Baseline current go-to-market activities

How do you capture your revenue today? We asked thousands of business owners, CEOs, and VPs of sales and marketing this question. Guess what? Most of them stumbled. Do you know the answer? If your answer is yes, congratulations! You are ready for the next question: Do you know how profitable each channel is?

The purpose of the baseline step is to answer these two questions with hard facts and document the underlying assumptions, beliefs and opportunities in existing go-to-market activities. The problem is that many organizations don’t know what they already know. Even in the age of the Internet, business units and departments are still working in silo, perfecting, rejecting, and innovating sales and marketing tactics without sharing with others. So the idea of the baseline activity is to bring everyone on board and create a fact base of current activities so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The question is, what information should be collected and from where?

Advances in analytics and business intelligence have allowed organizations to collect tons of data that can be sliced and diced a thousand different ways. If you are not collecting this data, don’t worry. To make reasonably accurate decisions, you really don’t need to know if Edward Jones wears a yellow shirt when he buys orange flowers for his girlfriend Jill. There is a place for such detailed data; however, for our purposes we can live with aggregated simple qualitative and quantitative information. In the upcoming section on channel economics, you will find the template for quantitative analysis. Here are some discussion-starter questions for qualitative information gathering.

Competitive Advantage

Let’s start with what makes you different: what value you bring to the lives of your customers. It so happens that, many times, companies and their employees start believing that their only competitive advantage is their marketing message. They forget the basic truth that, at some point in designing their campaign, someone made the choice to promote an existing differentiating factor as the key message. Maybe they didn’t know all the factors, but at that point in time it was the best message to compete. Whatever the reason, it is always good to take an inventory of your differentiating factors.

How are you different from your competitors?
What is your value proposition?
How do you fulfill this value proposition: through product, service, support, sales, or all of these factors?
Is there any need to add or remove something from the value proposition to enhance the overall customer experience?
Are customers requesting something new or changed? Why?

Customers

Believe it or not, the customer is the king or the queen, and the prince or the princess. Start by describing your customers in detail. The more vividly you can define them, the better the chances are that you can solve their problems, sell them more and make them your loyal customers. Who do you think your customers are? Ask the following questions of yourself and your employees and don’t be surprised to hear a variety of different answers:

What is your demographic and sales information?
What are the different customer touch points in your customer relationship cycle?
Why do customers do business with you? Is it because they love you or your product or your prices, or because they need attention that only your can business provide, or because they have no choice?
What does a typical customer journey look like?
How do your customers prefer to do business? Do they want to talk to salespeople/account executives, or do they prefer to place an order over the phone or over the Internet?
What are the most common complaints, requests, and advice you hear from your customers? Which types of customers and accounts do you most want to win?

Markets

Markets are groups of customers that share the same attribute e.g., geography, size, gender, buying capacity, etc. The goal is to collect what you know, understand, and hate about them. Yes, I used the "H" word. We love customers but we may hate some markets that are not performing as we would like them to. So we want to document:

How do you segment markets and why do you segment markets the way you do?
Do you target markets with specific products and, if so, what are they? Are there opportunities to sell products across markets?
Do you hate some markets and plan to exit them. Why?
What are the leading trends of your markets e.g., market size, product-market growth rates, market trends, etc.

Channels

Channels are the connection among your products and customers. There was a time when organizations used to decide what channel to use. Today, customers choose the channels, so here you need to document:

Which channels do you use today? For example, if you use partners or distributors to sell your products, name them or group them in specific categories.
What product do you sell through each channel to which market?
At a gut level, how do you feel each channel is doing?
Are your customers demanding any new channels?
Are your competitors using different channels and, if so, what they are?
What if we sell it through ___? (fill in the blank)

Customer Communication/Message

What people say about you and how they say it is the result of what you give them to talk about i.e., customer experience and your brand image. The secret of a good message is simplicity, repeatability, and authenticity. What are you giving people to say about you?

What is the message? Are you using different messages for different target markets?
Take your branding material, look at it, and answer four simple questions:
1. What does it remind you of? A bank? Fun? Sports?
2. What does it say to you? Boring? Trendy? Old-fashioned? Sexy? Dull?
3. To whom does it appeal? Men? Women? Children? Bargain hunters?
4. What does it says about the company? Gray? Old-school? Reliable? Design-led?
What channels are you using to spread this message (multimedia advertisements, social networking sites, interactive sites, etc?)
What tools are you providing to your customers to spread this message?

As you can see, these are some very important questions. There are no correct answers. Every response gives you deeper insight into building a better and growing business. To get the full spectrum of answers, you should talk to anyone who has contact with your customers e.g., sales staff, customer service staff, marketing and research staff, partner channels managers, Internet marketing staff including IT staff, etc. Make especially sure to include functional heads of sales, and of marketing and finance departments, because they have to approve and buy into the recommendations that will come from this exercise before implementation. You can interview all these stakeholders individually. For the maximum impact, however, I recommend you bring them all together in a room.

Once you have everyone in the organization talking about these questions, you will get some interesting insights and uncover many valid opportunities that were previously hidden in plain sight. The trick, however, is not to lose the momentum but to build upon it. Whatever you discover in this baseline process you should document, so you can use it as a reference point to judge your progress as you implement integrated multichannel selling models.

The added advantages of the baseline process are:

Consensus building – Discussing and sharing your findings with everyone will build consensus among all the stakeholders, which will energize the team to accomplish stretched goals.
Company buy-in – As you know, the biggest hurdle in implementing any new strategy is resistance to change. This little step will go a long way in managing this change.

Now that we know where we are, what opportunities exists, what go-to-market beliefs are held, and what direction that the management team is looking for, it is time to customize an integrated multichannel selling model for your organization. We will start with the continuous optimization process, which shows how to protect and renew core customer base.

References:

Six Discipline of Execution by Gary Harpst
Go To Market Strategy by Lawrence Friedman