You are a start-up or a mature corporation that put a lot of effort to enter a new market with innovative product. Your enthusiasm is at the highest, and you are developing now your go-to-market plan.
Start point is your product or service, you assessed that it brings high value to customers and is going to shake the market place. You have no doubt about the coming success.
The confidence that you place in your product is a good asset that you need to develop. While putting in place your marketing plan, it is worth to look at some of the challenges:
Reach your target audience:
First step is to effectively inform the right audience. An outstanding website is mandatory but not enough. To attract visitors, promotion campaign is launched. With a disruptive technology, advertising also needs somehow to educate the potential users. As customer attention is shared with many others, much effort is needed to deliver this understandable message.
Social networking and industry events are complementary to websites. They allow more interaction but need to be well prepared with a perfect synchronization. The number of industry events increases, they remain costly. It’s preferable to select the few that will give the best return.
Innovation attracts geeks and curious. It is important at beginning to filter and focus on real business leads. If you product is truly disruptive, better address the CEO: the R&D, Product managers will consider you more as a competitor than a solution to their problem.
From business lead to first sale: you established now relationship with potential customers, there are now other difficulties to overcome:
One of them is the lack of credibility, particularly if you are a start-up. Many often big corporations are just dealing with big corporations; smaller ones might not put a risk their core business using your solution. You need to identify companies open to initiate relationship with you, and approach them with a riskless scalable solution. First step is to visit with a demo, convince to go with Proof of Concept before to start the development of the final product
In many cases you product is not yet mature or includes several options that need to be reviewed by customers. Difficulty there is to bring at customer the right level of expertise without cannibalizing the technical resources of your organization.
Don’t miss your target:
While the ambition of a new organization is to build teams that will guarantee a scalable and sustainable growth, the delay needed to bring the right profile with experience might jeopardize your plan. At this point of time, it is worth to consider outsourcing, to complement you current resources and expertise.
Where experience matters:
There are numerous consultants that can help you on a single or few topics. While it is possible to edit a market survey even you are not an expert of the related industry, it becomes less efficient as soon as you initiate interaction with customers. Endless communication loops might demotivate them as well as your technical team. If you need external support, select the one that best understand your innovation.
CI consulting provides a complete set of expertise in sales and marketing, that ranges from market study, pricing to customer visits, sales negotiations. Long experience in tech industry particularly in Electronics, Software, Network and security will help you to secure the ROI on your new initiative.
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