Market
discipline and the magic intersections
Marketing executives must understand the varieties of corporate
disciplines to understand the motivations of their prospects. Appealing
to functional and emotive motivators, linked to your customer's
market discipline and current overwhelming pressure, is essential
to initiating a sale and is reflected in your product and corporate
messaging, brochure design, sales campaigns, and even how your receptionist
answers the telephone.
 The
starting point is to list the pressures your prospects most often
face and what their primary market discipline is. If your target
market segments are homogeneous and buyers genotypes are highly
similar, then you can renew your marketing strategy broadly across
your organization. Otherwise, you need to create a guidebook for
your sales staff detailing those customer disciplines and economic
motivators at play.
The key to rapidly identifying, qualifying and selling is to find
the intersection of the market discipline of your customer and their
most pressing issues. The figure presented here is merely an example,
and you will want to add more motivating factor rows to the matrix.
Find the matrix points that are most relevant to your customers
and refocus your marketing strategy and market messages on those
points. This will lead you quickly to the most motivated buyers.
Part of refocusing your marketing strategy may require revising
your branding. When you begin to evaluate your products and the
matrix points that concern your best customers, you may discover
that your branding presents the wrong impression. Indeed, you may
discover that there are harmful contradictions (i.e., selling a
product to facilitate customer intimacy while presenting your products
as being entirely feature driven). Borrow your customer's brain
and think about business in terms of their market discipline, then
think about your brand. If you don't have a spontaneous warm feeling
about your brand, then neither will you prospects.
As Treacy and Wiersema noted, you need to be good at all three
disciplines - operational, product and intimacy - but you have to
be superb at one. The same applies to your customers. Your branding
needs to be focused on the one discipline that is mutually understood
and cherished by both organizations.
"So, if you want to sell to me . . .you've got to understand
my business, how I make my money and what my problems are."
- Roger Krone, VP & GM of Boeing Rotorcraft
From famine to feast
Unless your firm is one of the few lucky ones to be in exactly
the right market at exactly the right time, then you must change
your strategy and change your diet. You can survive and prosper
in this lean economy, but it will require you to think like your
customers, understand their old disciplines and new pressures, and
to change your strategy and branding to meet their limited appetites.
Guy Smith (guy@SiliconStrat.com)
is the principal of Silicon
Strategies Marketing. Guy specializes in strategic marketing
and market development for technology companies. Aside from his
marketing successes, Guy has a background as a technologist for
NASA, McDonnell Douglas, and Circuit City and remains active in
technology, primarily within the Open Source Community.
| 
