Strategic market intelligence can reap rich profits for companies that seek to understand their corporate customers' needs and businesses better. From purchase driver mapping to sales gaps analysis, the ability to support and even boost revenue generation through strategic customer and competitor intelligence is critical for market intelligence teams. Here are some tips on how to plan and develop market intelligence that will be highly valued by marketing and sales teams.
There are four areas that market intelligence teams will need to make key decisions on, which will affect how effective their marketing and sales intelligence systems will eventually be. Choosing between the variables can make a critical difference to the team's success or failure.
1. Choosing between strategic and tactical market intelligence
One of the most difficult tasks market intelligence leaders face when designing internal market intelligence objectives, roles, output and performance indicators, is striking the right balance between strategic and tactical market intelligence. Should more resources be invested in strategic brand management intelligence or pricing intelligence? Should the team focus on sizing the market or monitoring promotions?
The balance depends on a number of factors:
CEO and management mindset. Management focus on short-term profits or long-term development will dictate the market intelligence that needs to be presented.
Planning cycles. Shorter planning cycles tend to lead to a more tactical approach to market intelligence.
The nature of the competition. Market intelligence tends to be more tactical in heavily competed markets where price or competitive bidding is under pressure.
Business or consumer markets. In B2C markets, market intelligence tends to be more tactical.
Corporate or local. If the main focus is on supporting corporate level management, market intelligence will tend to be more strategic in nature. A tactical approach is more appropriate for local sites.
Marketing or sales. Market intelligence in support of marketing is typically more strategic.
One could also argue that generating revenues though more tactical market intelligence will allow organizations to justify the existence and value of their market intelligence programs. This typically leads to further funding through clear ROI to build more strategic contributions.
2. Choosing the methodologies that best suit the organization
There are multiple market intelligence techniques and methods; some will help you defend your customer proposals while others will help you attack and fend off your competitors' sales tactics. Which one you use will depend largely on the nature of your business, your internal sales processes and the pain points therein.
Ultimately, the key to success will be in understanding your customers better than your competitors' as well as understanding your key competitors' mindset, strategy and tactics.
To achieve this, you can choose to use:
Voice of the customer (VOC). VOC can be a significant source of customer understanding that in turn, helps build trusted relationships with corporate clients.
Creativity in building competitor profiles. For example, you can investigate the long term financial strength and sustainability of your competitors and use that to your advantage.
Market penetration analysis. Try identifying segments that your competitors are focusing on and which you are not, and investigate why.
Strict account planning. It helps to aggregate account level intelligence, identify account intelligence gaps and include positive and negative feedback on competitive products in the analysis.
Win-loss analysis. This is an extremely important tool in strengthening your sales strategy for the future.
Role-play or war gaming. This is useful in understanding your competitors' mindsets.
Marketing mix analysis. This is exceptionally useful in reviewing the competitio n at the product or offering level.
Competitor channel or value chain analysis. Use the analysis to understand the mindset of your customers' customers or your competitors' margins.
Propensity models. Such models help you assess customer churn rates and to take corrective action in time.
Knowing which is the right methodology for your organization requires an understanding of the pain points within marketing and sales. It also helps to brainstorm with your colleagues in the sales department on what they think are the winning factors of your company's value proposition.
3. Choosing the tools that will make the output user friendly
A critical part of supporting a company's marketing and sales efforts effectively is in providing market intelligence deliverables that are quick to access and quick to digest; in short, clear and filtered formats.
Ideally, only one tool should to be used to provide market intelligence to the sales team. Otherwise, multiple internal systems should be integrated to create a perception of having one tool or access point. For example, customer relationship management tools and market intelligence deliverables can be made available through one access point.
Technology tools alone will not solve all the challenges for market intelligence. Building accessible and easy-to-use tools however, can provide a competitive advantage to your sales organization, as long as feedback is directly and continuously gathered from the sales front.
4. Choosing the method/s to recruit and motivate internally
Critical market intelligence typically already exists within an organization, through the collective experience and observations of a company's sales force.
A company with an active intelligence culture can go a long way in the receipt and utilization of field intelligence. This however, requires continuous internal marketing. So one of the most important success factors for market intelligence is the ability to build strong relations with the sales force.
You can do this if you can:
First align your market intelligence efforts with the company's sales targets and customer relationship management objectives.
Assess your sales process and identify pain points where better intelligence can make a difference.
Use the right incentives and motivational factors for those in the field to start contributing intelligence and insights.
Set up intelligence collection and sharing processes and tools that are both accessible and easy to use.
Generate deliverables that give sales teams the critical information that will help them seal the deal'.
Demonstrate tangible benefits to the sales effort through insightful, timing and value-generating market intelligence.
Celebrate and recognize success stories based on contributions from the field.
In addition, it is useful to identify other groups, such as legal, customer support, research and development or engineering, that are in position to provide field signals.
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