Marketing Creates And Captures Markets

We recently won a Global Innovation Award for our Asia Pacific efforts to grow and capture the market.  It was a recognition of marketing in our true profession of strategy, management, multi-channel and integrated marketing across content, social, digital.

Code named CAMP (Create A Market For Power), marketing lead the initiative with understanding the market dynamics, being creative to develop a programmatic approach, daring to do things differently and making an impact to the business.

It helped us achieve several consecutive quarters of year on year growth. Here is the story of how marketing led the way to this transformation.

IBM Power Systems in Asia Pacific is the market leader in the Systems of Records for IT infrastructure requirements.  With the shift in infrastructure consumption to solutions for big data, , we needed to take a hard look at our business to assess what we needed to do differently to win. We started by understanding more about the market place.

Understand The Market. Use Analytics.
The market had developed besides Systems of Records to Systems of Engagement, Insights, etc.  This new area was a fair fight with many market players who were trying to make the shift.  We assessed our position of power, who we needed to work with to extend into the new solution areas and what was needed for the shift.  This was done by using analytics, social and other listening.

Appoint Champions. Lead The Business Plan
Within the business, we needed champions who could prioritize and focus on the growth areas. The champions were needed to pitch the propositions, drive capabilities and align resources. We then mapped out the business and marketing priorities and what the game plan was. Resources included budgets, facilities and people across sales, technical, marketing from both internal and external. 

Develop The New Approach. Make It Simple.
We clearly defined the business problem as “How do we generate revenue for Brand with Who for What Solutions in Where".  The plan included considerations for conditioning the market, recruiting key players, training to develop skills, developing joint go to market, creating the market demand and generated business opportunities.  The approach had to be systematic and scalable, easy to understand and execute, convincing for investors and worthwhile for the time and effort spent.

Choose The Battle Field. Define Success
We chose to test the approach in a region where the opportunity was the largest but adoption was the lowest and in another region where adoption could match up to the pace of the opportunity growth. The approach yielded great results against the targets. In the first market, we grew our revenue by over 400% year on year.  In the second market, we achieved grew almost 200% of our target.

Determine Success Factors. Learn As You Go.
Through this initiative, we learnt that there are critical success factors that made a significant difference.

1. Quality over quantity: creating an impact helps to then ramp up the volume
2. Standardize and simplify: making things easy to speed up go to market.
3. Leveraging others' ability: Each party is better positioned as advocates and have greater influence to their segments, and it would greatly accelerate the results where we can overcome resource or capability limitations and creates self-sufficiency
4. Ownership & team work: Strong collaboration across each activity phase across the various stakeholders is crucial.  Often, one of the team members will just step up to lead beyond their role to ensure success.
5. Integrated marketing: A 360-degree engagement is required - internal and external communications, digital and off-line, business and technical, social and content, etc.

Marketing truly creates and captures the market.  While this winning initiative is being replicated across the business. The principles of how marketing can lead in business transformation can be applied to what we can create to make a difference.

This is the awesomeness of marketing!

How To Swing A Losing Deal To A Winning Deal

Coming off a winning streak in the board room pitch competition for our company’s sales training academy cross each ASEAN countries, I hopped onto my last stop in Thailand to facilitate two teams to develop a winning board room pitch.

One of the teams did not make it to the finals and the other team that did make it to the final four slipped shy of clinching the win. 

Here are my reflections of where the misses were and how the teams could have turned it from a losing deal to a winning deal.

1. Increase Revenue vs Reduce Cost: A proposition that helps increase revenue would almost always make the board members sit up over one that focuses only on reducing cost.  While cutting cost result in savings that can be re-deployed, it is important to consider how that re-deployment can increase revenue.

2. Manage Risk Appetite: With shorter management tenure, having a long return on investment period would jeopardize an ability to demonstrate results in critical early years. Break projects into smaller size phases to allow benefits to be realized faster.

3. Interpret The  Vision: With emerging technology and trends, a visionary proposal must be accompanied by clear road maps on what the solution entails.  Often sellers get caught up in corporate terminology and smart solution names that the customer does not recognize what is being proposed.  In painting the big picture with solutions, it does not mean that one should avoid naming the product.  We should balance both in the light of what the customers understand.

4. Assess The Expert’s Attitude: While subject matter experts are important, but if they do not walk the mile with you while constructing your proposal, do consider ditching them.  Experts who jump in and out of a deal can do more harm as they send the team off on a tangent when they do not invest time to understand the client.  Worse, they waste your time when their ego ask to be pandered to. Getting the right experts with the relevant skills and attitude will help you get to your goal faster.

To cross the finishing line to win, let’s learn from successes and also mistakes. Refine and become better each time. Do not give up.

Secrets to a winning pitch

Our company is known as a great sales company, where sellers who graduate from our Global Sales School are highly respected. With rapidly advancing technology, we have to re-invent ourselves on a regular basis. How much more the front liners that lead the client engagement and the brand teams who provide innovative solutions!

The sales manager plays a part with the day to day coaching of the team for each client.  But even the most seasoned seller needs to take time out think out of the box to create innovative propositions.  

Besides sharing best practice examples, we conduct a Client Experience Academy to put the sales leader through a real account scenario to work through the methodology of creative thinking. The sales leader facilitates discussion with the team to come up with a winning pitch for a pitch competition.

The sales managers have to select an account, gather the account team across the various brand experts, start developing new ideas and learning IBM’s value proposition, deepening expertise and developing the value add for the account.  We arm the team with an opportunity workbook and client provocation tool to generate a unique selling proposition that delivers value in the sales proposal.

Facilitators are assigned to account teams, to help guide the sales managers to use key coaching techniques.In compressed time, the team learns to be concise, yet thorough, to develop a precise pitch.

From a total of 25 teams, 3 finalists are selected for the final battle. The team that I facilitated was voted as the overall champion.

Here are a few tips & secrets on why our team won:

1. Know your client: Besides the account team's knowledge of the client, we often forget that there is a lot of information about the client from annual reports and industry write-ups that help develop deeper understanding of the company’s strategic and business directions.  Knowing this helps to align business and technology.

2. Tap on expertise: There are experts from team mates who have contacts and experience in other similar organizations that can provide insights to validate whether our proposal would resonate with the client, prioritize the initiatives and help quantify the impact.  We also reached out to our Chief Financial Officer to consult on financial metrics and innovative pricing models for feasibility.

3. Break and re-group: An account team is more effective if individuals are allowed to choose to develop sections in their areas of interest.  So it is important to get inputs from the entire team, know when to break up the large team into smaller groups to dive deeper into specific areas, provide clear delegations and then re-group the team again for a final run through.

4. Test & validate: We secured the help of various mentors from different parts of the organization to put our proposal to the test. We validate whether key concerns are addressed adequately and ensure that we have considered every possible angle and have the appropriate response for every stakeholder.

The above applies not just in the pitch competition but also in real life! A boardroom pitch is short but its impact is measured by how extensive the prepartion has been. We sometimes neglect to gather the team to maximize the outcome.

Congratulations & kudos to the sales leader who led the winning team, the account rep and the entire cross brand team that collaborated to deliver the winning pitch.  May you also win the real deal!