“MPS is dead! The market is saturated!”
I hear these words all too often these days, mostly from organizations whose core business model is still hardware sales. These companies are mostly trying to transform their business to include managed services; however, they’ve yet to create the proper market strategy and execution plan to succeed.
Managed services have always been an excellent choice for companies in a challenging economy. When business executives are driving cost management initiatives, or seeking to shift the focus of internal resources toward other key business objectives, they still turn to managed services, and specifically MPS and IT services. The key is to employ a dynamic market strategy that is capable of rolling with the changes in the industry.
So, what is the right market strategy, and how does one transform their sales organization and their company to maximize ROI? Setting up your transformation doesn’t happen overnight, and it doesn’t happen by just throwing services into the sales bag. It will take a serious amount of thought and insight to deliver a strong market strategy and execution plan and change the way your company goes to market. Over the next few months, I’ll share some insight in these pages into key areas to setting up a successful transformation execution plan. The following is a brief outline of those areas.
Key Business Objectives – I believe that key business objectives are the foundation to the business plan and go-to-market strategy. You can’t drive success if you don’t know where you want to go. Is your end goal to sell the company, turn it over to family members, or double its size? Regardless of your end goals, you have to define what you want, and when you want it, to set up a successful market strategy and execution plan. Key business objectives set a focus for the whole company to follow.
Market Strategy – Your market strategy and execution plan is the roadmap for the future. It defines the future direction of the company, your expectations, the products and services you intend to take to market, and who will want them. The market strategy, when done correctly, identifies the challenges and solutions you face in the future and empowers your marketing team to build the path to drive the company forward.
Marketing – Too many companies still believe that their sales team is their marketing arm, when nothing could be further from the truth. Effective marketing empowers your company. Marketing is the engine that does the research and defines your target and your company’s value proposition. Marketing understands the competition and builds solutions; it helps package competitive programs and solutions to your sales team. This aligns sales efforts and value proposition to your market strategy destination. If you craft a solid marketing strategy you will be well ahead of the game.
Sales Team Model – An awful lot of companies are still stubbornly following an outdated sales team model, which looks much like the old “20/80 model.” This means that a few good reps are driving the sales and many underperforming reps are lagging behind. Sales practices have changed dramatically, and a reorganization of the sales force is long overdue at many companies. This reorganization will free up money to be more effectively used elsewhere. Reorganizing around high-dollar, top talent has proven to be a more effective strategy time and time again.
Training – Today’s training should go beyond simple sessions of product knowledge; it should instill a complete business knowledge foundation so that your reps can understand why business owners and senior level executives make the decisions they do. Offering canned sales pitches and rote speeches is a thing of the past, and the pitch is sure to fall apart when the executive starts asking questions the sales rep is not prepared for. As the old saying goes, “If you’re gonna be convincing, you’ve got to be convinced!” Training should instill in your reps the same passion for the product that you have.
Execution and Accountability – Our data shows that a good 70% of companies have little or no accountability for their sales reps. This number is staggering when you consider that the sales reps are in many ways the driving force of your business, attracting new clients and increasing revenues. Too often I have heard executives say things like, “The reps know what they have to do, so why aren’t they doing it?” To this my answer is, “Whose company is it, yours, or theirs?” Executives need to take active control of their companies and put accountability standards in place to ensure everyone is involved in the company’s success. Effective sales execution and accountability must align with your market strategy, and it must have a solid value proposition, defined targets, milestones, and expectations.
MPS–it’s not dead! And no, the market is not saturated. We simply have to deliver a high value conversation to a high value target, sharing expertise equal to the task. And everything in our company needs to align with a market strategy that gets this done.
