I think one of the biggest challenges facing companies at just about any timeframe of its corporate life is focus. The focus I am referring to relates to a number of areas within the company. First is the notion of culture. Does your company have more of a sales-driven culture, (which represents a majority of companies)? Or is your company an engineering driven culture? Or is it a marketing-driven culture? In my experience, a small percentage of companies are based on a marketing-driven culture, more than half are sales-driven, and for technology, they are generally engineering-driven. Not being a marketing-driven company is big challenge to maintaining consistent focus.
What I mean by marketing-driven is looking from the ground up at everything you are doing as a marketing opportunity. So, for example, looking at your sales strategy. Is your sales guy running the show? This is very common. The sales guys come in and they want the sale, no matter the cost. And that cost is what I call a "seat-of-the- pants" approach where there is a frenetic environment and the sales guy turns on a dime depending on his customer. And features and benefits of the products are sometimes even adjusted for that one customer. That is a lack of focus.
What most companies are not doing is starting from scratch, looking at the market opportunity, looking at the market need, looking at what pain their product is going to solve in the marketplace. (That’s actually a key issue: "product myopia" - benefits versus features… this will be covered in a future post).
In an engineering-driven culture, it’s kind of a "if you build it, they will come" type of approach. They focus on "that little knob over there can create this really cool GUI which really is, like, cool". Versus creating a product that is actually going to meet the needs of the customer. Sometimes in an engineering-driven environment, the product marketing person will meet with customers and will clearly see the opportunities for product improvement… that the engineers will resist to their death.
What is needed is a different way of thinking; my credibility branding model helps because it offers a system to walk through the business and marketing strategy process. But in general empowering your marketing executives and departments and using your marketing brand when making business decisions is of the utmost importance. For example if resources are limited and you have the choice of pursuing several different customers but can’t service them all, don’t just go for the money. Go for the one that will meet budget expectations but also add credibility to the company and product. For example a well known brand will add far more credibility and make the sale process easier than a bigger sale to a no names company. An added benefit; the sale to the no named company will go easier when the brand name is on board. This is a process of focus.
There is more to the focus story, in the next post I will outline my perspective of the key points to market focus.
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