Strategy > Branding > Design > Message > Sales Platform
Strategy
All significant and sustained growth starts from your position in the markets you serve.
Philosophy: Typically an afterthought to short-term tactical objectives or considered too expensive to address on any sort of regular frequency, achieving breakthrough growth results requires a continual engineering of your market position and your customer relationship objectives. Not in defining tactical execution but rather strategy as the deliberate, calculated resolve of how to attain and maintain leadership over your markets.
Approach: Work top-down from the market leadership position desired to identify the key steps, and foundations required to reach, maintain and expand from that position (The What - what does leadership mean). Simultaneously, work bottom-up to define the psychographic needs of target market segments to identify relationship gaps in the market that can be used to achieve new levels of prospect/customer alignment, trust, leadership and advocacy.
Difference: I have developed a market engineering framework called the CustomerFactory that provides a template for understanding and manipulating the detailed nuances of engineering alignment and ultimately leadership with the market. Process is typically completed in a 1-day group-facilitated session.
Branding
Your real-time reputation in the market.
Philosophy: Your brand is your face to the world and it’s where perceptions of who you are, what you are, and if you’re valuable are derived—regardless of what you sell or what your solution is. Buyers do judge the book by the cover and attitudes and preferences about your business are formed in a split second. This is the value of your brand, and it’s a lot more than just your logo. It’s your real-time reputation as well as the visual embodiment of your alignment to the market —it defines the market’s expectations of the experience and relationship potential your business represents.
Approach: Define the ideal relationship you want your business to have with your customers and extrapolate the attributes, characteristics and experiences that constitute it. Develop a roadmap for making this relationship objective the reality across all impacting dimensions from design, to message, to online social commentary.
Difference: Leverage a wide global network of creative talent to maximize design options, minimize upfront investment and optimize the alignment of brand to market.
Design
The indication of your credibility, legitimacy and relevancy to the market.
Philosophy: It’s not about how cool, contemporary or creative the design of your sales and marketing assets are (website, collateral, pitches, etc) it’s about what it says to the market about who you are and what you’re all about. Production value counts towards your perceived strength and leadership just as equally as bad design destroys those perceptions.
Approach: Understand what role each design asset is playing in the larger sales process, what the desired alignment outcome it is designed to produce, and how best to communicate those dimensions visually and with the least words as possible.
Difference: Unlike the traditional approach that fits the design objective to the creative resources on hand, I focus on finding the right creative resources to deliver the right design—which more often than not is design work by me.
Message
How you engineer buying alignment into the market.
Philosophy: Message is more than words on a page; it’s everything from the color to the copy. The real challenge is storytelling. To tell a compelling story that can capture the market and direct them to an end-state vision that your value proposition supports/drives. Message geared to what and how needs to be preceded by message that speaks to where and why.
Approach: Effective message has to be directional and it has to be conversational. Message starts from the outcome of strategy and paints a path to getting the market there.
Difference: My perspective.
Sales Platform
The mechanical operation of your customer factory.
Philosophy: Every sales support asset, from product collateral, case studies, business cases, outside review or direct email campaigns and the services that power them constitute your sales platform. Each component needs to be designed to specifically elevate a higher level of buying alignment within cold prospects in a particular sequence that best accommodates the psychographic profiles of each segment class.
Approach: Map your sales platform according to the alignment it can produce at each juncture of the pipeline and design quantitative benchmarks that define success for each stage. Leverage the latest automation-intensive lead/prospect/customer management platforms to capture, compel, nurture and convert new business and provide metrics to the effectiveness of marketing engineer efforts.
Difference: Experience co-managing leading CRM and lead nurturing platforms in numerous industries from enterprise software, to consumer retail, to online information products in internet marketing, real-estate and others.
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The 20 Minute Challenge |
| In 20 minutes I'll guarantee you'll hang up with at least 1 actionable market development strategy that you could be implementing to further your position in market and broaden your lead gen reach. |
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