Shifting Focus from Products to PROSPECTS
Instigation: This ‘challenger’ mining company in Africa was up against major suppliers around the world. Their core product was a low-margin commodity, and they were losing economies of scale to larger producers. They were looking to build their volume to gain scale as well as expand into new areas... that had even stronger competition! Internally there was no agreement on direction, or even what the problem was. Typical of engineering firms, the focus was on the product, putting the marketing team in the position of “finding buyers” for what they produced.
Creative Questions Energize a Quiet Commodity Industry
Instigation: This long-established supplier of office products to small businesses had just been acquired. The newly merged company was anxious to explore options to increase growth within the current customer base, particularly in its top vertical segments, but years of prior attempts by Deluxe to increase volume through new products and services or new marketing methods had borne no results. The client was looking to us to tap undiscovered or overlooked opportunities, but their small business clients (wearing many hats) spent very little time thinking about this low-involvement category.
Being Right Can Be So Wrong
Instigation: Asigra has been quietly providing data backup and recovery software for decades. Positioned as the “cloud backup expert”, Asigra serves more than 550,000 sites throughout the world with single-minded devotion. Content to devote all their energy to supporting their channel partners, they are one of the most accomplished companies you’ve never heard of. By focusing solely on backup and recovery, Asigra developed a string of product innovations that led to industry analysts including them among preferred enterprise-grade backup solutions. The good news was that this opened a long-sought opportunity -- to expand from SMB to the enterprise. The bad news was that the enterprise marketplace is home to the well-known and well-entrenched 500 lb. gorillas of technology. Asigra needed a positioning that enabled them to get meetings with senior decision-makers at the corporate level.
Tradeshift
Instigation: Tradeshift is a B2B start-up offering a free invoicing platform and a growing web-based business network. Like many start-ups, its vision was grander than its reality. It quickly found itself in a sea of small companies offering commoditized e-invoicing services. Frustrating to employee and founder alike was the challenge of navigating between here and where they want to be. Their marketing had become muddled. As the new CMO John Eng observed, “Our vision was so big it was hard to communicate. Our messaging had to speak to a range of small to large companies. The challenge was that we’d never really codified a company-wide story or the messaging that conveyed that story.”
Free Personas: Worth Every Penny
The most valuable part of any research is the insight. That nugget of truth that expands your understanding and guides strategy and messaging. Digging for insights isn’t easy—you have to go beyond the surface and get some dirt under your nails. And gasp! you may even have to talk with people outside your organization to widen your own (narrow?) perspective and blow up those assumptions you’ve been operating from for way too long.
Good Fences Make Good Neighbors (Even If They’re Sales And Marketing)
The river between sales and marketing runs cold and deep. We can see each other’s camp on the opposite bank, just out of range. That we all work for the same corporation is often the irritant, yet I have seen how much success is generated when there is cooperation. Let me tell you how. “Good fences make good neighbors,” Robert Frost concedes in his poem Mending Wall. He’s not entirely happy with the concept, but the sucker works, and it will work here. Building a strong fence will define the playing field (formerly, battlefield).