Growth is an imperative aspect of doing business. But, it needs to be profitable growth and that part is not always a given.
When companies “go to market,” they bring together all the commercial functions—sales, marketing, brand management, pricing, and consumer insight—to drive the bottom line.
But recently, with uncertainty and financial constraints, companies are focusing on efficiency. This often results in energetic cost cutting, even in the ‘go to market’ commercial functions which drive the revenue. And while this results in greater levels of productivity, it also reaches a point of diminishing returns.
And now, on top of this, come three new changes that need to be considered.
What’s being called a ‘Go-to-Market Revolution’ is a wave of technological and customer-driven change that is altering the way in which companies deploy their commercial capabilities. And they don’t all make an efficiency drive particularly easy. The new era isn’t quite changing the fundamentals required for go-to-market excellence, but it is creating new possibilities.
The three tides driving this new revolution include customer pathways, technology and advanced analytics and globalization. Let’s take a quick look at all three…
Customer pathways are the ways in which consumers learn about and buy products. The way in which this is done has dramatically shifted due to technology, communications and media. Not long ago, you could go to market and launch through television networks, radio, billboards and print publications. However, the world has now evolved into a customer-driven universe of internet connectivity, web searches, cable TV, peer-review marketing and mobile devices and apps.
This customer pathway revolution is affecting every industry, be it business to consumer or business to business. Developing a deep customer understanding and consumer-centric view is the bed rock to success.
The second driver of change is the rapid and transformative evolution of ‘smart’ data, advanced analytics and modeling. This data revolution has helped transform business sectors, from retail to finance services.
In times of slow growth, companies need to successfully satisfy the specific needs of each consumer. Through mining data, companies are able to discover hidden pockets of growth in richly diverse markets and better cater to the smaller markets. Going to market becomes going to multiple niches.
While the concept of segmenting markets has been around for decades, the new digital and mobile technologies allow access to analytics of enormous quantities of sales and marketing information at a more microscopic level than ever before. Not only this, the new technologies allow quicker and less expensive data collection than ever before.
The final driver of the Go-to-Market Revolution is globalization. The rise of globalization has opened up labor markets, expanded offshore production and ushered foreign competitors to the doorstep of domestic businesses. It is shortening product cycles and speeding shifts in consumer tastes. Go-to-Market strategies need to be flexible and adapt to these dynamic market conditions.
What companies need to remember is that commercial success differs significantly from country to country.
These three tides of change have significantly contributed to the disruption and heightened competitive pressures that affect virtually every global industry today. For business leaders with ambition and foresight, the Go-to-Market Revolution offers a magnitude of fresh opportunities to attract and engage customers and to drive growth and profitability.
