AGI Sales

Transforming the commerce landscape

 

I. Introductory Remarks

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) has had a significant influence across a variety of business sectors, and sales is not an exception. Narrow AI systems have been helping sales teams with duties such as client segmentation and lead generation; but, the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) promises to usher in a paradigm shift in the way sales might be carried out in the future. This article explores the many uses of artificial general intelligence (AGI), as well as the problems and ethical issues associated with incorporating AGI into the sales business.

The Shifting Paradigms of Retail in the Age of AI

An Exposition of Narrow AI in Brief

Narrow AI systems have already made their way into the sales industry, automating mundane duties such as data collecting and first customer encounters through chatbots. These systems are even capable of predictive analytics for sales forecasting. On the other hand, these programs are specialized and can only perform certain kinds of jobs.

AGI: The Dawn of a New Era

AGI, in contrast to traditional AI, contains the capacity to comprehend, learn, and adjust its approach to a wide range of activities. In the context of sales, this indicates that AGI would be capable of handling everything from client contact and contract negotiation to strategic planning and post-sale care, all while simultaneously learning and adjusting in real time.

Applications of AGI That Might Be Possible in Sales

Engaging Customers in a Manner That Is Both Automated and Personalized

An artificial general intelligence system might interact with consumers through a variety of channels, adjusting its communication style to correspond with the individual customer’s preferences. Additionally, it would be able to comprehend the customer’s requirements with a minimum of contact, therefore making the sales process more individualized.

Making Decisions at a Strategic Level

AGI might plan on product releases, sales campaigns, and even organizational restructuring by studying a vast array of data, ranging from market trends to customer behavior. This would bring a degree of insight and foresight that is now impossible to attain.

Management of Sales from Beginning to End

The whole sales process may be managed by AGI, beginning with the creation of leads and continuing through contract closure and post-sale involvement. It might also learn from each transaction to enhance its future sales methods, so enabling it to self-optimize.

Problems and Difficulties to Be Confronted

Data Confidentiality

There are substantial worries over the privacy and security of client data due to the fact that AGI systems would be dealing with a vast amount of user information. Compliance with GDPR requirements and the protection of consumer data are of the utmost importance.

Collaboration Between Humans and AI

The human aspect, such as the forging of relationships or the handling of difficult and emotionally charged discussions, cannot be completely replaced by AGI, despite the fact that AGI is capable of handling many jobs. It will be difficult to determine where the line between human and AGI roles should be drawn.

Disruption to the Economy

If artificially intelligent systems were to take over the majority of sales duties, this might result in the loss of jobs on a vast scale and need social changes.

Considerations of an Ethical Nature

Objectivity and Subjectivity

The artificial general intelligence system has to be built from the ground up to be objective and free of any and all prejudices, regardless of whether they are based on race, gender, or anything else. This is something that is simpler to say than it is to practice and requires constant monitoring.

Taking responsibility

Who or what is held liable in the event of failures or problems, such as a badly managed customer complaint or a data breach? The artificial general intelligence (AGI), the developers, or the enterprise that is employing it?

The final word

The application of AGI to the field of sales offers a great deal of potential, since it has the ability to revolutionize the business world by automating and yet still humanizing a broad variety of jobs. Nevertheless, this game-changing shift comes with its own set of obstacles and ethical issues that need to be carefully addressed before it can be fully embraced. It is vital that we negotiate this terrain with prudence, accountability, and a vision for a future where artificial general intelligence (AGI) and humans may live and complement one other in the area of sales as we stand on the precipice of this transformational period.

The purpose of this piece is to provide readers with a full knowledge of the possible effects that AGI might have on the sales business. It would be possible to expand each segment even more in order to go further into the complexity and subtleties of this fascinating yet difficult new frontier.

At Acumentica, our years of rigorous research in the realm of Advanced AI Sales serve as the cornerstone of our ongoing path towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) in various  industries sectors and verticals. While the path to AGI Investing remains an arduous quest, our current accomplishments are nothing short of transformative.  We  have developed an Advanced AI Customer Growth System  that in real-time finds customers autonomously at your finger-tips.

Seize the opportunity to GROW your sales prowess by Contacting Us.

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Grow Your Online Presence Through Map Optimization

Map optimization is an integral stratum of digital marketing that businesses often overlook. It correlates to the process of improving a business’s visibility on maps and navigation systems, such as Google Maps and Waze to name a few. This is imperative because, in today’s digital age, more and more consumers are using online maps to find businesses and services in their local area. As such, having a strong online presence on maps is crucial for any business looking to attract new customers and increase its visibility. This article annotates the need, value, and benefits of map optimization.

Why Map Optimization?

To commence with, map optimization can help businesses increase their visibility on online maps and navigation systems. By creating and optimizing a Google My Business listing, businesses can make sure that their information is accurate, up-to-date, and easily accessible to potential customers. This includes important details such as business hours, contact information, and customer reviews. By having this information readily available, businesses can make it easier for customers to find them and increase their chances of being selected over their competitors.

In perpetuity, map optimization can also enhance the customer experience by making it easier for them to find businesses and services in their local area. This is a very important strategy that the big search techs are pushing towards as they want to recommend local business first. In addition, they want their flagship maps system to be in the forefront of peoples search. Its used now more than ever before.

This is because online maps and navigation systems allow customers to search for businesses based on location, category, or keyword, making it easier for them to find what they are looking for. Furthermore, by providing customers with more accurate up-to-date information about a business, map optimization can improve customer engagement and increase the chances of customers choosing that business over others. This results in increase sales and a ROI. It is important to note that there are best practices for optimizing your Google My Business listing for search. This includes providing complete and accurate information, using keywords in your listing, and encouraging customers to leave reviews. By following these best practices, businesses can improve their search visibility and increase their chances of being found by potential customers.

There are a plethora of real-world examples of businesses that have immense success contributing to increase foot traffic and sales with smart map optimization. For example, local restaurants and cafes can enhance their online search visibility by creating a Google My Business listing and optimizing it for search. They can also use their listing to provide customers with up-to-date information about menu items, business hours, and special promotions. Similarly, construction and manufacturing companies are using smart map optimization to increase their visibility in local search results, making it easier for potential customers to find them.

In conclusion, businesses should prioritize smart map optimization as it is a cost-effective and efficient way to increase visibility, improve customer experience, and boost local search visibility. By optimizing their presence on online maps and navigation systems, businesses can increase their chances of being found by potential customers and stand out from their competitors.  We recommend all businesses to first understand where they are on the search engines richter scale. This enables a business to understand their current state before making changes and monitoring them.

Contact us to learn more about how our transformative digital marketing services we can help you optimize your map listings and improve your digital marketing efforts.

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How Reinforcement Learning systems Increases your Marketing and Sales?

By Team Acumentica

Reinforcement Learning Systems In Marketing & Sales

Optimized Reinforcement Learning models is used in various sales and marketing stratums to maximize customer growth and strive for a balance between long-term and short-term rewards.

Let us go through the various scenarios where real-time bidding via Reinforcement Learning is used in the marketing space.

Customized Recommendations for customers

Personalized product suggestions give customers what they want. The Reinforcement Learning agent can be  trained to handle situations where challenging barriers like reputation, limited customer data, and consumers evolving mindset are dealt.

It dynamically learns the customer’s requirements and analyses the behavior to serve high-quality recommendations. This increases the ROI and profit margins for the company.

Creating the most beneficial content for advertisement

Coming up with the best marketing pitch that attracts a broader audience is challenging. Models based on Q-Learning are trained on a reward basis and develop an inherent knowledge of positive actions and the desired results. The Reinforcement Learning model will find the advertisement that the users are more likely to click on, thus increasing the customer footprint.

Identifying interest areas of customers with store’s CCTV to deliver better advertisements and offers.

Reinforcement Learning For Consumers And Brands

Without the power of AI, there is a big hurdle in optimizing the reach of advertisements to the customers.

Analyzing which advertisement would suit the need at a given scenario is very hard by naive methods; it paves the way for Reinforcement Learning models. The algorithm meets associated user preferences and dynamically chooses the perfect frequency for buyers.

As a result, increased online conversions are transforming browsing into business.

Reinforcement Learning Applications:

  • Reinforcement Learning involves training a model so that they produce a sequence of decisions. It is either trained using a positive mechanism where the models are rewarded for actions to be more likely to generate it in the future. On the other hand, negative Reinforcement Learning adds punishment so that they don’t produce the current sequence of results again.
  • Reinforcement Learning has changed the dynamics of various sectors like Healthcare, Robotics, Gaming, Retail, Marketing, and many more.
  • Various companies have started managing the marketing campaigns digitally with Reinforcement Learning due to its fundamental ability to increase the profit margins by predicting the choices and behavior of customers towards the products/services.
  • Healthcare is another sector where Reinforcement Learning is used to help doctors discover the treatment type, suggest appropriate doses of drugs and timings for taking such doses.
  • Reinforcement Learning approaches are used in the field of Game Optimization and simulating synthetic environments for game creation.
  • Reinforcement Learning also finds application in self-driving cars to train an agent for optimizing trajectories and dynamically planning the most efficient path.
  • RL can be used for NLP use cases such as text summarization, question & answers, machine translation.
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Transform Your Website Into A Sales Generating System

Your website should viewed as one be one of your distinct sales tools or system within your company.  This is where every explorer, lead and customer visits to learn about your business and its offerings. It’s indicative of your brand. It’s a place they go to make informed purchasing decisions. Rightfully so, it’s an area that requires focused attention that doesn’t get equal weight compared to other sales driven tools.

Your website requires to be built the right way and we often see businesses fall short of this. Your website should NOT only be a great looking and aesthetically pleasing site- though this is very important. It’s about it being one of your sales generating tools to attract the right foot traffic, and convert those leads into customers to grow sales.

If you are not looking at your website as a sales generating system and if it’s not making your business money, then you are missing on potential opportunities that drives sales growth.

So, what must a business do to achieve this.  We have recommended a framework of actionable steps, that if executed in a systematic function, will help transform your website into a sales generating system.

  1. Website Assessment

If you have a website already, conduct an website assessment to first understand your current state and where you are on a web rating scale. Understand the health of your website in real-time and fix the website issues based on the recommendations provided. It’s pointless to make changes when you don’t understand the issues first.

  1. Develop Website Strategic Roadmap

Once you have to have gotten the above results, develop a strategic Website roadmap on what you are going to enhance on your website that increases value. All changes made should be measured and tracked at all times.

  1. Company Positioning

We are assuming your company’s ‘Positioning’ is good which is indicative of your positive marketing and sales results. If this is not the case, then focus must be given to reassessing your position. Once this is done, you can embed the right curated content in your website.

Since your website is your sales tool, your users must understand what you do and why you are different. They must understand the qualitative and quantitative value you bring.  If this is clear, this will translate into more sales. Your site should contain content that depicts your company’s unique attributes and capabilities compared to your competitors.

  1. Advanced UX Design

Equal importance must be given to the design of your website. It’s look and feel, and user responsiveness is very important. Make sure that your website is simple but appealing at the same time. Get input from family, friends, employee and peers. Remember it’s not what you think of your website but what what others think of it. This will be your litmus test.

  1. Optimal SEO

Search Engine Optimization is one of pertinent disciplines to increase website traffic. Make sure you have optimal dynamic search keywords (which is changing) to increase your page rank organically without paid ads. This will then result in increasing conversion rates and sales.

  1. Enriched Marketing Content

The other important aspect of increasing your online visibility is making sure you have the right marketing content that pulls the right searchers who want to purchase your products and services.

  1. Web Data Analysis

In all that you do always collect, process, and analyze your web data to get actionable insights and make smart data-driven decisions.

  1. Website Analytics

Keep track of website traffic and convert those leads into customers. Track and Monitor changes for continuous improvement.

In summary, it’s important to point out that this is not a one-time process. It takes time for your site to be recognized and recommended by the big tech search companies. However, it’s very important to develop and deploy a website the right way. This is a continuous  improvement and equal oversight must be given to your web presence like others operational functions in a business. Be different from your competitors, look at your website as your sales generating system, make the right investments, and measure your Return Of Investment (ROI).

Acumentica is here to help if you need to transform your website.  Contact Us or Learn more about how our AI Digital Growth System that can increase your business online visibility.

 

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What Is Artificial Intelligence?

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Increase Revenue By Leveraging AI Technologies: Part 1

You are a small brick and motor business. You are good at what you do. You know how to build things but trying to figure out ways to increase revenue on a shoe-string budget. Have you considered using AI tools to address your challenges? For many, it might seem that a company needed to a behemoth like Amazon or Google to leverage and harness the power of AI. In the past, that might have been true as deployment of such tools were costly to implement. However, with the advancements of technology today, AI can be used by all types of businesses no matter their size,  solve specific industry and functional discipline problems and what’s important, it is affordable. In this article, we will help you understand how using AI technologies can impact your sales numbers yielding higher revenue and profit margins.

Before diving into addressing how AI technologies can increase revenue, it’s important to define first what Revenue and AI is and how it applies to the health of a business. This will bring clarity within the context of this article.

In simple terms, revenue optimization is not only about improving earnings from your sales but the sum of your income. It’s taking actionable steps to increase your profits margins and the Return Of Investments (ROI). Artificial intelligence (AI) also called Machine Intelligence (MI) leverages computers and machines that aims to emulate the modality, problem-solving and decisions making capabilities like that of a human.

Now that we defined the two, we like to set the preface and breakdown how a business can deploy AI technologies to increase their revenue. This can we done through the use of AI in;

  1. Sales
  2. Marketing
  3. Digital Marketing

This article explains harnessing AI within the functional discipline of Sales.

AI Sales

Find Customers 

By using AI sales tools or agents, a business can find customers who are seeking to buy their products and services specific to their industry. In addition, it enables a business to gain in depth knowledge about each customer, their background, personas, and characteristics.

We are not talking about leads or Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) though this inherently are one of attributes of what AI can also do as well.

360 Degree Customer View

A business may have information about their customers in their CRM or ERP systems. However, this information is static and can be myopic. Customers are not static but dynamic and a business needs to have real-time up to date information of their customers and user journey to make insightful data-driven decisions. Having a 360 view of your customers is imperative and a AI system can make this possible.

Predictive Customer Profitability

Based on a business transaction records, an AI system using RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value) score-based times series and other neural network based models can measure and predict a customer profitability. By doing so a business can segment and create target cohort email marketing campaigns with each customer based on the models inferences.

Predicting Customer Propensity

Customer propensity is understanding the behavior of a customer. It’s a model approach to predict the likelihood of explorers, visitors, leads, and customers are going to purchase a product or service. By doing so a business can only get customer acuity can but increase their Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO).

Prospecting Intelligence

Buy harnessing the power of AI, a B2B and B2C entity can find customers anywhere on the www with a high degree of efficacy. Imagine a system running 24/7 prospecting the web finding customers. That’s the power of AI which aids in maximizing sales and acquire your Total Addressable Market (TAM).

Recommendation Engine

After all the customer data is collected processed and analyzed, it can be arduous to then make the right decision that will yield an optimal result. An AI- powered self -learning engine does not only predicts but prescribes what you must do and focus on. It’s constantly learning and computing millions of data points in order to provide the best recommendation. This decision support system takes the guess out of the equation. It helps a business make smart sales driven decisions.

Increase sales productivity and efficiency

With the above features, attributes and capabilities of a AI sales system, a business will see their an increase in efficiency and productivity while lowering SG&A costs. This accounts for more savings amounting to higher profit margins.

In summary an AI sales  system or Customer Growth System can;

  • Significantly increase sales
  • Prioritize customer focus
  •  Understand and Influence customer behavior
  •  Gain 360-degree Customer intelligence
  •  Increase sales productivity and reduce Costs
  •  Increase ROI

Our goal help you understand how AI can help a business in many business facets. We encourage you to explore our site to learn more.

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The Critical Role Of Positioning In Marketing and Sales?

Introduction

Before diving into how Positioning impacts your marketing and sales, a business must understand what Positioning is. With over 21+ years of transforming businesses, “positioning” is one aspect that I see almost all companies need to reassess and focus on. Business owners, CEOs, and sales and marketing executives think their Positioning can be done without refocusing. However, a business should rethink its Positioning based on negative customer feedback, low-win bid rates, lost opportunities, and poor customer perception. Remember, it’s not what we think of our company, products, and services but what your ideal customers and prospects think.

What is Good Positioning?

Simply, a company’s product/service positioning is about providing customer-centric value that best-fits customers who love and want more.

Positioning impacts many aspects of a business. It affects how you market and sell products, directly affecting revenue and ROI. It determines how customers perceive a business. It affects what you build and what is offered to customers. It impacts marketing and sales costs. From an operations perspective, Positioning affects a business’s COGS (Cost Of Goods Sold) and SG&A (Selling, General And Administrative ) costs. Furthermore, good Positioning increases employee productivity from a people and culture perspective.

 When it’s mapped out, the value of Positioning impacts nearly every financial measure of a business, particularly profit margins. In short, good Positioning impacts the health of a company. Based on our research and experience, companies must take the time to reassess their Positioning if they are facing marketing and sales challenges.

How to implement Good Positioning?

A business can develop and implement good Positioning by;

  • Understanding clearly your best-fit customers’ personas and characteristics.
  • Know your unique attributes and capabilities.
  • Know the value and benefits of your product/services quantitatively and qualitatively.
  • Understand your Competitors.
  • Develop value-based context.

Utilizing positioning tools and techniques together with having discussions with the right team members in your company, a business can achieve good Positioning.

By executing the above strategically, a business will get continuous insights into the external market, create innovative alternatives, develop a business design and ensure the executability of that design by orchestrating and developing the organization’s capabilities. It is not principally about creating a positioning statement or document, although both play a role.

How can I ensure my Positioning Increases sales?

If a business’s Positioning is good, they will notice an increase in their prospecting rates, sales closure rates, and sales growth. Their Top-Line growth will increase. Furthermore, they will notice a reduction in their sales and marketing costs, that is if your your tracking them (which is very important to do). Moreover, pay close attention to the variances in a company’s profit margins with good Positioning. If executed right, monitoring and tracking their positioning change, they will increase the overall health of your company.

How good is your Positioning today? Do you want to get better? 

A structured positioning assessment will clearly help you understand where you currently are and what need you to better position your business.

There is an adage “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly, expecting a different result”. If you are stuck or challenged, make the correct change. Wrong Positioning may be a blind spot and pain point that you might need to mitigate.

Do you think you have a positioning problem? Acumentica can help by:

  • Performing a Positioning assessment of your business through analysis and team-based interviews.
  • Utilizing our fact-based positioning tools, processes, and methodologies.
  • Executing the inferences from the assessment to reach a good positioning state.
  • Tracking and monitoring a company’s positioning strategy.

Contact Our CXO Executives

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Tips To Increase Your Online Conversion Rate organically

As a small business owner your working on a shoe-string budget. We get it. Over the 20+ years of experience working with GROWING  small businesses online visibility and sales, there has been a plethora of learned lessons. We want to outline for you what steps you need to take that is going to help increase your digital visibility, foot traffic, conversion rate, and sales organically without any paid ads. We recommend not waste your hard earned money on social media and search engine marketing until you have optimally executed the below. We have seen this time and time again how companies burn $Millions with little or ROI to show for it.

  • Conduct a Digital Assessment of your business – If you have not already done so, clearly understand the health of your website in real-time and fix your website issues based on the recommendations. Design your website that gives your targeted niche customers a better online experience from quote management, web chats, to purchasing seamlessly online. However, addressing the simple low hanging fruits will position your business better on various search engines radar screens.
  • Search Engine Optimization  – Use the right keywords that your targeted customers personas will query to increase page rank higher organically without ads.  Always track and monitor your SEO.
  • Map optimization –  Is your business on all Search Maps? If not, this is a missed opportunity. The big search tech companies strategy is to use it’s Maps system to recommend businesses to customers or consumers. The goal is for your business to Rank higher organically without any paid ads.
  • Enriched marketing content –  Provide quality content your target market niche. Yes the marketing content you compile is very important. Big tech companies use business content as a benchmark to make the right business recommendations. If they see your business as an expert in your field, they will recommend your business.
  • Google Business Page  –  Google business page is another linchpin system from Google that is imperative to have.  A business that meets a search engines criteria gets a higher authoritative token. This then translates to recommending a business to a customer.
  • Website analytics – Understand who is coming to your website and their user journey in real-time. If you know what they searching for on your website, you can then connect with them. This is a sales generating opportunity.
  • Analyze Your Digital Data –  Track and monitor the digital progress your business is making. Your data tells you a story about your digital performance.  Getting insights into your web data and making improvements will accelerate your page rank.

We want to point our that this is a continuous improvement always making the right changes to be ranked higher. The goal is to increase your page rank without any paid ads. This will in turn, lower your marketing and sales costs and increase your foot traffic and revenue. We are here to help. Contact Us should you have any questions. If you don’t have the resources and bandwidth, Acumentica’s Artificial Intelligence Digital Growth System and expert team can increase your online growth.

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Increase A Business Online Visibility And Sales

How to increase a business online visibility and sales?

By Team Acumentica

As a small business owner your working on a shoe-string budget. We get it. Over the 20  years of experience working with GROWING  small businesses online visibility and sales, there has been a plethora of learned lessons. We want to outline for you what steps you need to take that is going to you help increase your digital visibility, foot traffic, conversion rate, and sales without any paid ads.

We  want to set and precedent and recommend do not to waste your hard earned money on social media and search engine marketing until you have optimally executed the below. We have seen time and time again how companies burn $Millions with little or ROI to show for it.

So let’s get to it. Below are the steps a company needs to take:

  • Conduct a Digital Assessment of your business – Understand the health of your website in real-time and fix your website issues based on the recommendations. Design your website that gives your targeted niche customers a better online experience from quote management, web chats, to purchasing seamlessly online. However, addressing the simple low hanging fruits will position your business better on various search engines radar screens.
  • Search Engine Optimization – Use the right keywords that your targeted customers personas will query to increase page rank higher organically without ads.  Always track and monitor your SEO.
  • Map optimization – Is your business on all Search Engine Maps? If not, this is a missed opportunity. The big search tech companies strategy is to use it’s Maps system to recommend businesses to customers or consumers. The goal is for your business to rank higher organically without any paid ads.
  • Enriched marketing content –  Provide quality content your target market niche. Yes, the marketing content you compile  is very important. Big tech companies use business content as a benchmark to make the right business recommendations. If they see your business as an expert in your field, they will recommend your business.
  • Google Business Page  –  Google business page is another linchpin system from Google that is imperative to have.  A business that meets a search engines criteria gets a higher authoritative token. This then translates to recommending a business to a customer.
  • Website analytics – Understand who is coming to your website and their user journey in real-time. If you know what they searching for on your website, you can then connect with them through a personal email campaign. This is a sales generating opportunity.
  • Analyze Your Digital Data –  Track and monitor the digital progress your business is making. Your data tells you a story about your digital performance.  Getting insights into your web data and making improvements will accelerate your page rank.

We like to point out that above is a continuous improvement always making the right changes to be ranked higher. The goal is to increase your page rank without any paid ads. This will in turn lower your marketing and sales costs and increase your foot traffic and revenue.

We are here to listen and help.  Contact Us should you have any questions. And if you don’t have the resources and bandwidth, Acumentica’s  Artificial Intelligence Digital Growth System and expert team can increase your online growth for you.

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Increase Digital Presence Organically Without Paid Ads

Increase Your Digital Web Presence The Right Way

Empirical evidence on the value of Paid advertisements has proven  it does NOT yield a HIGH ROI as originally anticipated. Large companies are pulling their once costly digital ad campaigns. Why? Because majority of customers don’t believe in ‘push’ advertisements. They will only click on trusted links they are searching for and not the barrage of advertisement popping up on their screens. This approach is called pull marketing.

We believe there is a compelling opportunity for a business to transform and enhance their web presence (pull marketing) by ranking higher on the World Wide Web without any paid ads by optimizing their website, leveraging the latest technologies and implementing SEO and content marketing. In doing so, a business can lower their sales and marketing costs while in tandem increase their prospecting and sales. Notably, we like to point out that it takes time so see results. If making tweaks constitute to web growth, then every business under the sun would do it.

Rightfully so, the big tech search corps have gotten smarter with their search algorithms and only recommend business who meet their and the customers criteria’s. They do this by giving a business a authoritative token. The higher the token, the more likely they will recommend a business. And this takes time for a company to rank higher.

This is why it is important for business to track and monitor their digital data and make the necessary changes based on web and revenue growth. It’s also important for a business to understand this is continuous improvement and not a one step process.

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Six Successful Ways A Business Can Enhance Customer Value

Six Successful Ways A Business Can Enhance Business And Customer Value

 By Team Acumentica

Company’s today need to develop a high performance culture to ensure it’s value is market-driven, compelling to customers, differentiated and sustainable and effectively enabled for sales, resulting in revenue growth. By implementing a value-add Market Planning process, one can become more knowledgeable about the marketplace, customers requirements, competitors and the competitiveness of your capabilities. This will allow a company to invest in the offerings/solutions and programs customers value most, and the marketing, development, alliance and sales activities necessary to bring those offerings/solutions and programs to the market. In turn, the company will benefit from improved management of those offerings/solutions and programs over their life cycle in order to meet performance goals.

How fluid are you in moving from strategy to execution?

This is dependent upon a seamless, well-choreographed performance of Marketing and Sales. A company marketing organization needs to flow from strategic to tactical — to produce a strategy with aligned offerings/solutions and program plans, and to enable execution.

Marketing Management’s contribution to High Performance Marketing is about defining value for a Company;

• Value perceived by customers, conveyed by and provided through the Company brand

• Value received by Company, in return, through execution of competitive business designs

Below are 6 ways to enhance your company or business unit business value.

a) Understand and Choose Value

Understanding and anticipating the customer’s changing definition of value in a dynamic marketplace, with shifting customers, competitors, capabilities and company strategies. Choosing the opportunity, market segment(s), and/or customers, and the scope of value to be delivered by a company at a profit to these segments, with or without partners.

Phase 1. Understand the Marketplace to Select Markets and Business Segments

Phase 2. Develop Value Proposition(s) to Articulate Relevancy and Differentiation

b) Create and Return Value

Developing customer-driven offerings/solutions and programs to deliver maximum value. The strategic and tactical approaches for returning value including profit models, branding and pricing structures.

Phase 3. Develop Business Design to Ensure a Sustainable Business

Phase 4. Design Marketing Mix Elements to Embody Value Proposition

c) Communicate and Deliver Value

The five “Ws” of customer communication: Who says what to whom in which channel, when and with what effect? Deploying and enabling routes-to-market to deliver value to customers, down to the named customer.

Phase 5. Assign, Allocate and Optimize Resources to Ensure Efficient Execution

Phase 6. Measure Customer Conversion to Validate Business Value

The take away is for companies to realize that proficiency in understanding markets and creating customer value is a primary determinant of its long-term performance. In addition, instilling key marketing processes and methodologies that are not only strategic but both strategic and tactical in nature. By implementing the above process, a company can increase their mind share, market share and revenue in today pervasive global economy when executed efficiently.

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The Customer Really Does Rule

Among the business lessons and rules learned over the years is that the customer really does rule. This was learned in the context of understanding that there are a finite number of sources of actual, hard cash for a business. Among the alternatives are:

•  Borrowing it (in the form of debt or equity or venture capital)

•  Selling assets (if you have them to sell) or

•  Getting it in the form of revenue from customers

Among the three, it makes sense that if one could choose, they would choose revenue from customers. Debt, equity, and venture capital, in the beginning start up phases, are fine. Unfortunately each has continuing costs associated with it. Continued borrowing over time can become onerous and eventually lead to a company’s demise. Selling assets is fine until the assets run out. But over time, revenue is the sustainable source of cash that is the reward that the customer bestows upon a company for its excellence and the value of its offerings. There is nothing onerous in reasonably “growing the top line” on a continuing basis.

Now customers have numerous choices as to where they send their money and who they reward, i.e. they have alternative choices called “the competition”. A competitor, by definition, is “the customer’s alternative choice”. There are direct competitors (those that are very much alike in appearance), indirect competitors (those that do not look alike but serve the same customer need), DIY (do it yourself) alternatives and in some instances, doing nothing is an alternative choice for the customer.

So how does a business capture the customer reward?

Since the goal is to have the customer send you the money, and lots of it, the first step in maximizing cash from revenue is to find a group of customers that can be served in a meaningful and sustainable, economic fashion. This is called “target market selection”. One of the first major strategic decisionsthat any company makes is deciding what market it will serve. Since it can’t be all things to all people, it must be something meaningful to some group. In nature there is a saying “no species can live everywhere, but each species must live somewhere”. Translated into the business world, this means find a specific, relevant target market that is compatible to your business strengths. Focus on that market. Don’t spend a lot of time considering irrelevant markets; a waste of resources.

Once that target market has been selected, the second major strategic decision that a company must make is deciding what will be its basis for a sustainable competitive advantage. There will usually be alternative choices for the customer’ money in the target market; called competition. And in order to maximize the revenue stream from the customer, one must have a unique and distinctive advantage over those alternative choices. Lower cost, unique features, superb service, distinctive positioning, are a few of the alternatives for establishing a competitive advantage. Whatever one selects, be sure it is sustainable and affordable.

Well, having selected a target market and established a basis for competitive advantage, the next step is to set revenue goals and operational tracking measures that will be the predictors and evidence of the wisdom of the strategic decisions. Another lesson or rule is that one should always be number one in market share within the relevant target market, or at least a close number two. The customer’s response in revenue terms is what drives market position. The more they like and value what you are doing, the more revenue they will send you. Market leadership reflects the relevance of the market selected the strength of the offer’s unique and distinctive advantage and the value seen by the customer. Conversely a weak market position indicates the weakness of the strategic decisions and, of course, less revenue.

As noted above, operationally, the relative value of the offer as seen by the customer, in comparison to their alternative choices, is an accurate leading indicator of what their actual in market performance will be. Value can be determined by:

•  Ranking and valuing the offer’s features in terms of their importance

•  Rating one competitor Vs another on the features, and

•  Rating each competitor Vs the other in terms of its perceived value (CVA score)

All these measures aid in predicting what the customer will do. Since customers usually behave in relationship to the value they perceive, the highest value score for a competitor will lead to the highest revenue stream to that competitor.

There is another aspect to being the market leader and that is the competitor with the highest market share (by virtue of selling the most volume) is usually the low cost producer within the selected market segment; or they should be. Through scale and experience effects, market leaders should have the lowest costs. Combined with the greatest revenue, this makes the market leader the competitor with the highest margins and returns, i.e. the financial leader. Not a bad combination.

In the long run, some companies seem to continually outperform the others in terms of market position, margins, returns, and creating shareholder value. Others do not, lagging behind in market share and financial performance. Since the marketplace is neutral to everyone, why do some companies do better than others? Winning companies have a winning strategy as it relates to target market selection, unique and distinctive offers, cost control and investing scarce cash resources. Winning companies become number one with their customers in their respective markets. And they understand the value of being the low cost producer. But most importantly, they recognize the value of the customer who is the final arbiter of their success. WHAT’S IN YOUR WALLET?

“Enjoy the value it brings it you”

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