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Your weekly thought-provoking exploration into building disruptive capabilities.
How To Win In Market
Last week we delved into what constitutes a ‘Customer Proposition’. Refer to blog: http://www.superiorsales.com.au/what-are-the-challenges-to-building-customer-propositions/ Whilst this is a theoretical construct, it lays out the plan for how we win in market.
We have the right strategy to win with our brands, packs and channels in the market. However the focus must now be how we turn strategy into action in the market through a set of integrated plans. We need to bring our brands to life through each channel and we need to execute in a way that allows us to adapt to market conditions as we go. Changing behavior in consumer, shoppers or customers is neither simple nor easy. Reaching consumers, shoppers or customers is neither simple nor easy. Reaching consumers, shoppers or customers via multiple touch points requires a significant level of coordination. The general saturation of channels with marketing messages makes it hard to cut through.
To get attention and drive the right motivations, we need to develop activities that reach our audience in the right way. To cut through we need to engage in the right place and the right time. Doing this effectively requires striking a balance between the ‘Science’ and the ‘Creativity’. The ‘science’ to really understand the behaviors we are aiming to change and measure our effectiveness in doing this.
The ‘Creativity’ to engage our consumers, shoppers and customers in distinctive communications and offers the stand out while also reinforcing a consistent brand position. Activity Summaries and other tools and outputs in the Superior Integrated Way process help us achieve the right balance between the two.
These activities not only need to occur across touch points for a single brand, but, form the point of view of a customer and our sales-force, must also be well coordinated across all brands, channels and regions. We will fail if we put too many activities into any one channel, or overload our sales force in a particular region. Both channel and brand plans need to be developed in an aligned and integrated way. The Calendar in Integrated Activity Planning helps us see the complexities and make the trade-offs needed. Here we can see all our planned activities across brands, channels and regions on one calendar. This makes it easy to adjust the planned activities where we see too much overlap or where there are gaps. Getting this calendar right in the Integrated Activity Planning step sets us up for smooth execution of our activities in-market. This leads us to execute the right things, in the right places at the right time. And enables us to effectively prepare and train our sales force to deliver the plan.
Our markets are constantly changing – new entrants, new regulations, and new competitor moves – in ways we cannot always predict. Even with the most robust planning up to this point, sometimes things go wrong. When things change or do not work, we must quickly adapt. In the Superior Integrated Way process we set metrics to track where we are winning or losing with each activity. We review and evaluate these to track each cycle planning meeting and make changes and adjustments whenever necessary. Capture these learnings over the course of the cycle; give us a strong foundation from which to build the next Integrated Activity Plan.
At Superior Sales we build programmes leveraging all the core drivers of capability – organisation, people, process and culture, not just skills. Refer to our white paper at http://www.superiorsales.com.au/storytelling/whitepaper/
At Superior Sales our capability experts work extensively with companies to equip sales teams, and indeed the whole organisation, to deliver a better customer experience. Please get in touch at http://www.superiorsales.com.au/contact-us/
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