Getting caught up on reading as I nurse a cold today. An article worth highlighting. On page B10 of this (3/28/06) Tuesday’s WSJ, there was an article on marketing strategy that made loads of sense.
Two audiences might want to pay attention. First, product management folks who think it’s about building a better mousetrap and the thing will ‘fly off the shelf’, know this: aligning your product offer to your sales model is critical to the business success. This is often the most overlooked, taken for granted part of the go-to-market model. 2nd, CEOs of small size firms. More on that later.
This article shares a case study, demonstrating that sometimes an OEM model makes more sense for a small enterprise software company than trying to take on sales and marketing themselves. CEOs who wish to build their own sales force might rethink their more expensive approach, and see if their growth and profits increase.
Key quote:
“Sometimes in life, you have one of those ah-ha moments,” Mr. Butterfield says, recounting how he realized that the company lacked the scale to painstakingly go from company to company in pursuit of new business.
Traditional marketing methods weren’t working because of the company’s small size, and it needed to come up with a new strategy to sell its products, which helps companies manage their information technology.
“You just wonder why no one ever noticed it before.”
So he fired the entire sales staff and replaced it with a partner team.
Two months later, the company signed a deal with Compaq. Altiris increased its revenues last year (2005) to $187.6M from $1M in 1999.
Sound smart? I think so.
I belong to a fabulous CEO group with execs from $4-50M size firms and many of them is trying to do-it-all themselves. First, they are defining the marketing / value proposition themselves for specialized markets by hiring vertical experts. 2nd, they are trying to hire all the sales expertise themselves. I wanted to clip this article and pass it on to each of them. Next meeting…
