Marketing Strategy – Maturity Scorecard
The most fundamental question in assessing your marketing maturity is “Do you have a strategy?” Although fundamental this is often not crisp or may be very well thought out but not well communicated. Here are some questions that need to be answered to ensure your market strategy is well founded:
- Have you defined your target prospect/customer? What types of industry, what size? Who in these companies will buy?
- Do you have a well defined value proposition? Is your messaging aligned with the different roles your will encounter in selling?
- Are you well positioned? Is your value proposition and messaging differentiated? Do you understand the competitive landscape? What competitive strengths do you have?
- How do you go to market? Are you leveraging a direct sales model? Do you need a channel? Are there partners involved?
- Are the results (sales & customer wins) consistent with what the strategy expects? This is the ultimate measure of success.
Communicating the strategy is just as important as having one. If not well communicated a crisp & sharp strategy bleeds into average.
The following table will help you score yourself on market strategy. For each attribute of strategy you can score between 0-25 points, for a total of 100.
Marketing Maturity Scorecard
High technology marketing is a mix of art, science, luck, and hard work. It also requires a diverse set of skills which include strategic planning, creativity, ROI analysis , etc. If you have multiple solutions at various stages in their life-cycle, how do you balance your investment in time and dollars?
I have recently created marketing maturity scorecard to share with the rest of the executive team and the board of directors to ensure alignment in the mix of investment across solutions. Essentially the scorecard captures 4 key elements:
- Messaging, positioning – Do you have a clear value proposition, the correct positioning, and the supporting messaging?
- Assets/Content – Do you have a set of supporting sales tools (or assets) such as whitepapers, PowerPoints, brochures, etc. that support your positioning?
- Customer Proof Points – What customer testimonials do you have? Prospects want this way more than your brochure.
- Promotional/Lead Gen – Do you have the right promotional plan, do you know which channels leads to which prospects and roles?
In my case the solution portfolio include a mature market where we are market leaders and the marketing objectives are to re-enforce market leadership and generate leads. Alternatively I have a brand new solution where first we need decide what we can say, and then build the brand.
I will drill into each of these topics over the next few posts.
Do You Play The Ball…
…or does the ball play you?
One of the VP’s of engineering used this expression to describe people within our organization and I think it is a great lense to review your actions and work from. Essentially, what we observed is that there are those that create, initiate, and drive efforts, while others are re-active.
Playing the ball is especially important to focus on in this economic climate. Read the WSJ every day and learn of large losses, big layoffs. For some reason the people remaining at companies do not end up with less work, but more. The old “do less with more” management mantra. Of course the real answer is: do less. But do the things that matter most.
Here are some questions for marketing to ask themselves as to whether they “play the ball”
1) How often does sales come with a deal that needs only one new critical feature to close a huge deal?
2) Do you prepare your marketing plan and then present at the quarterly sales meeting or does the quarterly sales meeting get scheduled driving you to create the marketing plan?
3) Same as #2 with product road maps…
4) Does you boss come and ask you “we need a market analysis of the XXX segment” or do you present to your boss before she asks?
You get the point. Today’s reduced staff and heavier workload, is not a reason to ignore the strategy. In fact it is a time to revisit and revamp your strategy.
Setting Sun
OK, that was easy, and when a company is down it is sometimes too easy to pile on. However, in reading Dan Farber’s post on the cuts at Sun Microsystems and their strategy to get back on success path, it makes me relfect on what made Sun a great brand it its day. Its current focus on open source is unfortunately only a cousin of what their past succesful strategy was.
During the 90′s Sun was a great company. At the time they were a customer of mine and I was always impressed with the people, products, and marketing. What made them unique? I believe it was their vision and innovation. Sun was a leader at promoting open concepts ”for the good of the market” that resulted in a big pull for their hardware and operating systems. Examples include NFS, TCP/IP, and finally Java. Take TCP/IP, Sun was big promoter at a time when Novell and Microsoft were each battling for control with their own LAN protocols. Sun’s creation and promotion of Java changed the developer’s landscape.
So why is their current strategy a distant cousin? True it is still a drive for open standards. However, it is a follower’s strategy not a leader’s. In past campaigns they were the first and most vocal supporter. No one would view this as innovative.
