Our Process

New products can increase your accessible market by satisfying the unmet needs of new customers. New products will also broaden your product offering to existing customers and drive increased revenue to your business. Developing a strategy for product launches, however, requires knowledge of the target customers, the channels for reaching them, the competitive and overall market environment. Your new products must contain NUDs: New, Unique, and Difficult to copy features to excite customers and drive demand. Effective marketing and communications tactics will communicate those benefits to customers and channel partners.

Channels help your company bring products into the marketplace where purchase decisions are made. But conflicts are unavoidable, and sometimes even desirable. One lesson learned the hard way is "No Conflict equals No Coverage". You need to recognize that channel partners struggle with competing priorities and will always make decisions based on their own best interests, not necessarily yours.

Managing channel conflict requires being intentional and strategic, recognizing and respecting each channel and channel partner’s role and needs. You may need help developing, supporting and encouraging good behavior, both between your channels, and between them and your own sales team.

A sales opportunity pipeline is a powerful tool to track and close potential business and predict demand flow and cash flow. It can be as simple as a spreadsheet or as complex as full-blown Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Many CRM systems fail. Why? The only two clear requirements for success are: 1) CEO commitment and enforcement that all intended users adopt the system, and 2) that clear guidelines indicate which opportunities must be tracked. Your system must become part of your team’s daily work, and should make that work easier. CRM must not become a beast that needs to be fed data periodically.

The Opportunity Pipeline below (showing actual data from a previous client) displays the sum of all order opportunities for a small manufacturer, shown three different ways.

• • All Opportunities Total
• • Probability Weighted Total
• • Weighted Total, Only High Probabilities

The resulting Order Forecast highlighted some obvious and real business problems:

• • The next month’s order rate will be very low.
• • In five months there will be a logjam of orders. Customer lead-time expectations need to be managed carefully.
• • More business opportunities need to be generated urgently for future months.

Pricing is both an art and a science. Profitable pricing must become a unifying business objective. Marketers are typically the natural owners of the strategic pricing process. They must change the way they think about the value of their products and services. They must be the change leaders within the organization for price setting, discounting policies, and order negotiation. They must develop systems to track competitive pricing, customer purchase patterns, and price management. Pricing must evolve from a tactical lever to a strategic imperative to drive profitable growth.

If your company is ready to accelerate the professional growth and impact of your marketing leadership team, turn to Global Launch for reliable and professional marketing coaching services. Bring in an experienced C-level executive marketing coach to mentor your team’s marketing leader and achieve a better return on your marketing investment.

In a typical engagement, your internal marketing leader receives:

• • Periodic meetings to coach and mentor, discuss opportunities, key initiatives, challenges, organizational issues, and relationships.
• • Ad-hoc access to the broad Global Launch network for specialized expertise, as required.

This mentorship enables making informed decisions faster. Your Global Launch coach accelerates your marketing leader’s professional growth while raising their level of contribution.

Working with a knowledgeable coach generates tangible benefits for your marketing team, including:

• • Greater Contribution: Your team will acquire enhanced strategic thinking and tactical implementation skills to tackle global marketing plans.
• • More Relevance: Your marketing leaders will learn to effectively align marketing strategies and tactics with your company’s business and profitability goals.
• • Increased Accountability: Setting goals and implementing relevant metrics to measure their success, the team will understand how to maximize your marketing ROI.
• • Greater Clarity: With an increased ability to effectively communicate with team members and stakeholders across the organization, Marketing and Sales leaders become partners positioned to drive revenue growth. Sales and Marketing teams will both understand where they have unique responsibilities and where they share joint responsibility, increasing professionalism and accountability, and ultimately driving market share, sales revenue and profitability.