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April 05, 2005

It's not just for marketing anymore...

Last week I had breakfast with a very old friend of mine, Ray Ziganto. He is head of marketing/sales for Bi-Link and a fan of the Bi-Link and a fan of the marketing playbook.">marketing playbook. Anyway, in the course of long, pleasant, wide-ranging set of conversations, Ray shed some interesting different light on a number of the playbook ideas and their application.

Bi-Link is the leading global contract metal stamping provider of metal parts, subassemblies in mobile phones, laptops, and other electronics devices (i.e. they make all the metal stuff in your Blackberry). This is not what you would normally think of as a classic "marketing" company. But hey, Ray has a lot of marketing DNA, and he felt excited (i.e. obligated) to figure out a way to use the concepts in book his friend wrote in practical way in his business.

Well, most of the people Ray works with are either mechanical/process engineering or straight-up-the-hill sales types. ABCs, Plays, Positiong/Messaging had to be practical to this business and to these people. So in the process of brainstorming he hit on a few things that are really of note:

• Doing your ABC/Gap analysis is not just a big, strategic, abstract analysis of the "landscape"/"playing field", it is actually a way for you, as a sales person, to empathize with your customer and better manage the account. Understanding A) their situation B) their goals and C) the challenges they face in reaching them is just a plain simple way of making sure your sales people are in synch with their INDIVIDUAL customers
• A customer = a market. Your individual customer can actually be the best way to get educated on the market anyway. Rather than commissioning "market" research across the whole market, start with a customer you have or already close with and get them to walk you through their ABCs and their view of the competition. Their view is in many ways more important anyway - they are paying you money.
• Working with A customer = marketing. Beyond just using them to understand the market, sometimes working more closely with a strong "enabling" customer will help you break into a market a lot more than doing what we normally think of as "marketing." Sales people often look to "marketing" as sales support and lead generation. Ray asked the obvious but critical question "Should we spend $200K on a tradeshow booth or give $200K more in resources to our most strategic customer to kickstart a project in an area new for them?" What will be more strategic in the long run, another media outlet for making claims or real value creation that lends proof of your abilities in a new market?

Damn good question and good way for companies to think about marketing - not just as this abstract input and output but as the right way to acquire, leverage and extract value from customers, even if the people doing it are not "marketing people" but sales, product, engineering, receptionists, you name it.

Posted by johnza at April 5, 2005 03:42 PM

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