Create Sharply-Defined Marketable Items

According to the following illustration, there are over 400 sales representatives trying to meet top management executives of any given FORTUNE Global 2000 corporation. This clearly underscores the challenge faced by high-tech vendors in making headway with buyers in the addressable market and bringing them into their sales funnels. No doubt product demos and service capabilities should eventually be showcased to qualified leads, but they are too broadbased to have any impact with contacts at the top of the funnel who probably haven't yet heard of the vendor.  

To succeed at this early stage, salespersons need to articulate what business value their products or services add to the prospect's company.

GTM360 helps high-tech vendors in this process by creating marketable items. Marketable items package product features and service capabilities into compelling reasons to buy that resonate strongly with the target market’s pain areas and hot topics. If they don’t create gain, they must solve pain.

The activities involved in the OFFERING phase are

• Discover internal strengths

• Identify differentiators

• Scan industry hot topics

• Package strengths and differentiators

• Create go to market themes / marketable offerings

As the following examples illustrate, marketable items are not product feature lists or canned demos. Neither are they item descriptions on merchant websites nor technology service lines like application development, maintenance, upgrade and support. With a razor-sharp focus, a marketable item usually leaves out more product / service attributes than it includes.

After we create a longlist of marketable items, we score them against the dimensions of sales and delivery readiness in an Offering Scoring Matrix. This yields a shortlist of marketable items, the number of which depends upon the vendor's marketing budget and revenue goals. Depending upon the aggressiveness of the vendor's sales and delivery organizations, the shortlist might contain only green zone marketable items or might include a few items from the amber zone as well. Red zone marketable items are usually avoided.

Only the shortlisted marketable items are taken up for the CONTENT and CAMPAIGN phases of the business development cycle.