Growth Insights for CEOs

Advanced analytics provide the opportunity to integrate external and internal data to gain deep intelligence that allows businesses to predict the future with significantly more accuracy and personalize solutions at an entirely new level. How will analytics impact your competitiveness?

A marketing consultant I know posted on his Facebook page today: “Always wonder why some CEOs would rather diddle with things on a web page or other marketing minutia than deal with really important business strategy issues or building a company team.” While I know this was more an expression of his current frustration with a client than a real question, it got me thinking—and I suspect the answer may be relatively simple: Entrepreneurs stay in startup mode too long.

Guest Blog by: Lee Frederiksen
Prospects’ buying behaviors are continually evolving. Staying on top of current trends can help your professional services firm position itself in the right place at the right time.

A recent study by the Hinge Research Institute has identified more about how professional services buyers are behaving—from how they’re finding and evaluating your firm to how they’re making their purchasing decisions. The study surveyed over 1,000 buyers and tracked some interesting trends that could influence your firm’s marketing choices.

To give you the inside scoop, we’ve pulled a few of the most significant findings to create a three step plan for your firm to increase your visibility and get found by more prospects.

When consulting with businesses, one of the fundamentals I look at is whether their business strategy and marketing efforts are in alignment. Just like a well-aligned vehicle will always move confidently in the right direction, so, too, will a business relationship – provided there’s the right connection between what your customers value, and what you provide.

Many times, I will hear companies boast of offering great quality, cost and delivery; how they are innovators; and how they have the best technical support teams. The reality is that it’s quite rare for a firm to be the best at everything – and often, pursuing such a superlative-laden strategy can often be a suboptimal marketing strategy to pursue.

CEOs and Presidents of mid-sized, privately held or family-owned businesses are required to make decisions on a wide range of strategic and tactical issues. To ensure they make the best decisions on critical strategic questions, it’s important to be informed about current best practices. Accessing the perspectives of experts in a particular area can help ensure executives make an informed decision.

As a marketing consultant, I’ve had the opportunity to work with and observe a range of advisory firms, gaining insight into the strengths of various consulting formats. The Triad Greensboro, Winston-Salem and High Point has a wide range of consulting services and business advisory formats available to CEOs and Presidents. 

As part of a recent consulting assignment, I spoke with some of my client’s key customers. As is typical in many small and mid-sized B2B companies, these customers were periodically contacted by their salesperson for account follow up and maintenance. However, during my conversations it turned out that a few customers were harboring significant frustrations even though the vendor had believed all was well. My client was actually in danger of losing business from these large accounts.

The question is why hadn’t this frustration come up in conversations with the sales team?

The Strategic Planning Process

The strategic planning process is simple in concept. You gather your planning team of five to twelve executives and over the course of two days, you answer three basic questions:

With every passing day, content becomes more and more critical to informing prospects and customers about products and services, in order to drive sales growth. But in a hyper-intense world where many people read less and less each day and prefer to get news and information from pictures with cutlines and one-minute or shorter videos, how can small and mid sized companies afford to engage the talents needed to package content in an optimal way for a visually-oriented target audience?

How many times have we all heard about the discord between the Sales and Marketing organizations? http://www.slideshare.net/pardot/sales-vs-marketing-the-original-game-of-thrones. This discord intensifies based upon whether you work in a Sales or Marketing driven culture. A CEO recently asked me why these two organizations don’t work well together, and how he can improve their overall relationships, and more importantly their individual and collective effectiveness.

I had to take a moment to process this inquiry as I have personally experienced the strained relationships. Some of my favorite questions that I have heard from my team and Sales brethren have been: “What do they do all day?” “They do a lot of stuff, but aren’t accountable for business goals?” or, “They just don’t listen, or follow-up on things.”

Over the years that I was in marketing leadership, I experienced the variety of misconceptions that companies had with marketing. It was rare to find a company that viewed marketing as a profitable tool to communicate the vision of the company. Instead, they expected marketing to compensate for their shortcomings, and somehow convince customers to prefer us despite our failures.