Strategic Marketing Process

1. Stake Your Position in the Market.

No matter what market you're in, your audience is inundated with information. Some of it is hype. Some of it is from your competitors. Most of it makes it hard for you and your organization to be heard.

For your product and organization to be recognized and remembered, what you say must be distinctive and important. Of course, you've got to be talking about things your customer cares about, not boasting about team, your new funding, or the number of lines of code in your latest product build. Talk about your customers and their needs. Don't talk about yourself, except in the context of serving your customers.

Language and imagery are critical. They not only characterize your offering; they also create the context in which your offering will be judged.

Ask yourself: are you talking about benefits your customers care about, or are you merely listing product features your engineering team is proud of?

If you've developed distinctive messaging, is it being used consistently across the organization? Can every member of your sales team position your product accurately and consistently? Can your executives? How about your resellers?

Success in the marketplace depends on first, selecting a distinctive position for your products and services, so that their strengths address your customers' needs, and second, developing a communication strategy that ensures that this positioning can be conveyed consistently throughout your organization.

Our team can help you with product positioning and corporate messaging.

2. Prepare Your Channel:
Arm Your Salespeople with the Materials They Need.

Once you have articulated your positioning, it's time to generate materials your sales team can use when presenting your products and services in the market.

Our experienced team of writers, graphic designers, and Web programmers can produce whatever your sales team needs to be successful, including:

• White papers
• Data sheets
• Brochures
• Corporate backgrounders
• Press releases
• Web sites
• Flash animation
• Podcasts

What do our customers say?

"John Bennett is the only writer I trust to a) understand what I say and b) turn it into something I'm proud of."
   —Doug Klein, CTO, Vernier Networks

Sample White Paper for Kenai Systems, Inc.

Here's a sample white paper (PDF) John Bennett wrote for Kenai Systems, a software start-up that was launching a Web services vulnerability assessment solution at DemoFall 2005.

3. Generate Leads.

Your sales organization is trained on your products and services and armed with sales tools and talking points. Now you need to generate leads.

We can help you select the lead generation programs that make sense for your organization, and we can execute those programs, giving your pipeline the activity it needs.

Our experience includes:

• Email campaigns
• Placed articles (Computerworld, IEEE Computer)
• Case studies
• Web advertising
• Web portal customized for key accounts
• Web seminars
• White paper syndication (TechTarget, KnowledgeStorm, etc.)

Contact us today to let us know how we can help you meet your lead generation goals.

4. Close Deals.

Closing deals is "where the rubber meets the road." It's the obvious metric for measuring the success of a marketing push.

But we think there's more to closing deals successsfully than getting a P.O.

Business is ultimately about relationships. As you close your deal, what kind of relationship are you establishing with your customer? What channels for communication are you putting in place? Are you affording your customer opportunities to do even more with your product or service? How can you work together? And what opportunities are you providing your customer to speak publicly about your work together and the solutions you're creating?

In other words, don't just close deals. Close deals strategically.

Call us today to discuss to your sales and marketing needs. (510) 495-6590.

5. Publicize Successes through Case Studies, Speaking Engagements, and Other PR Activities.

As Geoffrey Moore has pointed out, a market is simply a network of people who consult each other before making a purchase. To gain credibility, you must be recognized and esteemed in each market in which you're selling. To sell, you need reference accounts.

Case studies and customer testimonials are a great way to build references. After all, a customer is more likely to trust another customer, than a vendor.

Are you creating opportunities for customers to speak for you? Do your Beta programs include testimonials as a customer requirement, assuming all product performance expectations are met?

I can work with both you and your customers to get the word out about your products and services. Here are just some of the companies for whom I've written case studies:

• NetContinuum (application firewalls)
• Sentilla (Java-based pervasive computing)
• Vernier Networks (WLAN security and Network Access Control)
• WildPackets (network analysis)

I've also ghost-written magazine articles for leading publications such as Computerworld and IEEE Computer.

Contact me today: (510) 495-6590 or john (at) bennettstrategy (dot) com

For more information, please contact us.