SEOst.com Blog

Strategy
These models integrate customer and product management with marketing and sales to drive profitable growth with target customer segments. Depending upon the client situation and need, we consult with executives and their teams in one of four ways:Diagnostic Assessment
For certain clients, the specific go-to-market performance issues require greater clarity and empirical validation. In these cases, SEOST utilizes one of several 360-degree assessments that examine market and category trends, channel performance gaps, trended customer attitudes and behavior, organizational and process competencies, and competitive dynamics.Strategy Development
SEOST approaches strategy development in a very collaborative manner. Leveraging key findings from the assessment, we team with the client to conduct ‘deep dive’ analytic and research models to define, prioritize, and ultimately trade-off various go-to-market, marketing, or specific channel strategies that ultimately result in investment and resource shifts, revised governance structures, and operational priorities.

Organizational Change
Whether it’s a globally-integrated marketing organization or a territory-level sales structure, SEOST recognizes that strategic change begins with governance structures, new role and skill definition, and ultimately compensation, quota-setting, and executive MBOs that enforce and enable the new corporate model. In the case of sales channels and resources, we work closely with field management to realign market coverage, as well as teaming across specialized roles.

Operational Implementation
In building and deploying the new marketing and sales model, SEOST provides proven processes and tools for creating and testing a new marketing process, a new distribution channel and set of partners, a new measurement or planning process, or a new in-market program focused on selected offerings and customer segments. We focus on accelerating clients to the new model, embedding a best-in-class capability, and then enabling the client to scale.

Sales Force Effectiveness
Today’s sales executives are evolving from top-line focused field sales generals to segment leaders—challenged to optimize customer coverage, share-of-wallet and yield across a hybrid set of direct and indirect channels.As markets mature and become more competitive, the challenge of keeping field productivity ahead of shrinking gross margins requires companies to rethink the sales model and how they align and retool their sales forces to grow profitably.Since SEOST’s pioneering work in the late 1980s on multi-channel economics, we have developed significant experience, processes, tools and expertise in helping clients design, build, and transform field sales organizations to improve coverage, acquisition and productivity.

Sales Strategy

Translating a growth strategy into an actionable sales strategy with the sales organization and channel partners is a critical priority for today’s global sales executives. SEOST’s Enterprise Channel Planning methodology realigns the roles and mix of field sales professionals to better serve customers and partners, while identifying scalable levers that improve productivity and reduce marginal sales cost. Our high-performance sales models consist of:

A deep understanding of shifting buyer needs and segment opportunity
The company’s evolving portfolio and value proposition
The economics of distribution alternatives
Factors driving pipeline and resource productivity.
This collaborative process ultimately results in an improved growth and economic model, actionable plans that can be executed by sales and channel resources, governance structures that improve in-field roles and performance, and a clearer value proposition for winning customer share.

Field Transformation

SEOST combines proven methods, process and sales management acumen, and a determined focus to increase field team ownership of the sales model. At its core, a successful sales model must drive substantive change in the field, among them:

improved roles and teaming
optimized customer and territory coverage
more effective sales processes, better opportunity management
more effective management structures and professional development.
We view these changes as the heart of the transformation, and we partner with clients in the field to pilot, iterate, and scale the new model while empirically measuring and forecasting its effect on customer attitudes, pipeline, and sales conversion. New processes and training are built, best practices are identified and shared, and improved pipeline and resource management are deployed to enable greater visibility and continuous improvement.

Integration of Alternate Channels & Marketing

It’s an increasingly multi-channel world, and the pressures to drive new product adoption, up sell, and cross-sell mandate greater integration of marketing and sales to drive productivity. As part of the sales transformation, SEOST brings a host of deep expertise in:

Partner channel development
Construction and integration of telesales and web channels
Integration of marketing capabilities
These combine to further leverage the field sales organization to pursue its highest value priorities – senior buyer relationships, new business acquisition, and sophisticated solutions and value propositions. Through our other service areas, we work with companies to build, integrate and manage these channels to enhance the overall sales model.

Compensation

Our research shows that most sales executives believe their compensation model is not aligned with sales objectives, and the incentive structure doesn’t adequately motivate required changes in sales activity. Companies struggle effective quota-setting, minimizing plan complexity and differentiating top performers to enhance retention. Our SFE practice compensation experts ensure optimal compensation models by alignment of the following:

Structure with quota and crediting
Corporate business objectives with sales rep performance
Customer satisfaction with an affordable cost of sales.
Compensation continues to be a critical enabler of any sales model, yet traditional pay and performance structures often do not reflect the increasingly sophisticated set of go-to-market objectives to drive particular segments and products, as well as the multi-channel teaming environments that can often lead to “compensation stacking” or channel conflict. In short, we design end-to-end sales compensation programs that align incentives where the field reps can drive the most value in certain segments, customer acquisition scenarios, sales process roles and product categories.

Sales Enablement

Sales enablement encompasses a growing set of tools, skill development, customer content, competitive intelligence, pipeline management and processes that enable the field to manage a growing number of customer segments, channels, product offers and value propositions. Today the emphasis is on:

Leveraging CRM investments
Improving customer contact through more methodical customer data mining
Standardizing sales approaches in systematic portals
Implementing virtual training more effectively
Enhancing pricing and bid processes
Accelerating new marketing and sales programs through the sales force

Especially for companies selling to other businesses (B2B), field sales reps are evolving into “quarterbacks,” integrating marketing, product and services sales teams at the point of sale.

Finally, we operate the same types of programs we design for our clients. For clients who want to accelerate or expand their entry or coverage of specific customer or product markets

Marketing Management
The role of the CMO and the marketing function as a whole are going through a dramatic evolution – if not a complete reinvention. Historically, marketing has been a competency and business model driven by brand visibility and the latest creative campaign, but today’s senior marketers are redefining their impact on the demand chain by linking closer to product management and the downstream sales channels.To maintain a “seat at the table”, leading CMOs are focusing greater attention on performance and accountability to clarify business impact, and defining a new marketing model around media integration; a more digital-centric, self-learning customer base; and exceptional excellence driven less by “creative” and more by process excellence, infrastructure scale, and analytic insight. We call this new model Marketing 2.0.Our analytic and measurement capabilities are provided by our Marketing Sciences team, but that’s only part of the story. Marketing 2.0 reflects a strategic shift in how programs and resources are deployed, how processes are built or rebuilt to improve marketing and sales integration, how marketers create operational rigor from global to local activities, and fundamentally how marketing organizations align activities, messaging, pricing, and offers in a more scalable, responsive customer-centric manner.

SEOST’s Marketing Management practice works with global corporations to transform their marketing functions – building strategies, operating models, organizations, programs and infrastructure to bring them to the next level of marketing performance.

Customer Development Strategy

It’s generally acknowledged that there is more value in extending customer relationships than focusing primarily on net-new acquisition. The challenge: even the most sophisticated companies lack the segmentation and discipline to focus marketing dollars on the most valuable (or potentially valuable) customers, while understanding the offers, pricing and experience that will drive share-of-wallet. While most marketers over-emphasize prospecting, SEOST works with CMOs to develop a value creation roadmap, clarifying value- and needs-based segments that integrate insights from three areas: which offers, bundles, and pricing drive pipeline and conversion; which customers are worth pursuing and with what investment; and which marketing media and tactics drive the greatest yield

This is not a branding exercise. It’s an empirically-driven planning and investment allocation process to drive customer value.

Offering & Solution Development

As companies continue to release new products, and entire industries continue to consolidate, marketing and sales channels lack the capacity to adequately market against corporations’ growing portfolio of products and services. Increasingly, companies are fighting for customer share by creating customer solution bundles that meet a broader set of strategic customer needs, while cross-selling specific offerings across peer buyers.

This trend portends a new era in innovation beyond mere physical product features. Historically, sales channels have assembled these custom solutions at the point of sale, but today, leading marketers are jumping in to create scale around solution development and marketing, as well as product cross-sell and attach. SEOST partners with companies to shorten this time frame from product innovation to customer revenue, redefining marketing roles and organizational processes, and packaging offers and value propositions that are more “channel-ready” to both sales channels and customers.

Customer-Driven Relationship Marketing

The relationship marketing vision translates to “right product, right channel, right time.” Financially, the opportunity cost of not implementing customer-driven programs is visible in the “lead black hole” – the gap between marketing responses and qualified sales leads. For most companies this gap remains significant, with the traditional fix merely to bombard prospects and customers with even more offers and campaigns. The fact that most CRM installations are nothing more than glorified contact management systems has only exacerbated this challenge, and continuing to focus on product-centric campaigns to drive pipeline only ignores another truth: customers are in charge and increasingly conducting their diligence via the web, based on their own purchase cycle.

SEOST is working with companies to build customer-driven capabilities – in-bound customer-driven response engines that systematically guide web-learners to self-identify through the marketing and sales cycle, as well as outbound, multi-tactic processes that accelerate pipeline and recapture and nurture responses to qualified opportunities

Integrated Demand Generation Engine

Perhaps the most significant design point of Marketing 2.0 is integrating these new competencies – analytics, interactive, telechannels, relationship marketing and process excellence – into a demand generation engine. Because some of these new capabilities reflect significant investment, the “engine” design is akin to a manufacturing facility that undoubtedly cannot reside in every country.

SEOST is actively working with clients to design, build, transition and even operate marketing demand generation engines in the Americas, EMEA and APAC – fundamentally constructing a scalable platform to manage marketing investment targeted to specific segments and producing predictable pipeline that can be converted or adjudicated to local sales channels.

Global Sourcing Management

The new marketing model represents a radical shift in agency utilization, resource skills, marketing roles and the connection from centralized corporate advertising to localized field marketing. The emphasis on marketing accountability, combined with the fragmentation of media now requires CMOs to reallocate marketing spend across a broader variety of media and tactics that connect awareness to qualified leads in a systematic and scalable manner. An important driver – and, quite often, a huge source of investment efficiency – is rationalizing the marketing agency and provider network that has failed to achieve the consistency, efficiency and speed promised by the conglomerates. As marketers continue to drive integrated campaigns, there is huge opportunity to drive fee efficiency, consistent performance accountability, and process discipline across product launches, corporate-to-field initiatives, and country-by-country deployment.

SEOST has worked with several global enterprises to drive independent performance management; rationalize AR/PR, media, direct response, interactive, web, event, tele-operations, analytics, data, and other marketing factor providers; and restructure contracts to optimize provider expense – that together produce greater campaign yield and global adoption.

Integrated Web Sales
The SEOST mantra is that customers choose channels, channels don’t choose customers. Customers are increasingly choosing a web based or electronic sales channel. Providing customers the ability to learn, shop and buy on their terms and at a time that suits them is critical.Our clients see the benefit, as it provides needed sales coverage, enhanced customer satisfaction and at times net new revenue at a significantly lower cost to serve.Our services include:

Effective sales experience

We design and build online sales environments from information architecture, to user interface through to full look and feel design. We apply persona based design principles, to develop excellent customer sales journeys from interest to closed sale.

Delivering channel ready products

We help clients define the optimized portfolio to be served through this channel. Define merchandising programs and develop product and solution propositions that met both the client’s needs as well and the online buying experience.

Enhancing sales efficiency

Using our deep analytics and sales performance experience, we harness web analytics to drive increased sales efficiency and performance.

SEOST understands that a successful e-channel isn’t just a cool user interface. It’s how you truly manage this as a sales channel, including proposition development, portfolio management, sales management, merchandising and most importantly performance management and, ultimately, optimization.