Issue: Sales & marketing is not functioning at the level you’d like and expect, but you cannot identify why exactly. This service is offered as a broad and general review to identify any issues. Where are the bottlenecks? Where are the various marketing functions poorly aligned?
Issue: You are entering a new market (for example, geographical or sectoral) and your current marketing operation is not ideally equipped. This could be for a number of reasons. Perhaps you lack the data resources. Or else your existing marketing team is not physically present or not culturally aligned to the new market.
Issue: Contrary to what many entrepreneurs think, a scale-up is not a big startup. What brought success during the startup phase won’t get an entrepreneur through the scale-up phase. Startups that keep doing what they did in the past will nearly always stall.
Issue: You have a great product or service but it’s not standing out as a value proposition. Your prospects are unable to see what differentiates you. Your positioning is not showcasing your true value. Perhaps the spark has gone, and your revenues are growing slowly, flatlining or in decline.
Issue: To cope with ever-changing market conditions, companies often undergo mergers, acquisitions, divestment, downsizing, withdrawal from certain territories etc. Following one of these major changes, your marketing organization needs to shape up for the future. You want to retain your best talent and motivate people, but many of them may need to adapt to new responsibilities if you are to meet your organization’s requirements moving forward. E.g. finding the right balance between centralized corporate marketing and field marketing.
Issue: The issue is simple: you are not getting enough sales leads through the pipeline. The cause is more difficult to identify. Hot leads left to go cold? Is there a blockage? Not enough marketing prospects entering the funnel? Poor hand-off between marketing and sales? Inability to distinguish between hot leads and duds? Untrained or inexperienced sales development representatives?
Issue: Data is one of the most frequently cited challenges for the marketing and sales functions. In some companies it’s actually a people issue, because the business intelligence folks are focused elsewhere, or you lack the right kind of IT talent. Or else it’s a legacy problem because customer data is siloed in different systems, leaving you with multiple versions of the truth, no real insight and poor visibility. Perhaps the biggest headache of all is integrating data and systems after a merger. Not least, human error is common but difficult to clear up without data cleansing technology.
Issue: Sales and marketing leaders like to invest in commercial technology they have used in the past, such as SalesForce, Pardot and HubSpot. Or else they are persuaded that this new whizzy piece of software will solve an immediate problem. The end result is a bloated stack of unused software, or “shelfware”. The situation got worse with the advent of the cloud and software as a service, which is usually paid for by subscription. Today, it’s not unusual for a company to have more than one marketing automation app, more than one messaging system etc. and to be paying for more licenses than there are people in the company. No wonder that the senior director of IT sourcing at a Fortune 500 retailer called software “the silent killer of your company’s budget.”1 Once again, post-mergers and acquisition scenarios only compound this problem.
Issue: Internationally active companies invest a vast amount of effort in creating and managing customer contracts. They are stored in various hard copy and electronic formats, in different languages and structures, conforming with local legal requirements. They are full of useful data – if only you could get at it!
Issue: Finding the right people to fill senior or specialist positions has become more challenging and time-demanding than ever – especially if the roles demand a rare or even unique combination of skills and experience. Human resources departments, whether large or small, often lack the resources to give recruitment the detailed attention required to source specialist top talent, especially if they need to meet additional criteria such as diversity targets.
Kaleris+Navis Kaleris, vendor of a logistics platform providing unrivaled connectivity…
ToolsGroup ToolsGroup helps retailers, distributors, and manufacturers to improve the…
