The success of a company depends on its ability to align with its customers, and this certainly includes its choice of sales channels. If a company chooses channels that meet its customers when, where, and how they want to do business, it'll sell more stuff. Otherwise it will sell less. Thus, we have to make sure that the list of channels we have brainstormed meets the buying criteria of customers. You can basically rule in all the channels that your customers want and rule out the rest.
There are two tools—i) customer needs criteria, and ii) customer buying behavior—that you can use to align your channel selection with customers. We collected all the information needed to apply these tools in the last section. Let’s see how to make the best use of it.
Aligning Channels with Customers’ Needs
If you focus on channels that satisfy your customers’ needs and eliminate channels that don’t, you will sell more. For example, customers who need and expect training, on-site installation, and easy access to a real person will be very dissatisfied with low-cost channels like the Internet or phone. On the other hand, customers who value self-service and ease of transactions will love the Internet and might hate people calling on them. The table below shows how different channels stack up against the most common needs of customers. You can use this table as a starting point to get the first-cut channel list.
You can create a table like this and rank your list of channels. You don’t need any complex ranking—a simple three- or five-star ranking system will work.
Align Channels With Customers’ Buying Behavior
The second tool provides a much more exact approach for aligning channels with customers. It’s based on the facts gathered in the last step regarding customers’ buying behaviors, where you asked how they buy a product today and how they intend to buy it in the near future. The chart below, for example, shows the findings of how customers are buying a camera bag today and how they want to buy it in the future.
It is clear that currently most sales happen through manufacturing reps and distributors. Catalog or mail order is also a major channel, whereas the Internet is not a major player at this time. However, customers are indicating that they are interested in buying directly, either from a retail store or via the Internet. Such an obvious indication warrants that a business take a serious look into building these two channels to capture sales in the future.
These two tools together help you shorten the possible list of channels in more manageable touch points. However, it is still outside-in view. A product may not have be suitable for a particular channel. Next section "Channel Product Fit" describes the process of filtering channels from a product's suitability perspective. You will also find tools to customize a product for a channel.
Related:
- Table of Content
- Red Queen Effect – An Introduction
- The Billionaire Code
- Cracking the Code
- Implementation Plan
- Renovation or Innovation?
- Implementation Process
- Baseline Current Go-To-Market Activities
- Protect & Renew
- Plan for New Sales
- Targeting the Right Market
- Market Segmentation
- Prioritizing Target Markets
- Align with Your Customers
- Example of Customer Experience Mapping
- Mapping Customer Experience
- Drawing Customer Persona
- Customer's Moments of Truth
- Identifying Appropriate Levers to WOW Customers
- Establish Channels to Deliver the WOW Experience
- Targeting the Right Market
- Renovation or Innovation?
Reference:
- Go-To-Market Strategies by Lawrence Friedman