The Why
Why will you take a different approach?
In order to break through the noise, you will put into action:
Demand Creation: Instead of relying on conventional demand generation programs that cast a wide net and wait for lead interaction and capture to determine if they meet marketing and sales qualification requirements, you will methodically create your demand by proactively engaging the exact companies and contacts that already meet your ideal customer profile.
Thought Leadership Insights: Instead of leading with conventional sales and marketing motions that deliver “me too” messages and commonplace scripts, you will lead with expert insights and unique thought leadership content that establish you as an authority who delivers something of value and is worthy of earning your prospect’s time.
Rigorous Methodology: Instead of linear campaigns and programs or one-off events and content projects, you will adopt a cohesive framework of highly-integrated and intentionally-sequenced actions designed to efficiently target, influence, engage, and learn from your target market to continuously maintain thought leadership status, generate unique insights aligned to market needs, and foster relationships that generate new business.
Ownership Mindset: Instead of carte blanche go-to-market programs and constant pivots from tactic to tactic expecting to catch lightning in a bottle and grow sales, you will take conscious ownership of market segments and purposefully implement a reliable and repeatable methodology to firmly supplant yourself as a market leader in your category and perpetually deliver high-value thought leadership and prospect engagement opportunities to progressively shape and penetrate ideal customers in your target market.
The What
What will you do that’s different?
By taking this approach you will achieve:
Precision: Identify, target, and name the exact companies and the exact people that make up the entire market segment you have chosen to command.
Engagement: Engage your exact target market in a unique, expert way outside of conventional sales and marketing practices, which creates new visibility for your company, establishes you as a credible partner, and earns prospect buy-in to engage.
Scale: Extract the expertise and insights from resident experts and business leaders to package them into tangible, actionable assets and repeatable themes and topics to generate continuous thought leadership and content assets for the business.
Relevance: Spotlight your expertise and deliver valuable content on critical issues, trends, and topics that showcase your expertise in the field while also delivering unique insights that your audience will find valuable and actionable.
Access: Break through the noise of a crowded market where competitors and alternative offerings are competing for buyer’s attention. Gain the direct access to them that you need to establish who you are and create a business relationship.
The How
How will you create and sustain thought leadership status and buyer engagement?
To elevate your status and accelerate capturing mindshare, you will significantly boost sales and marketing effectiveness with:
Finite Strategy: Instead of making general assertions of the markets you will target and having sales and marketing set sail in a general direction, you will recognize that each market segment is finite and will define and identify the exact companies and the exact people you will target.
Market Segmentation: Instead of leaving the market segment you are targeting open to interpretation, you will define the exact industry and company, influencer and buyer personas, to identify the exact companies by name and the exact people by name with which you will target.
Theme Architecture: In addition to approaching your ideal targets with sales motions and marketing collateral with even the best of messaging and positioning, you will instead identify key themes and topics of concern in your industry with which to create common ground for meaningful business engagement.
Primary Market Research: Instead of first pushing traditional marketing collateral and sales aides at your prospects, you will conduct meaningful surveys with insightful questions to engage and pull interest from your prospects towards your company, and generate insights of value to share back with them.
Published Insight: Instead of pitching your product or demonstrating your features and functions, you will produce polished, company-branded research findings, reports, and statistics which offer thought-provoking and valuable insights to prospects, while giving your brand an identity and associating it with critical industry matters.
Media Engagement: Instead of conventional press releases about quarterly momentum or upcoming events, you will issue press releases with statistically backed findings from your study and featuring soundbite quotes from your experts and spokespersons, giving the media something newsworthy, unique, and timely that is much more likely to garner industry attention.
Webcast Event: Instead of traditional product-oriented vendor webinars, you will host a webcast revealing the results of your study and having your experts, guest speakers from customers, or industry influencers discussing the timely and relevant topics raised by your study.
Thought Leadership Assets: Instead of being short on ideas and sporadic when it comes to creating collateral and content assets, you will cultivate and curate a perpetual and organized stream of articles, blog posts, social media posts and tiles, and other digital assets like short video Q&A, all derived from your theme architecture and curated market research.
Exclusive Engagement Experiences: In addition to sales meetings, demos, and client dinners, you will host invitation-only roundtables, panels, and similar networking experiences to engage your high-value “VIP” prospective buyers and influencers in non-sales, thought leadership networking and knowledge exchanges.
Systematic Refinement: Instead of being “one and done” or “moving on to the next”, you will recognize that influencing and penetrating a market is a continuous process whereby you will keep track of the exact entities you engaged as well as what you learned from the studies and individual engagement, to continuously feed new ideas back into subsequent research studies and thought leadership content, while using the methodology as a way to continuously refine your products and services, messaging, and positioning closer to the needs of your target market segment.