You thought you knew, right? Many people do, and yet a lot of us take our business and market position for granted in the face of rapid, constant change.
Specifically, Sales and Marketing teams find themselves under siege with the tsunami of technology offerings that all purportedly offer a magic pill to help you get it right when it comes to aligning your messaging, content, market presence and sales engagement with your prospects and customers.
My first career introduction to this challenge came in the first year with a small software enterprise. Large enough to be a force in the auto industry, and dominating its segment, yet small enough to have a collegial team led by a CEO who understood the value of mentorship and his role in keeping us on track. Our success in this unique market segment was ground-breaking and yet vulnerable to larger, more agile firms who could easily compete if they chose to.
Each year, but not always at the beginning of the calendar year our ‘master’ mentor would assemble our marketing, sales and product teams in a room. Roughly twenty of us called to the ‘brainstorming’ alter, to listen, explore, and offer our collaborative knowledge to the question, “What Business Are We In?” Once assembled he would strut to the door and lock it with the pronouncement “Nobody leaves until we figure this out” – not to intimidate by any measure, but to make the point this was important stuff.
For the next eight hours, sometimes longer, we would conduct a deep dive on everything we knew about our product, our customers and our competition (real or perceived) with the goal of assessing our understanding of each facet of the business and whether we still held an accurate view of the business and our path to staying relevant. As the purveyors of a ground-breaking technology, we knew intuitively that to stay ahead of market need and competitive threats we needed to revisit our thinking.
Our CEO charged us with the premise – “The business you were in a year ago, may not be the same business you are in now?” In a business climate led by disruption, there are some key areas we need to look at to maintain a data-driven mindset about what our business represents and to continually test our market relevance.
Listen to your customers:
Are they looking for more than you offered last year? Your sales teams are your front line of information on your customer’s opinion and satisfaction. Poll your team and learn what feedback they are getting. Share it with all stakeholders. Find the customers who are dissatisfied and learn why. Examine the wins as well as lost deals to determine if lost sales are symptomatic of something bigger – a misalignment in what you are offering vs. what they are looking for.
Understand what your competitors are doing:
Does your offering still have an edge to differentiate? Is it likely that your competitors have found a way to win, over your best features? Have they learned in the past year to influence buyer decisions that you used to easily win? Perhaps while you have been focused on developing more strategic content, they may have also with the goal of weakening your competitive position. Is your sales team ill-equipped to counter those new threats?
Re-examine your marketing presence:
Ask your base if your message is still resonating? Are your monthly and annual numbers holding to the growth curve that you expected? Does your messaging still compare favourably to the trends in your market that buyers are listening to? Perhaps it is time for deeper market research to confirm if your lead gen engine and sales teams are connecting with how buyers learn about your offerings compared to the available alternatives they can choose from before engaging directly.
The business you are in today, may not be an accurate reflection of what you currently offer in your product or service, or what you thought it was the last time you asked the question. Change is rapid, at times stealthy and there is never a bad time to reassess if your business is still relevant in the eyes of your customer, your competition and the messaging you take to the market. Time to ask the question?
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