Resources | The Accidental Marketer

How does your organization gain understanding of the different amount of influence various decision-makers and opinion leaders have in your industry?*
- Our sales and marketing efforts are aimed predominately at our existing buyers. We have not yet developed sufficient knowledge of other stakeholders who may exert influence on the purchasing decision.
- While we do not have a formal process for identifying and engaging with other key influencers, we have pockets of best practice. Our sales people have developed a broad network of contacts outside of the key buyers
- We understand the chain of command and influence in our industry pretty well, and manage our sales and marketing resources so that we spend some time gaining an understanding of the ‘big picture’.
- We analyze and regularly update our understanding of influence in our industry. We use different messages to key influencers and adjust and optimize how our sales and marketing resources are utilized.

How well do your sales approach and marketing materials move beyond the technical merits of your product and service to fully address customer needs?*
- Our materials are heavily focused on features and technical aspects of our products and services.
- We provide a detailed specification but make a point of tying back these features into customer benefits.
- We identify customer functional benefits first and then tie these back to our features and attributes. We never simply outline our attributes in isolation.
- We connect our customers’ needs, both spoken and unspoken, to each of our product or service features. We articulate the benefits in emotional as well as functional terms.

How does your organization capitalize on the different needs that different customers in your industry have?*
- Our customer needs are all similar so we focus on developing a strong message aimed at appealing to the largest group of customers and prospects.
- We recognize some obvious customer differences such as size and the industry they operate in. We take a different approach to each type.
- We have segmented our customer base using criteria such as number of employees, sales volume, geography, industry and use these segments for developing new value propositions or providing different messaging.
- We have a segmentation that clusters our customers and prospects according to their needs. We seek to understand the key drivers of their behaviors and what specific needs they are seeking to satisfy.

How do you monitor competitors and anticipate the entrance of new types of competitors into your marketplace?*
- We regularly debrief our sales personnel on the activities of our direct competitors in sales meetings and use these occasions to discuss how to counter competitor strategies.
- We have personnel whose responsibilities include the monitoring of competitor activities and offers, and regularly receive briefings from these people.
- We have formal processes for monitoring today’s competitors and also spend time with customers to understand how they fulfill the functions of our products using different types of solutions
- We have a formal process for monitoring current competitors and indirect competitors (e.g. substitute products), and spend time trying to predict where new direct and indirect competitors will emerge from in the next 2-3 years.

Does your company agree on what a valuable customer or segment “looks like”?*
- We allocate our resources based on which customers or segments have spent the most with our company in the past.
- We consider potential value in a new customer or new segment but have no formula for defining this potential – our sales people help us determine which accounts or segments are worth winning
- We have an agreed-upon formula for defining customer or segment potential value. It is largely made up of financial criteria.
- We have an agreed-upon formula for defining customer or segment potential value. It consists of financial and non-financial criteria that help us predict which customers or segments are likely to see value in our offerings AND be profitable to serve.

How does your organization assess its own strengths and weaknesses in developing marketing strategy?*
- We rely on the informal feedback received by our field personnel to help us figure out what we are doing well and where we need to improve – they are the ones with their fingers on the pulse of the marketplace
- Our executive team regularly visits with our customers and these discussions constitute the majority of the input we have for assessing our strengths and weaknesses compared to the competition
- We do not make any conclusions without data – surveys of customers are required before we take any action on leveraging strengths or improving weaknesses
- We use a combination of customer surveys on key items and formal debriefing of our field personnel to gain the most realistic, actionable feedback on our strengths and weaknesses.

How does your company allocate its resources towards specific customer segments?*
- We allocate our resources evenly against all of our customer and market segments
- We allocate our resources most heavily towards segments that offer the biggest financial rewards for our company
- We allocate our resources based on which segments offer us the biggest financial rewards and where we have assets and skills that enable us to deliver what the segment wants.
- We allocate our resources based on which segments offer us the biggest financial rewards and where we have assets and skills that enable us to deliver what the segment wants, AND we have consciously reduced resources or eliminated investments in low value segments.

What drives the innovation processes at your organization?*
- Most of our innovation comes from watching what our competitors do to innovate and then try to do it better
- Typically our innovation comes from our most creative people coming up with a very interesting new application of our products/services.
- We make sure that each new innovation in our firm goes through a process that outlines how the innovation helps fulfill a defined customer need
- We do not start our innovation processes until we first have market intelligence and understand customers’ unfulfilled needs.

How would you describe what your company stands for in the minds of your customers?*
- Basically, we stand for the same things our competitors stand for – some like us better, some like them better.
- Customers have a strong feeling about us one way or another – some love us, some hate us, not many are on the fence
- We “own” a position in our customer’s minds, unfortunately its not the position we’d like to own
- We have a unique image in our industry, and it has allowed us to create substantial equity for our business via our brand.

How does your company set its pricing strategies?*
- We place the authority in the hands of the sales and/or executive team – they are tasked with winning the deal, so they need to have the power.
- We have some basic pricing guidelines, but they are just guidelines that can be over-ridden without much bureaucracy.
- Our organization has established pricing practices that are agreed to, and we have a formal process for situations when guidelines need to be modified
- Our prices are established based on the value that our products are delivering to our customers, not just based on cost or competitor pricing – and we have formal processes to ensure our discipline.