Click to Listen: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/hawkseye/2011/06/11/marketing-vs-selling-a-product–whats-the-difference

This week we have a two very special guests with us; Jay Longwell, President, and Greg Mower, VP Strategic Planning, both of Stratus Marketing to discuss the difference between Markting and Sales.

We will explore why knowing the difference between the two can save or break a business, what items you need to know about both services and how you can start your Million Dollar Business!

For some it may sound counter-intuitive, but one of the best places to look for solid, sustainable business growth over the long term is in international markets. While most companies have a presence in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), Latin America and Asia Pacific, the presence is typically limited to the more traditional markets, such as the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan and other leading nations.

Forward thinking organizations, however, have started to develop their presence in the emerging markets. Typically, emerging markets are thought of as the BRIC nations of Brazil, Russia, India and China. It is true that from a global economics perspective these are the primary emerging countries. But when it comes to developing your own emerging markets, your selection may differ.

The Market Development Plan (MDP)

You need to select the markets that best align with your solution, your business and your ability to deliver based on customer expectations. Just as you would create a Market Requirements Document (MRD) to determine the viability of a new technology and initiate development, so too, would you create such a document for international market expansion. In this case, a Market Development Plan (MDP) provides you with the data and details for successfully entering a new, international market. When it comes to creating a well developed, focused MDP, it is just a matter of adhering to the three R’s. In grade school that meant the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic. In the world of an MDP, though, it is a different set of building blocks:

Research

The US Customs Office is currently running a “Know before you go” campaign.  When you are planning your international market expansion, follow that same thinking. Know everything you can about the market you want to enter – before you go there.  That may sound rather obvious, but companies can sometimes be easily influenced by factors that are not necessarily aligned with their business.  It is important to understand that a market is a fit for your particular solution, meaning that there is a clear need in this specific market, the customers recognize the need and are looking for solutions, and there is a relatively clean competitive landscape.  You will also want to know if this country represents near-term or long-term opportunity and how that aligns with your business objectives. For that you will also need to analyze the target customers, market maturity, primary industry segments, and strategic partners/relationships in the market, and as it aligns with your existing business model.

That means gathering and analyzing all internal, as well as external market data you can find. You want to understand the customers, industry sectors, distribution channels, competitors and economic factors for the market. You will want to use this as the starting point to building your MDP.

Review

Once you have built your MDP, the degree of its success will be based on your ability to continually monitor and communicate its results including progress, successes, failures, road blocks, etc.  International market expansion is a resource intensive commitment. The folks responsible for the resources, the bottom line, or the organizations supporting your effort need to understand how things are going.  Ideally, you will have set up a cross-functional team of people from each of the key operational areas. Regular, on-going review with this team will help to head off any issues before they become too great.

Revise

The MDP must be treated as a living, working document. As you begin to engage this new market, you will discover new things that will impact your plans. Market conditions may change. Competitors may act/react differently than anticipated. Or, you may find some of your information or actions were off base. Whatever the case, your MDP must be built with the flexibility to make necessary course corrections on the fly, keeping you moving forward toward your intended objectives.

Focus is the Key to Entering New Markets

Understanding the dynamics of a new geography and potential opportunity is just the beginning. More than in any other dynamic change in your go-to-market strategy, a new geography will require laser focus to your launch efforts. The natural tendency is to go broad and wide.Narrowly focused market segmentation, positioning strategy, clear value propositions, executable programs and audience-specific messaging are critical to entering and gaining a foothold. Strategic partners are also critical to the mix. With a solid, comprehensible and actionable MDP guiding you from the research stage through strategic planning and execution, you will create clear messaging and programs. And you will create a fertile environment for success.

Author: Jeff Ballard is an international marketing executive best known for creating and managing innovative, results-oriented programs and campaigns to drive revenue via new products, markets and channels worldwide.

Stratus Marketing is a leading consulting firm and launch marketing agency for the technology industry. Stratus has helped dozens of leading technology firms to create customer alignment through loyalty initiatives and cross functional teams. Learn more go to www.stratusmarketing.com

To contact Stratus direct email: info@stratusmarketing.com or call 208-761-1489

One of the critical success factor in your post-recession growth plans is your customer base. Your customer base is as valuable an asset to your business, as your people and products are. And your customers can represent the quickest growth opportunity you have.

One of the first places to look in evaluating your post-recession growth strategy is your customer base. A key measurement of your customer base is its loyalty to your company and your products. For some companies, customer loyalty means customer satisfaction. This is not the case, though.  Loyalty goes deeper than merely being satisfied.  Being ‘satisfied’ is really a point of entry with customers. It is an expectation that must be met in order to be in the game. If your customers are not satisfied they will actively go elsewhere.  But to merely be “satisfied” also means to be open to change. Change that the next savvy competitor can leverage to take away your customers.  More importantly, your customers’ loyalty levels will dictate just how effective of a role they will play in your growth plans.

There are several companies providing customer loyalty analysis, each offering their own terminology. In general terms, though, the overall customer loyalty spectrum goes from aversion to dislike to satisfaction to like and to champion.  The objective is to build your business plans, sales and marketing programs and customer interactions with the focus of keeping you customers in the top end of that spectrum.

As you look at loyalty — and just how much attention you want to afford to it — look at the benefits. Customer loyalty moves beyond simply satisfaction to create:

• Recommendations for your product- either formally as in a customer reference or informally within their peer group
• Ready-made pipeline for cross-selling other products and services
• A profitable well for new and updated solutions
• Lower churn rates, ensuring more customers for the long term
• Positive positioning of your company in on-line forums, blogs, Tweets and other social media resources utilized or frequented by the key decision makers

So what is the best way to move forward and implement a customer loyalty initiative?  There really is no cookie-cutter formula. Nor is there a one-size-fits-all program that you can just pick up and adopt. There is, however, a process you can follow to create, implement and manage a successful customer loyalty program.  And it is as simple as A, B, C.

Alignment

The first step is to ensure that your business model is in alignment with your customers’ business model and their most pressing needs. This means understanding your customers’ business – their industry, their customers and their business pains – and knowing it better than your competitors do. With this level of knowledge you can better align your sales, marketing, and support with your customers’ business. To the degree you can, you may want to segment your base and create a targeted customer program to be even more fully engaged with your customers and creating stronger ties with your business.

An important thing to consider when aligning with your customer is the current sales planning model. How effectively does your territory planning, account planning or opportunity planning integrate valuable customer information? Is it built around solving customer pain points? Does it incorporate industry trends and best practices relevant to their needs? Answering these questions will require that you have access to the right information and the ability to turn it into actionable business intelligence and effective programs.

Buy-In

Once you have (1) set up a customer-focused infrastructure to more effectively engage your customer base, and (2) developed a sales model that’s well aligned with customer needs, the next step is to ensure that it’s adopted throughout all levels of your organization. That means ensuring that the new model is endorsed throughout the management chain and reinforced as an integral part of the sales management discipline.

After management, the sales team also needs to embrace this initiative. After all, they are the primary champions on the front line and the key to its success. Last but not least, the new model must have buy-in from the other key constituents in the organization that will help make it successful. This includes marketing, technical support, customer service, development, accounting and other groups that can have an impact on customer engagement.

One thing to consider for buy-in is establishing cross-functional teams in support of key accounts or tiers of accounts. Representing each of the key areas of your business, these teams can be valuable to the sales planning process, ensuring a higher level of customer engagement and avoiding “silos of influence” that can derail the initiative.

Consistency

For your customer loyalty efforts to be successful at all, they must have consistency. To start up a program and begin to engage with your customer in this new, more effective way, only to stop after a while, or to do so intermittently will do much more harm than good.  The process you establish must be an on-going effort that is part of your daily, quarterly and annual sales management function. To work, it must not only stick, but it must be built right into your organizational DNA.

Author: Jeff Ballard is an international marketing executive best known for creating and managing innovative, results-oriented programs and campaigns to drive revenue via new products, markets and channels worldwide.

Stratus Marketing is a leading consulting firm and launch marketing agency for the technology industry. Stratus has helped dozens of leading technology firms to create customer alignment through loyalty initiatives and cross functional teams. Learn more go to www.stratusmarketing.com

To contact Stratus direct email: info@stratusmarketing.com or call 208-761-1489

The dual CPM®/CPMM® certification is independent of industry or national specifics, identifying the ability to lead any product, in any geography, and at any point in the product life cycle. According to the AIPMM, “The CPM® credentials indicate a thorough understanding of the functions responsible for championing new products throughout the front end of the product lifecycle, from inception through to launch. The CPMM® credentials indicate a thorough understanding of the product marketing functions which are responsible for ensuring the success of the product in the marketplace.” Deborah’s passing the certifications reflect her expertise in Product Management and Product Marketing, which includes building case studies, conducting competitive analyses, developing product specifications and product launch plans, managing the product life cycle, planning strategic marketing, and creating marketing campaigns to drive customer acquisition and revenue.

Ms. Matus is an experienced Product Marketing Manager, with tenures at Advanced Micro Devices, Micron Technology and MPC Computers, totaling over 20 years experience in product marketing of high technology products to worldwide markets, and is currently working as an independent consultant. She holds a BS in Business Management from Montana State University and is a volunteer with the Assistance League of Boise and the Eagle-Star Technology Corridor organization.

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For embedded components of tech-products, the lore of the ‘Intel Inside’ ingredient branding is a ‘siren’s song’ promising strong consumer identification and untold sales.  Like most stories of easy money and innovation in marketing, there is much more to tell.  While Intel has achieved ‘brand nirvana,’ the initial capital outlay for the ingredient marketing co-op easily measured in billions of dollars.  The advertising co-op that paid for a portion of computer manufacturers ads was heavily supplemented with television advertising, further increasing the cost beyond most marketing budgets.

A similar ingredient branding co-op is unlikely in today’s computing or mobile marketplace for a reason other than the marketing budget requirements, the commoditization effect it has on the entire consumer product.  Computer manufacturers learned the hard-way that the intense branding of the processor severely reduced the distinction of their product to the market — it is unlikely that another advertising co-op would be accepted with this outcome as precedent.

INVISIBLE BRAND

Even if your brand is invisible to its end-user, their input is vital to ensuring your product is the ‘secret ingredient’ in their favorite products.  Know your customers’ customers as well or better than they do.  For the ingredient brand, segmenting the end-user market is the most critical step in a good go-to-market strategy. 

Even if your brand is invisible to its end-user, their input is vital to ensuring your product is the ‘secret ingredient’ in their favorite products.

Segmenting is storytelling where the characters are the archetypal customers, high-quality images that speak to a broader reality.  Key to defining the characters in the narrative of segmenting is that they spreads word-of-mouth referencing within the group.  Successful customer-centric businesses like Best Buy push segmentation characterization down to the sales floor, training all associates to recognize different customers by their service needs, product associations, and sales conversions.  For the embedded technology marketer, end-user segments should initially be divided along their acceptance of technological innovation as either innovators, early adopters, early or late majority, or laggards.

WHERE A CHIP IS NOT JUST A CHIP…

Most embedded technology companies have a diverse portfolio of products thanks to the technology treadmill of the product life-cycle and the increasing availability design or end-of-line circuitry changes to a volume part.  While operationally minor, these additional products can be in vastly different consumer applications, targeting a different self-referencing segment. 

Following the bell-curve, the median adopter of technology also represents the largest market segment while those who tech-up with each new product are in a smaller, although more vocal self-referencing group.  Looking at the characterization of each of these segments can help in properly positioning each product in your portfolio to the most appropriate end user.

•             Innovators – “The Techie”

-              Guru endorsement & Tech Press Coverage

-              Demos/Trials

-              Open-Source Access

•             Early Adopters – “Key is Customer Service”

-              Whole Product

-              Positive Product Reviews

-              Positive Benchmarks

•             Early Majority – “Big Fish Consumers”

-              Market Share

-              Primary Product Placement

-              Vertical Press Coverage

•             Late Majority – “Your Mom”

-              Company Recognition

-              Full Product Line

-              Strategic Business Partners

Due to their own innovative and contagious energy toward a product, innovators and early adopters can act as de facto product marketers capable of sidelining product adoption by the majority market.  It is easier to market to people like us — techie’s who get it.  Far harder is targeting the majority market that wants 360º-support, preeminent product placement, and vendor-supported applications.

It is easier to market to people like us — techie’s who get it.  Far harder is targeting the majority market that wants 360º-support, preeminent product placement, and vendor-supported applications.

For each of the product adoption segments that you believe you have a product for, list those attributes that you believe they have (or better yet, that your research clarifies them as having).  Weigh each of these attributes as to their importance to the end-user, your strategic partner in the manufacturing of the final consumer product, and in your business model.  This weighted score of attributes is a critical component in a business model that ensures end-user needs are met within the structure of the channel.

BACK TO THE CHANNEL – SUPPORTING THE CONSUMER PRODUCT STRATEGIC PARTNER

Developing a marketing partnership with the consumer product manufacturer can assist in the strategic placement of ingredient products into the hands of the end-user.  Key components  in a successful embedded-technology partnership will be the:

•             expansion of product services,

•             development of systems that the end-users desire,

•             and channel-structure that enables strategic sharing of advertising costs. 

Targeting the consumer product manufacturers price sensitivity with shared advertising and service schemes while remaining diligent on marketing services that are desirable to the end-user will ensure a successful partnership — even without ingredient branding.

Aptina has numerous products in different positions on the technology adoption curve (see below) that could benefit from further segmentation and individual strategic positioning development to better capture market and partner with consumer product manufacturers.  System-On-Chip technology offers much of what the end-user desires in ‘instantaneous darkroom’ and RAW image processing but requires strong partnering with camera manufacturers to enable longer R&D cycles of learning & more complex user interface.

Aptina is well-positioned to take advantage of an increase technical sophistication in camera products by diligently developing end-user segmentation and by partnering in the channel to develop whole-product strategies.

About the Authors

Justin Harnish is Marketing Consultant specializing in semiconductor and solar products where he has spent ten years as an engineer and marketer.

Stratus Launch Marketing is a leading international launch marketing firm that focuses on bringing new technologies to the global marketplace.  Their clients include new product groups in Fortune 500 companies and hundreds of new technology startups.