Building Your B2B Market Leadership Machine

Mar 15, 2016 | Breakthrough Marketing

In today’s highly competitive B2B markets, to be a leader, you must build and run a modern marketing machine that can be thought of like a race car.  In fact, market leaders need to be great at three things; Marketing Automation,  Content Marketing, and Messaging and Positioning.  These can be thought of as the engine, the tires and the fuel of the race car.

When you have a high performance engine, the right tires, and high test fuel, market leaders can achieve high performance with content that is relevant, programs that are efficient and results that are highly effective.  This is show in this simple drawing:

Let’s take a bit of a closer look at the intersections of each of these circles.   As we can see, if we want to achieve leadership, we really do need all three.  For example, with poor marketing automation, we are left ineffective and inefficient.  Without good content marketing processes and approaches, our go to market will lack efficiency and relevance, and without good messaging and positioning, our go to market race car will lose both relevance and effectiveness.

This diagram may seem obvious to some, and daunting to others.  As a consultant focused on Market Leadership, I’ll make three observations related to this, and look forward to hearing yours.

  1. If I were a CMO again, as I was last year in an interim role, I’d focus first on having the right fuel for the car, ie, building the best messaging and positioning I could.  Given that doing all three of these with excellence is difficult to achieve, I’d strive for excellence here first.
  2. Observation 2 – My next investment priority would be in building a well tuned marketing automation engine.  My reasoning for this is that before I tackle efficiency by optimizing and investing in excellence in content marketing, I want to drive effectiveness and relevance first.
  3. Observation 3 – Many organizations I see are highly efficient with their go to market efforts.  They have tuned the engine and have beautiful tires.  However, they are feeding their car with low test messaging and positioning, and fail to be relevant and effective like market leaders are.  It’s no surprise that the Content Marketing Institute’s September 2015 study entitled “B2B Content Marketing 2016 – Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends” reported that the number one challenge identified by content marketers was “producing enough relevant and engaging content”.

How do we build the right race car and feed it with the right fuel?  Why do so many organizations struggle for years with nailing the right messaging and positioning and what cost do they pay? What does success look like?

I’ve written a brief whitepaper on this very topic, called 6x in Six Months, which outlines my thoughts on a road map for achieving market leadership and increased revenue, and briefly answers some of these questions.   If you’d like a copy, send me an email at ken@kjrassociates.com with the Subject: 6x in 6  or schedule a 30 minute chat with me here.

Happy racing – Ken

5 Times to Fix Your B2B Messaging – and It’s Probably at Least One of Them Now!

Mar 15, 2016 | Breakthrough Marketing

When I chat with CEOs, CMOs and VPs of Sales in B2B technology companies, it’s almost always about “re-messaging” or “re-positioning” their company, product or service or some combination of these.  Often I hear, “I know we need to do this, but I am not sure it’s the right time…”

Well, I believe that if you are not sure, it probably IS the right time!  Here are five windows of opportunity that I find are DEFINTILEY the right time, and if you miss these, you miss an opportunity to increase your breakthrough, opportunity generation and sales.

#1 – Our sales guys say the “messaging is broken” – Sales is your canary in the coal mine.  They are the first to feel market shifts, long before the folks in the “factory” become attuned to it.  If sales says it is broken, it probably is. Also, fixing messaging is a great opportunity to bring senior sales folks into the process and get both their insight into the market and buy-in into the output.

#2- We aren’t in the deals we should be – Sales is finding out about deals late. And when we do find out, the competitor has already nearly locked up the deal.  This is a symptom that you are playing on someone else’s turf.  You need to step back and develop a Viewpoint message that aligns with your customer’s world.  This may be the missing piece of the equation.

#3- A new product, product line or major capability about to be launched – A natural time to step back and ask, “why does this matter to our customer’s world”, “what’s our unique value”, and “have we told the story the way we need to”.   Every homeowner knows that when you add an addition to the house, you often end up rippling changes through everything, not just the addition you did.  Cohesive messaging, like cohesive design, can’t just be tacked on.  When it’s time to remodel, think about the whole, not just the new part

#4 – That pesky competitor is getting all the buzz – And damn it, we’ve been shipping all that stuff forever, or that one feature sure seems small, what’s going on?  Often the landscape of the customer shifts in a way that a small nimble start up notices and you don’t.  Pay attention not just to the technology, but to the VALUE that customers think they will get from the new shiny object.  And why is that value rising to the top of the buyers priority.  Are we aligning our value with the customer’s reality as much as our messaging should?

#5 – We are doing great but.. – There’s a bigger opportunity out there and it is time to be bold and capture it.  Re-positioning from strength is often one of the most overlooked ways to accelerate demand and growth. Especially when combined with #3 above.   Positioning from strength let’s you grow your market faster and leverage the experience and customer success you’ve worked so hard for.

Of course, it’s usually some combination of the reasons above.  If you have not revisited your messaging and positioning with the last 12 months, it’s probably time, and there’s no time like now!