Whether you sell directly to consumers, or to other businesses, it’s important to understand which are your high potential customers. This enables your organization to target sales efforts more effectively, to maximize impact of your marketing spend, and to focus product and portfolio development.

Using a segmented market model, we determine your highest potential customers, and find underserved segments. These are high potential segments which have inadequate coverage, or need customized portfolio development. These underserved segments are the key to rapid growth and establishing dominant market share. Our international experience helps Growth Path identify regional ‘white spots’ which may well be developed markets elsewhere, from which we can determine success factors.

But finding potential is only the first part of the plan. Next up is a Fit vs Need analysis for these segments to see how well positioned your organization is currently, and where fortification is needed to be a dominant player (e.g. portfolio expansion, custom services, support or delivery infrastructure). This analysis helps identify ‘low hanging fruit’ available for short term growth with existing or minimal additional resources; and also charts a longer term, sustainable growth map.

Short term rapid results provide two significant benefits in establishing your long term growth plans: they provide significant improvement to benefit shareholders; and get the attention of sales staff that the growth plans work. This dual level buy-in helps give your organization the drive and resources to implement the changes required for sustainable long-term growth.

You’ll also find high potential segments for which your current organization does not have a good fit. This is invaluable in developing a rationale for opening new channels to market; for broadening the scope of your portfolio through development, partnering or acquisition; for geographic expansion; and for adding business development initiatives.

Most importantly, we’ll help you structure your organization & processes to ensure that you are focused on the targets at every phase from product development, portfolio & service management, sales & account management, through to your internal and external communication strategy. Keeping that focus is your key to profitable growth.

What are the value drivers for your key accounts, and how can you increase share-of-wallet with your best customers? Growth Path can work with your account service team to establish value-based criteria to determine how to respond pro-actively to your A-list clientele.

We’ll help your team implement multi-tiered customer development plans to maximize key account potential, by determining the full breadth of needs which can be fulfilled by your organization. We’ll also work with you on developing partnerships that can tremendously broaden your appeal to key accounts.

Finally, we’ll help your sales & account team divide responsibilities, learn to differentiate A, B & C type accounts from core business, and develop targeting plans for adding/nurturing strategic key accounts on a regular basis to stimulate growth.

What would make your target customers choose your company? What aren’t they getting now? Most importantly, what features/issues will cause a potential customer to choose expertise over price as their deciding factor? Growth Path can help you accurately determine that with a comprehensive program ranging from customer interviews and competitive analysis, through focus groups and advisory councils.

Our analysis starts with input from your sales and support staff on customer requests and issues. This is followed up with a strategically devised set of customer satisfaction issues which not only provide insight on your customers’ current retention status; but looks at what they value from other providers; examines their purchasing/decision patterns; and uncovers the best way to add premium value.

When you look to focus on a particular vertical market or demographic, it’s important to understand precisely what drives them, and what it will take to be viewed as the brand of choice. For new markets, this is where focus groups can be invaluable – and Growth Path has extensive experience in assembling focus groups ranging from testing new product introductions, to determining new market requirements and barriers-to-entry.

For a market in which you wish to establish a reputation for ongoing expertise, this focus group transforms into an advisory council, composed of influencers and decision makers within your industry. The twist here is that in addition to polling them for market trends and requirements, you must convince them that you are simultaneously transforming your business with what you learn.

Which brings us to marketing your expertise – with business development efforts followed up by case studies, testimonials, and sales applications in an integrated marketing portfolio. Because the plan is not just to be the best – but to let the right people know, so they’ll choose you.

We can help you accurately determine that with a comprehensive program ranging from customer interviews and competitive analysis, through focus groups and advisory councils.

Few mid-sized industries are in the enviable position of having reliable data on overall market size available. If your market is not neatly encompassed by Europe or the USA – the two areas which have the best data, it gets more complex. Most North American estimates for example, take the USA add 10% for Canada and forget Latin America entirely. How do you find a market potential for a new product that has no equivalent? If you’ve got something new & improved, what % of the existing market is really available to you? Where do you start?

Growth Path will build a research model based on your company’s requirements, then examine relevant data sources. We can advise what data you should purchase, and what you can realistically expect from it. More importantly, we’ll build the dynamic data models to help bridge the gaps in market intelligence with a degree of assurance. We have experience in a wide variety of models & bridges, including those based on company size & annual revenue; building square footage (m2); number of full time employees; throughput (enrollment/patients/clients); and facilities based.

The next step is to break down this overall market into the segmentation most useful for your company. This can be geographical, based on demographics when you sell directly to consumers, or by vertical market when you sell to other businesses. Through modeling, we can provide you market transparency – the ability to tunnel down from the over-all market, through regional breakdowns, verticals (by NAICS or demographics) to a specific customer to determine their potential to your business. This enables the best kind of targeting for your sales force – knowing the high potential customers within their region.

We’ll also help you build competitive profiles to understand how others in your industry are structured and positioned. If you know how & where your competitors work, it’s much easier to uniquely position yourself for success – without a price war. This understanding of your market share in segments is critical to developing your intermediate & long term growth plans, and leads the way to understanding best regions or segments for expansion, partnering & acquisitions.

Customer segmentation & targeting also paves the way for superior sales results. Data mining provides qualified leads for directed sales management techniques, and improved key account management focus.

Do you need dedicated product or service offering managers? If so, what should their focus be? Growth Path will lay out a strategic portfolio management plan tailored to enhance your growth ability, carefully delineating organizational responsibilities. Whether you need to bolster existing product management, or add it to your organization, we can pinpoint the areas where your resources will be best utilized.

The first step is to determine the high support, and high growth elements in your portfolio, both of which require unique styles of product management. We’ll also look at how service for your portfolio is currently addressed, to see if it is best served by integrated or discrete management. Effective service portfolio management is the key to profitability in many companies, and Growth Path can illuminate these opportunities.

Major challenges for most portfolio managers including branding – especially with multiple product lines or stratas. We can help with both rationalization and differentiation, both by market and sales channel, to optimize the product mix for your target markets. This can result in major savings in both development and purchasing, as these endeavors are harmonized to target segments.

Many product managers typically rise through the ranks, and are very technically proficient and understand the nuances and applications of their portfolio well. We can help them translate this into communicated expertise that the market desires. As well, we can help fill in the gaps in typical problem areas such as establishing market level pricing, and competitive selling profiles.

Finally we can ensure that the support infrastructure for your portfolio includes both your sales & business development force, and of course your customer base. With almost two decades of portfolio management experience, Growth Path has the knowledge to help you implement the processes, and checkpoints which ensure that your team covers all the bases. This includes comprehensive checklists – from service parts, sales demos, internal/external documentation, sales training, and purchasing agreements, to detailed launch plans.

Selling direct? Through distribution? Dealers? Value-added-resellers? Get the right mix to augment your growth, and determine the key points in avoiding channel conflict. Opening new channels is one of the keys to growth – rationalizing them the key to doing it profitably.

Growth Path has years of experience in managing multi-channel distribution. We’ll help you select the proper channels for your business – ones which open up new markets to stimulate growth. By identifying ‘non-value add’ markets, we can uncover opportunities for you to expand your reach through distribution or dealers, which would be unprofitable for direct-selling. We’ll also help you understand the pitfalls and benefits of using value-added resellers as an alternative (or precursor) to expansion, and help you target these accordingly.

Our team will work with your channel managers in partner selection, crafting contracts, and most importantly identifying the channel requirements and differentiators. This frequently means collaboration with portfolio managers to provide alternate brands or differentiated products/feature sets appropriate to each channel.

We’ll help your portfolio managers develop a pricing strategy which encompasses all your channels, to maximize revenue and profitability – while minimizing conflict.

When it comes to channel conflict, if you have multiple existing channels which don’t interact well, we can apply our experience to rationalizing the management of these. We’ll help you determine which channels are the key to your future growth, and what re-structuring might be required to optimize their effectiveness. Like tuning an engine, channel rationalization removes the gunk to leave the motor running faster & leaner.

We’ll help you craft your sales force into the team you need to grow. Determine whether you need geographical, segment driven or portfolio-based territories; and optimize these sales territories to drive opportunities.

If you rely on your existing customer-base for more than 40% of annual revenue, then you can benefit from a shift to establishing a Hunter-Farmer methodology. We can help implement this sales-split which segregates new from repeat business, allowing your best ‘street people’ to sell full-time while inside sales and client management specialists pro-actively support existing customers.

Our ‘white spot’ determination can help pinpoint locations for new sales-only offices/branches, while maximizing the effectiveness of your sales staff by limiting travel.

Examining your sales processes will help streamline the time spent closing by your sales staff, as we look how to maximize sales leads, qualification, proposals, follow-up, commissioning and handover to customer service.

As part of your over-all target marketing approach, we can help in transforming your sales force to value-add selling techniques. We can also assist in determining the efficacy of a dedicated service force or inside sales support.

Mid-sized companies can’t afford a heavy marketing overhead. We’ll help you determine a focus for your marketing efforts to reduce overall expenditures, by channeling resources to where your organization requires them to grow.

We’ll start by using a comprehensive survey tool to uncover the current Sales & Marketing state of growth readiness for your business. This two-stage process starts with a review of your sales & marketing process by Growth Path, to see what’s currently in place, and our view of the status. This is followed up by structured interviews with your sales & marketing teams, to see where they believe the organizational strengths and weaknesses are.

Collating and analyzing this, we can help you determine your state of growth readiness in the evolutionary status of all the major elements of strategic marketing necessary to a successful organization. These are ranked on a sliding scale from non-existent, through rudimentary, average, superior and world-class. These evaluations extend through the breakdown of major tasks – for example, your Product Management may rate superior overall, but need shoring up in a specific area such as establishing market-level pricing strategy.

The results of this evaluation will help you target your marketing efforts to have the greatest ROI for your organization. We can determine the incremental efforts required for stability and maintaining customer satisfaction/retention, and those required for growth. This can lead to an organizational roadmap for both short-term ‘low hanging fruit’ and intermediate to long-term growth plans.

Benefits in targeting your marketing resources in this manner are significant – you will hire people with the skill sets that most benefit your organization. You’ll know when you need a Key Account Manager instead of a Marketing Manager. You can also determine efforts which are best out-sourced. Your Product Managers may be perfectly capable technically, but need help in establishing a market potential profile.

And of course Growth Path can work with you in any of these identified areas to augment & strengthen your existing capabilities. When you commission an additional 2 weeks of Growth Path programs, we’ll rebate 50% of the assessment cost. Commission 3 weeks, and we’ll rebate the full cost of your State of Growth Readiness Assessment.

Growth Path will help you determine the underserved ‘white spots’ for economic expansion. Then we can walk you through the process of deciding if you want a full service direct selling/delivery branch/outlet; are better served by a sales-only office. Next we work with you on a business plan analysis to make the choice of determining whether it’s more effective to branch out directly, or to acquire an existing infrastructure. The alternative to this – partnering with a local value-added reseller is also evaluated.

These ‘white spots’ can be both geographic (e.g. opening a new sales office in the suburbs), or portfolio related (adding infrastructure to handle a new line to your east coast office).

For acquisitions, we can examine the strategic value of a bolt-on or expansion, and the potential it may add over and above its economic value. Acquisitions can cause radical shifts in market share; erase barriers to entry; create/remove channel conflicts; heighten union/non-union worker tension – and you need to be aware of the potential impact of all of these.