Brand

Many companies make the mistake of thinking that the world is one big market and “one size fits all.” It is imperative to understand the nuances of international markets and develop strategies to cost effectively market and sell products in multiple regions with different cultures, customs, distribution channels, infrastructure, economics, and technical requirements.

A well thought out global strategy will help you expand your businesses to new geographies. A third party perspective, or additional resources may be required to accelerate, or align, marketing and business development efforts for startups and established companies alike.
Operationally, systems and global organization alignment is becoming an increasingly difficult challenge. Data and system governance issues, differing regulations regarding email marketing, and preserving a global brand are also strategic challenges.

Customer

Understanding your customers and why they need your product or service is step one. When introducing a new company or offering, researching the market opportunity and validating customer demand are essential first steps. This defines your target market.

Segmenting the market to identify similar needs and characteristics of potential customers requires you understand the buyers journey – the process they go through to select their solutions. From this, detailed personas about customer segments allow you to speak to them as individuals with targeted messages about things they care about, not the benefits of your product.

Understanding how they find you or want to receive information from you through a variety of channels will help you plan your integrated multi-channel campaign strategy.

Sales

It’s all about generating revenue to build a successful business. This includes optimizing the sales process, team, skills, organization, messaging and systems. It requires mapping sales processes, managing data, and linking campaign, customer and prospect information to the various stages through the funnel.
The end goal is to have organizations and systems that make it easier for sales and marketing teams to do their jobs. You can then produce dashboards and reports that deliver senior management the information they need to to run the business. Think of it as a Revenue Engine – a methodology for putting it all together – to manage the entire lifecycle of your prospects and customers.

Effective revenue generations starts with a sound sales strategy, plan and a predictable way to monitor the pipeline and sales results. Accelent has created a process for Sales Team Analytics for More Predictable Success to help Sales Management ensure it meets is revenue goals.

Demand-Gen

Some think demand gen is a tactic, but it must be a strategy first. Understanding how to segment your market and reach your audience requires a lot of up front planning. You must first understand what and how customers want to hear from you and then build campaigns that appeal to what they care about.
Demand generation strategies include marketing to your installed base, not just net new. Understanding your current customer profile and why they bought your product or service will allow you to leverage progressively profiling to continue to refine your marketing strategy.

Programs and effective campaign strategies can then be created with established goals and metrics. This increases the likelihood that your customers and prospects engage with you and move quickly through the sales funnel.

Channel

Marketing and sales channels move goods from producers to consumers and this can be done directly or through a partner network. Channel strategies are always evolving. The activity through these channels needs to be integrated and data (ideally pipeline) must be comprehensive.

Social media is a dynamic channel that must be integrated with marketing campaigns along with other Internet based channels where your customers find information about you or even buy online.

A major trend in retailing is Omni-channel marketing, a seamless approach to the consumer experience through all available shopping channels, i.e. mobile devices, Internet, storefronts, television, radio, direct mail, catalog etc. We believe this is trend will expand beyond retail and companies must be investigating the best channel strategies to stay ahead of the competition.

Alignment

The alignment of people, processes and technologies is a strategic imperative. The most painful misalignment impacting revenue is between marketing and sales. With the advent of powerful marketing automation and CRM systems, these groups must communicate and agree in terms of processes, “lead” definitions, account strategies, data management and KPIs as the marketing and sales funnel is becoming one.

Once the processes are agreed to, it becomes critical that the proper tracking is in place. The different parts of the funnel from the sales accepted leads through the sales team yield needs to be tracked and analyzed to ensure the maximum return from the investment of these valuable resources.

Alignment of marketing, sales and IT is also critical. It must ensure the integrity of the data so that accurate reporting of business metrics can be achieved across multiple systems.

Organization

Organizational alignment and building effective teams and processes is critical to success. Marketing and sales operations are experiencing a major shift as new tools, technologies and channels emerged. There is a need for diverse skills including system programming and analytics, and process driven operational teams need to be put in place.
Many companies are building centralized ops, Revenue Performance Centers, to coordinate the systems, campaigns and channels activities. Sales operations are also evolving, with Telesales taking a new role in lead qualification as opposed to generation. Training is required across the board.

The need for alignment between these organizations, particularly globally, requires an overarching strategy. External assistance is needed to help establish the requirements in terms of organization, skills, what to outsource and how to effectively manage operations.

Global

Many companies make the mistake of thinking that the world is one big market and “one size fits all.” It is imperative to understand the nuances of international markets and develop strategies to cost effectively market and sell products in multiple regions with different cultures, customs, distribution channels, infrastructure, economics, and technical requirements.
A well thought out global strategy will help you expand your businesses to new geographies. A third party perspective, or additional resources may be required to accelerate, or align, marketing and business development efforts for startups and established companies alike.

Operationally, systems and global organization alignment is becoming an increasingly difficult challenge. Data and system governance issues, differing regulations regarding email marketing, and preserving a global brand are also strategic challenges.