Building a complete and differentiated go-to-market plan is something all marketing professionals strive to achieve.
We typically follow a methodology to ensure that the target customer is at the center of the plan and that we have a clear and compelling value proposition to generate a positive response.
Many marketing professionals have learned about Neil H. Borden's "The Concept of the Marketing Mix" (circa 1964). The ingredients of Borden's marketing mix centered on the 4Ps: product, pricing, placement, and promotion.
But those 4Ps require that the marketing professional develop the optimal marketing mix, including market insights, marketing/sales programs, and measurement tools and metrics. Unfortunately, those actions too often become afterthoughts in today's hurried time to market.
Assuring Success With the 4Ms
The key to a successful plan based on the 4Ps means starting with a framework from the outset that includes what I like to call "the 4Ms." And let's be clear: We're talking about a demand generation program coupled with quality sales enablement that ensures responses and leads are handled optimally and with precision.
- Market intelligence
- Modeling
- Mix
- Measurement (and make sure you assess how you will measure before you begin developing the program)
The 4Ms are the marketing activities that act as the glue binding Marketing and Sales together. Ensuring that Sales and Marketing have skin in the game motivates both teams to achieve marketing objectives that focus ultimately on revenue.
1. Market Intelligence and Analysis
Anyone raising money to fund a startup needs both a great idea and a large and growing market they'll be able to address. In the same way, regardless of the maturity of your company, you need to develop a business case for what part of the market you intend to address, why it makes sense, and how you are going to do it.
The process of researching the total addressable market for your proposed product or service is only a small piece of the necessary analysis. Identifying the viable market segments that your solution can address, along with understanding the customer profile and primary business drivers, is the baseline for any plan. Whether you have a solution that requires prospecting for new customers, or perhaps you have the benefit of an installed customer base that you can cross-sell and upsell into, the same rules apply:
- Do your research. Analyze the data to determine what slice of the market you intend to address.
- Determine the challenges and pain points you will solve.
- Articulate the benefits your solution offers that are differentiating from the competition. And make sure salespeople are armed with concise but useful competitive intelligence and SWOT analysis.
- Finally, before you assume you have all the answers, ensure that your primary research includes meetings with your sales teams and channel partners (depending on the go-to-market), and sales training with the sales organization to assess their knowledge of the market and their customer base. Often that's where the rubber meets the road. Understand any objections they may have and address them. Make it clear that success depends on Sales readiness and buy-in.
2. Modeling
With a lot of great data that's been sliced and diced, you can now justify moving the plan to the next stage.
Nomenclature aside, your next step is to model a "sales program," a holistic set of resources, tools, and activities that enable both your sales force to be effective and your customers to engage with your organization. The key to this is to ensure you provide Sales with prescriptive instructions on how to use the resources and when to use them.
And don't think of Sales enablement separately from demand generation. The two should be tightly linked. Sales enablement tools and resources you provide your salespeople and customer success teams should be integrated with customer engagement demand generating tactics (telemarketing scripts, email templates) so that Sales is part of the marketing engine and Marketing is helping to drive sales funnel.
So that Sales understands how Marketing intends to create an ongoing customer experience, providing details on how the entire program or campaign will work helps everyone take ownership in the outcome. Building the marketing funnel means that marketing must invest in...
- Awareness (advertising, email, social, tradeshows, and PR)
- Consideration (web/seminars, whitepapers, case studies)
- Preference (demos, ROI and TCO Tools, financing offers, discounts, holistic product/solution offers)
When sales teams understand the logic behind the marketing program, they can effectively leverage each prospect interaction and the offers that have initiated a response.
Close the loop with review teams that provide continual feedback on the approach, validating or invalidating the tactics themselves.
The job of program modeling is about accelerating sales cycles and helping Sales to move customers more quickly from the prospect stage to the propose stage.
3. Your Mix
If your company or product is immature, awareness is critical. If you are marketing to your installed base, your emphasis may reside more in the consideration and preference stages. After all, you are marketing to existing customers who are familiar with your brand but may not understand why they should upgrade or build upon the solution they already have.
Targeted demand generation with case study offers, whitepapers, ROI tools, or financing may prove to generate high response rates.
4. Measurement
You might be thinking, "I cannot get the funding for a robust system to measure my marketing activities." That may indeed be the case, but today there are great hosted solutions that enable you to have an integrated marketing and measurement system up and running in less than a week.
At the end of the day, you have to justify your marketing spend and measure your return on marketing investment. Whether your marketing program is channel-driven or direct sales-led will determine where the integrated marketing and measurement will take place, so figure that out early.
If systems are not in place to support your measurement goals, take a step back and reassess the plan and go-to-market.
You need to measure response rates, leads, appointments set, pipeline, and sales so that you can refine, improve, and optimize your campaigns based on what prospects are responding to, what they are registering for, and what content they are downloading.
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Adding the 4Ms is not designed to make things more complicated. The 4Ms methodology ensures that the fundamental aspects of your plan and strategy are sound and can be executed and measured. Because, as we all know, a great marketing strategy does not always translate into an effectively executed plan.
