solutions include ongoing communication with customers seeing what they see as “the next big thing,” focusing on continually improving our own core competencies, and possibly teaming with the more promising emerging companies.
  • The illusion that advertising will pay for everything – in reality, advertising dollars are a scarce resource like all other resources. Solutions include testing our own value-adds as an ongoing process, and creating fast-fail models to cost-effectively test our own promotions.
  • Definitions of value and productivity are no longer stable; all depends on the method of measurement. A solution is to remain aware of the innovator’s dilemma and to continually renew our value propositions.
  • A workforce in flux where young people don’t want to work for what they perceive as “old line” companies, as well as early-retiring baby boomers who may learn in 3-5 years that they can’t afford retirement. Solutions include focusing on employee engagement, building more flexible and “liberating” business models, and teaming younger with more experienced workers to cross-train each other.

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