Advisor Archives

Marketing Capability Assessments How do you know your marketing organization has the capability to win? To be successful in today’s competitive environment, businesses must have effective marketing processes and tools as well as the experience to apply those capabilities appropriately. Business and marketing leaders need to consider: Is my marketing organization equipped with the right [...]

Create Value for Your Most Valuable Customers Help your sales and marketing teams invest their time understanding and creating value for your most valuable customers with these three quotes and a Market Edge Framework. “We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re customer obsessed. We start with what the customer needs and we work backwards.” – Jeff Bezoz, [...]

Sales Call Planning in Complex B2B Environments Closing the deal requires more than the typical transactional sales call plan Pre-call sales planning is common practice for most organizations, but the nature of sales evolves as the interaction moves from relatively ‘simple’ transactional sales where individual customer requirements generate orders to ‘complicated’ (consultative and solution sales [...]

Strategic Marketing Programs What return on investment are you realizing for your marketing efforts? Many B2B companies struggle to identify and measure the value they expect to receive from their marketing efforts. Customer interactions often focus on sales rep relationships and promoting offers with slick collateral and fact sheets. In those situations, marketing is relegated [...]

NPV in MLB How Could the Philadelphia Phillies Give Bryce Harper a $330M Contract? by Dave Anshen, Sr. Consultant, Market Edge Image from USA Today As we approach the start of the 2019 baseball season, baseball fans and analysts are debating the decisions by the California Angels and Philadelphia Phillies to give such lucrative contracts [...]

How do we lead the discussion from Price to Value? If we do not understand our value, we are destined to give it away Does your organization have the required commercial capabilities to quantify and capture the value associated with your offer? Our clients face increased pressure to define and hold value in markets with [...]

Developing B2B Sales Capability: Can B2C examples be used to develop B2B Selling Capability? We are often asked if B2C tactics and examples are relevant for developing B2B Sales Capability.  The answer (as with most consulting answers) is, “it depends”. In both B2C and B2B, the sales function helps move customers through the buying cycle [...]

Value-Based Portfolio Management Transforming Your Business & Improving Your Competitive Advantage Product portfolio management is fundamental to business success. In any economic environment, companies are challenged with optimizing their portfolio to ensure that their product development pipeline reflects business objectives and growth targets.  Senior managers observe business case presentations by enthusiastic product and market managers [...]

Campaign Planning Effective Campaigns Include Four Elements: Set campaign objectives (e.g. qualify >100 leads and begin semi-tech trials with >20 opportunities by end of June) based on priorities from the business unit strategy and associated strategic marketing plan. Complete a ‘deep dive’ to understand the target segment. Use CRM / Salesforce to ‘data mine’ and [...]

Workplace Assessments Workplace Assessments gather data and insights to determine focus developmental areas to help individuals and the organization accomplish their goals and objectives.  B2B approaches to assessments range from informal qualitative reviews to the intensive deep dive into the organization.  Choosing the right assessment approach before beginning an initiative will help define success and more...  [...]

2018 Marketing Benchmarks Market Edge’s proprietary Marketing Benchmarks and Capability databases are based on >20 years’ experience with category-leading clients in a range of B2B and B2C industries. Strategic, tactical and product management marketing roles are analyzed as a function of operating profit, R&D investment and anticipated growth.  Extracts from the database compare similar business [...]

Identifying Value-Creation Opportunities in Healthcare with the Treatment Activity Cycle Framework When it comes to succeeding in the healthcare industry, what you don’t know will hurt you Turning the Unknown into Competitive Advantage In modern healthcare, commercial success depends on designing offerings that provide value to multiple stakeholders simultaneously. Although clinical benefit is always a [...]

Characterizing the Market Landscape How do you define the size and shape of your market? Market Landscape Maps clarify the market landscape and help businesses make critical strategy and marketing decisions.  They are especially helpful to explore new markets or to compare multiple geographies. A traditional market map shows the relative size of various sectors [...]

Use of Net Promoter Score - Is NPS the Right Tool for your Business? Independent research on the NPS scores by industry sectors and major brands is most available for B2C companies, where word of mouth (or social media) can quickly lead to increases and decreases in sales. However, there seems to be less available [...]

Do you struggle with the linkage between sales and marketing? As businesses grow it critical maintain alignment between the sales and marketing functions.  Without this alignment, impacts can be seen in: Account targeting – we spend our time with the wrong customers Value proposition delivery – we focus on attributes that are either non-differentiated from [...]

Effective Channel Management Are you managing the channel or is the channel managing you? In many industries the path to the market involves other companies who provide services as an extension of your company’s sales offering. In some cases these companies are true partners who reflect the same values and services that you expect from [...]

Are customers taking the Pricing Lever from your control? The day you understand the value you create is the day you stop giving discounts. Does your organization have the required commercial capabilities to raise prices? The strengthening global economy is driving the pace of price increases in the specialty chemicals and materials sector (see attached [...]