It's Crunch Time

It just happens to be serendipitous that the name of my marketing blog and my first post coincides with what many believe to be "crunch time" in the U.S. economy. For a very good snap shot at why, check out this article on Business Insider.

I'm certainly not a fatalist though, but it does serve to make a larger point - in building a sustainable company, there will always be incredible challenges, even ones seemingly out of our control, or are they? Even in this circumstance, brand extension and demand expansion exist with the right marketing and sales strategy and execution, operating in what I refer to as a "crunch time" model. Yes, the two are very much intertwined and there needs to be total alignment between them from a strategic and operational perspective, including positioning, segmentation, campaign execution and measurement, with marketing adopting the sense of urgency found in great sales organizations.

I'm working right now for a leading SaaS company and developing a sophisticated go-to-market strategy to penetrate enterprise segments. Note the plural form of segments, because there is no one enterprise segment in this instance, and each one represents a different business opportunity at each point in time. With a challenging economy, a limited direct sales model and finite marketing capabilities, it becomes all the more important to make very smart, strategic decisions about where to align the company's value proposition with the right segment, and then design the messaging and campaigns to attack that market, focused on the roles of the buyer, their business need, the existing credibility of the brand in that space and the degree of vulnerability of the competition. Sales is intimately involved in the entire process, and ultimately needs to provide input and buy-in. Contrast that with the conventional approach of setting a sales target at a macro level with no concerted sales and marketing strategy to maximize the outcome, which breeds longer sales cycles, missed opportunities and unprofitable business.

Is the deeper approach more costly in terms of time and budget? Fortunately no, Internet marketing produces the efficiencies to make the crunch time model work. I'm currently reading Geoffrey Moore's book, Dealing with Darwin: How Successful Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution, and I was struck by his emphasis on marketing innovation being a strong differentiator and game changer. Sure, great marketing innovation involves creating the iPod and iTunes, but it also involves out innovating your competition every day, and finding multiple, integrated ways to carry a message forward that produces a compelling reason to buy and adopt a product. I was struck this week by the effects of our PR campaign (purely PR 2.0 based) that communicated the widespread adoption of our software in large, enterprise accounts, including a multi-billion dollar one. The campaign was conducted jointly with sales, with sales sending the press release to their prospects, and large enterprises started popping up wanting to know how their competitors were leveraging technology in this economy. It's Crunch Time!