The concept of “system selling” is applicable to all products and services. System selling extends the lifecycle revenue of products and services. The wisdom of offering products and services that don’t stand alone, but which intimately fit into a greater system for the end user or client, continues to be sound and exploitable by marketers. It is a necessary element in OMNI channel strategies, product management and the Product Lifecycle Revenue Model. Why? (more…)

It’s not how much money you make; it’s how much you get to keep. Unfortunately, as the cost of labor, materials and shipping goes up your profit margins go down and you get to keep less and less of your revenue. The natural response to this dilemma for many organizations is to raise prices, reduce services, cut overhead or just accept lower margins and hope to make up for it in volume. Any one of these options has risks that must be weighed very carefully. If only there was a way (more…)

Every leadership team should be asking questions about their social networking strategy. They wonder how Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google Plus, CRM, Sales Force, Customer Portals, Websites, Blogs and other platforms can be utilized for business development purposes. We have been developing those thoughts at Group50 for the last 14+ years.  We have spoken with hundreds of companies, and have found a wide disparity between their efforts and the type of business they are in. Although not a formal study, our general findings are as follows: (more…)

Market Effectiveness™ is a series of cross functional business processes that need to be well managed and orchestrated. Market Effectiveness is akin to the supply chain and poor performance at either of these will result in bad business performance.

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If you are like many leaders, you remember the great new ideas that were early springboards for your company’s success. For some reason, however, your new products and services “pool” seems to have dried up over the years. What happened? Have you become less creative? Has your organization grown complacent and removed from customers and how your products are used? Perhaps you’ve just been looking in the wrong places.

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To gain a competitive edge, every project needs to take a holistic approach to new channel development. Changes in one process or program will weave its way throughout an organization and its markets. When making changes to the marketing and sales channels, some work needs to be done early in the project to assess the implications of change. Failure to consider this may cause irreparable damage to the company’s sales, clients and reputation in the marketplace. In new channel development, the company knows current markets well and has setup programs and processes to support the existing channels. When a new channel is contemplated, there are many interrelated issues that must be dealt with. They include: (more…)