Buyer-centric go-to-market strategy (with a little help from Geoffrey Moore)

This article is something of an essay on my current thinking about buyer-centric go-to-market strategy and has been shaped by a recent conversation with strategy luminary Geoffrey Moore. Why buyer-centric go-to-market strategy? And why now? As a high-school drop-out, I was in a customer service role from 1980 and earned my first sales role in 1983. I was lucky enough to start my career in sales at a company with a deep commitment to soft-skills training, and to work for managers committed to nurturing any skills they'd helped me acquire. I did very well. Not through any READ MORE ›

By |Strategy|
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A Leaders guide to crossing the chasm post-Covid

Back in 2016, I wrote and shared an article that looked at how you should consider market maturity as an input to setting effective go-to-market strategy. The article was originally triggered by a conversation with the owner of a prospect (later a customer of align.me)  Justin Annesley the Managing Director of local printing company  Inkifingus. Justin was struggling with accelerating his SME print business revenue during a period where traditional printers like his needed to transition from long-run print to shorter run, digitally enabled solutions. Many of his traditional buyers were moving away from him to lower READ MORE ›

By |Strategy|
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Finding rhythm: When’s the right time to talk to your buyer?

When a buyer is ready to talk, we need to talk with them right away. And if they’re not, we need to follow up. But what is the right cadence? How quickly should I follow up? How quickly should my next and my next and my next correspondence be? How many should there be? Landing the right cadence - That's what we're going to explore in this month’s blog. Timing is everything When you say something is just as important as what you say. Imagine you've been used to receiving emails every month notifying you about a READ MORE ›

By |Evergreen, Velocity|
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How to get your business performing like a winning Formula One team

Motor-enthusiasts know that March in Melbourne means cars. Really expensive, really loud, really fast cars. From my desk, I will be able to hear the sound of engines and virtually smell the petrol and rubber burning. In motorsport, the top drivers know that, “the farther you look, the faster you go.”[1] Even before the season begins, a common set of objectives are defined.  Driver and support crew will have agreed how fast they want the car to go – race by race, corner by corner, straight by straight. So why is it useful for businesses to consider the READ MORE ›

By |Velocity|
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How to make a perfect funnel model of your imperfect funnel

You work really hard for three years and does that leave you with 2% of the market or 20% of the market? How do you know? How much market do you need? We’ll explore how to make a perfect funnel model of your imperfect funnel in this week’s show. Here’s how the basic math works. Start at the bottom, how many sales do you need, work out what your leakage is by each stage and do the backward math. Now it can be that simple, but that invites all sorts of questions about what a good funnel READ MORE ›

By |Evergreen, Velocity|
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The key to better response rates? It’s all about speed

  In a study published in the Harvard Business Review, two researchers reported on how quickly businesses responded to online leads. (It was an American study specifically looking at online leads, but I believe it holds true for most countries.) Drawing on work across over 1,000 businesses, they found is that 37% of companies responded within an hour. That's pretty good. At the other end of the spectrum, 23% of businesses didn't respond at all. That's possibly not a good idea. The researcher's conclusion was that businesses are not responding fast enough. Because whilst 37% is good, READ MORE ›

By |Velocity|
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Hurry up and wait! How to reduce sales cycle length

  In B2B marketing, we often fret over the length of the sales cycle - it's always too long. If the economy gets nervous the funnel slows even further. So we're asked something like "how do you make your funnel flow faster?", "how do you reduce the sales cycle?" and "how do you make buyers act faster?" - all variations on a theme. To answer this, we need to understand why and where the funnel is slow. And that means today we need to expore the mind of the buyer, the efficacy of tactics, buying roadblocks, and READ MORE ›

By |Evergreen, Velocity|
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Basic sales calculator tells a misleading story

How many leads do we need? A basic sales calculator will help you work out how may proposals and leads you need to meet your sales target. And it will be wrong. Adding just a small degree of sophistication to your sales calculator will deliver you a very different conclusion, resulting in a very different plan. In this week's show, we'll build a basic back-of-the-envelope sales calculator, and share a great free tool that will give you a result that will astound you. You need a lot less market than you think. All right, so bear with READ MORE ›

By |Velocity|
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