New business development is the lifeblood of any industrial or engineered products company. Because selling cycles can be 18-36 months (or longer) you need to keep your sales pipeline full at all times. This requires strategic planning, solid positioning and impeccable implementation of the details. Some of the ways we help our clients achieve these things include:
Strategic Planning that helps you target and land profitable new business. These are not binders that simply sit on a shelf and collect dust. Our strategic plans are real world documents that create a vision and roadmap for your company's growth. They target specific industries and prospects to go after right now and provide your sales team with the selling tools they need to do so successfully.
Strategic Positioning that enables you to sell on something other than price. Identifying or creating a unique position in the market is critical. Without strong positioning, customers cannot differentiate you from your competitors, so they fall back on the only standard of differentiation you've given them...price. We can help you never sell on price alone again.
Target Market Identification... we'll help you find markets and opportunities that best match your company's strengths and capabilities maximizing your chances for success. We'll help you construct a framework for evaluating potential target markets that reviews each option against factors like segment size/profitability, pricing pressure, service & quality requirements, cost pressures, barriers to entry, technology differentiation, etc. We also provide an objective view of your current business and target marketing strategy. We help you determine which markets you should target for additional growth, which ones you should defend and which ones you should abandon.
Customer Analytics. Developing a deep understanding of your customers' needs is critical. Studies consistently show that the industrial companies that are most successful are the ones that focus their marketing on the customer rather than themselves. In these days of inbound vs. outbound, internet- driven marketing, your marketing needs to be all about the customer... not your company. We'll help you develop key customer personas and profiles that will give you a deeper understanding of your customers needs and then develop marketing and selling tools that show how your company can help meet them.
Market diversification ...we have developed a proprietary, methodology for helping you determine the best way to expand beyond your core business. We'll help you protect your core business while diversifying into those adjacent markets that offer the greatest chance of success based on your company's capabilities and core competencies.
Market Segmentation. The idea behind market segmentation is to design your sales and marketing efforts to specific subsets of your customers...thus making it more relevant to their needs. It is similar to a classic "divide and conquer" approach that when done right is much more effective than the "one size fits all" approach that most industrial companies take in their marketing and sales.
New Product Launches. The planning to release a new product should start at the same time as the development of the product itself. Too often, industrial companies spend months or years developing a new product and then rush it to market without adequate planning and forethought. We can work as an extension of your new product development team or develop a turnkey launch plan that is tailored specifically to your product and market situation. Either way, we can help you generate a ROI commensurate with the time and money you've already invested in developing the new product.
Hot Spots Marketing. Sometimes timing and market forces combine to create sudden opportunities for your technologies and/or products. In these cases, we can help you quickly put together a hot spots marketing plan and program that will enable you to turn these unexpected opportunities into an additional revenue stream. These Hot Spot opportunities can be generated by a new government regulation, a major competitor unexpectedly filing for bankruptcy, a competitor's product recall, etc. These are opportunistic situations that require quick thinking and fast responses....we can help you with both.