Marketing Action Plans: Outlines, Templates, and Guidelines for Gaining a Unique Competitive Edge

By Morgan D. Rees

Is your business not reaching enough prospects, experiencing long sales cycles, or not seeing your marketing campaigns generating the revenue you expect? What if you could have instant access to preexisting plans, do more in less time, save money, and increase your ROI?

Morgan Rees has put it all together in Marketing Action Plans, a concise, step-by-step book with bottom line guides and strategies that will take your company from invisible to remarkable. Its like having your own marketing department available to you, twenty-four hours a day, every day!

Learn from Morgans experience with such notable brands as Philips Electronics, Norelco, Marantz, Magnavox, Citrix Online, Netgear, and Honeywell. Marketing Action Plans offers ready-to-use plans, processes, outlines, guidelines, booklets, templates, and forms that you can customize by simply filling in the details. Some customization will be necessary to fit the needs of your organization, but a substantial part of your plan, layout, and content are provided.

Marketing Action Plans is a year-round resource tool. Its not the kind of book that sits on your bookshelf at home; rather, it is an important tool that can guide you through the development of plans for your company or organization.

Enjoy your MAP to success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 13, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450237345

Morgan D. Rees

Morgan Rees, currently a resident of California, is a savvy business strategist with extensive experience, from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. With over fifteen years in business-to-business and consumer marketing involving numerous publicly traded companies, he is an authority on what works and what it takes to build a company’s brand and profitability.

Book preview

Contents

Introduction

Marketing Is the Navigator

A Running Start

Branding and Advertising

Brand Strategy and Launch Plan

Web-Based Marketing

Marketing Programs,

Components and Process

Sales

The Inside Sales Process

1. Introduction

2. Lead Management

SALES PROCESS DEFINITION

(Insert your company name here) Technologies

Inside Sales—Baseline Script

(INSERT YOUR COMPANY

NAME HERE)

COLLATERAL STATUS AT A GLANCE

(INSERT YOUR COMPANY

NAME HERE)

COLLATERAL AT A GLANCE—ACTION PLAN TEMPLATE

Quality Assurance

Customer Retention

Summary

About the Author

Introduction

Just one hundred years ago, the majority of the nation worked for themselves or for a very small business, while the minority was employed by large businesses. For the past fifty years, however, this trend has reversed—now the majority work for giant corporations.

Remember when IBM dominated the entire global computer business? Do you recall when General Motors owned the global automobile market with over 60 percent market share? Kodak was synonymous with color film and held 90 percent marketing share. For decades you didn't say, Make a photocopy, you said, I'm going to make a Xerox. Now we have digital photography, and Hewlett Packard owns the color desktop printer market. Who in their right mind would have ever contemplated these pillars of industry would lose their standing?

We are in the midst of a work paradigm shift that is changing us from one way of doing business to another. It's a revolution. A transformation. A sort of metamorphosis. It didn’t just occur; rather, it's driven by our changing times.

Workers are now being subcontracted for a specific initiative or project. This is indicative of the Silicon Valley business model; however, now globally. Now each one of us will not only have to have our own unique expertise of skill sets such as in engineering, product management, electrician, financial controller, etc., we will also have to be able to market ourselves as standalone services or companies. We now have to market ourselves against the other guy. Marketing Action Plans will expeditiously and painlessly bring you up to speed and provide you the outline, templates, and self-guidance to market yourself in the aggressive global village and give you the competitive edge.

Over my career I have read hundreds of marketing, branding, sales, and product management books. During that process, I usually highlight important areas with a yellow highlighter. Then, after finishing the book, I would circle back and type out all of the yellow highlighted areas. Regrettably, I have never been able fill more than a single page of information per book that I could actually use in my day-to-day job of marketing. In other words, my time was not being used efficiently, and the return on investment was low.

Marketing Action Plans is a 365-days-a-year resource tool. It’s not the kind of book that sits on your bookshelf at home; rather, you should keep it with you at work at all times. Everything in this book is for real-world survival—individual documents, processes, procedures, and full plans.

All of us have had - or will have - a boss who demands a full public relations, marketing and/or online plan on his desk in less than a week. This is impossible to do from scratch; however, with Marketing Action Plans you will able to use 50 percent to 80 percent of each document and template included.

Simply insert your company name and products where asked. Yes, you will need some customization to fit your organization, but having a substantial part of your plan, layout, and content provided will permit you to do two things: focus on what is really important and meet your unrealistic deadlines.

Also, after decades of experience I can personally attest that having a process and check off forms dramatically speeds up your entire department. It will synchronize everyone in or outside of your marketing department. It usually takes years to develop a complete set of fully developed best practices lists. But now you, simply by reading this book, have virtually everything you need.

Enjoy your MAP to success.

Marketing Is the Navigator

Success Factors for the Emerging

Technology Company

Marketing is the Navigator

Venture capitalists have a saying, If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there. Many start-ups are founded by technical innovators, whose vision is primarily focused on the technical capabilities of their products. However, the better mousetrap may not succeed in the marketplace. For the emerging company introducing its high-tech products, marketing should be an equal partner in guiding the conceptual thinking, market requirements, direction setting, product development, and product launches—the essentials that determine the ultimate success of the start-up and its product offerings. The marketing organization plays the role of navigator—advising on the customer-focused objectives, the processes and methods for execution, and the best course for developing and launching products on time and within budget.

At emerging technology companies, the marketing organization can play a key role in establishing and steering the company’s directions. Marketing can ensure that a company’s technical vision is balanced by an understanding of the wants and needs of its target customers, for example, the CIOs and network managers of Fortune 1,000 enterprises.

Investors are often instrumental in guiding technology entrepreneurs to focus on marketing and rely on marketing-driven processes. The typical management team at a start-up company is more enamored with embellishing the bells and whistles of their technology than understanding and addressing the requirements of their target customers. I am impressed when it is demonstrated how integrated marketing is in the core fabric of the company and when implemented marketing-driven methodologies keep a company focused and on track.

Before new product development gets under way, the marketing organization should be tasked with answering fundamental questions such as:

• What are we selling?

• What is the product?

• Who will we sell it to (and how do we get them)?

• Why will they buy it (and why won’t they buy it)?

• What is the competition?

This focus on marketing can enable an emerging company to diversify its product portfolio by leveraging its core competencies. The marketing team can identify market requirements for additional products based on the core technology but with differentiating functions that meet specialized requirements. Because the underlying technology is the same for all products, the company can shorten the development time for new products.

Critical Success Factors

At an emerging company, marketing can drive critical success factors, including:

• Ensuring unified corporate wide commitment on vision, strategies, and plan

• Building tools to ensure the success of the sales organization

• Managing the product development process

• Gaining intimate knowledge of the market and evolving customer needs

• Achieving, sustaining, and managing perception of product performance

The marketing plan for each product incorporates elements including alignment with the company mission, value proposition, marketing fundamentals, market segment profiles, market size, market share objectives, competitive landscape, product delivery requirements, product road map, marketing tactics, sales strategy, and resource plans. The cumulative mix of these elements defines a multidimensional matrix that drives the company’s sales goals, time lines, budgets, and staffing.

The integration of the marketing perspective into all aspects of the planning and execution process forges an externally oriented, customer-driven consciousness. The marketing-driven company leverages the perceptions of its visionary technologists to develop a vision that ultimately wins the hearts and minds of its customers. This customer focus permeates product requirements documents, product road maps, engineering plans, and customer support requirements, sales presentations, beta product releases, and ongoing product development. A marvelous transformation occurs when the customer becomes everything. Every department and every member of the company begins to share a unified commitment to the company’s vision, a common strategy, and integrated plans.

A Balance of Progress and Perfection

Management’s role is to identify and clearly state objectives, associate those objectives with achievable metrics, track progress towards those objectives, identify obstacles in real-time, and engage a rapid decision-making process that overcomes those obstacles. Rather than increasing bureaucracy with ever-increasing levels of approval, the company should implement lightweight processes that people can understand and use. By continually emphasizing the company’s focus on the customer, the marketing organization helps to achieve a balance between progress—we’ve got to ship the product on time—and perfection—we’ve got to fix every bug.

The marketing organization can help to achieve the balance between progress and perfection by honing the emerging company’s ability to execute its core competencies and identifying strategic partnerships that extend product capabilities and related solutions. For example, if the company’s engineering team primarily consists of software developers, but the market requires an appliance-level solution that integrates software and hardware, hardware elements can be licensed from best-of-breed partners.

Understanding the trade-offs related to issues such as underlying hardware architectures is a critical element of the perfection versus progress equation. Some start-ups spend millions of dollars developing application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) that provide high performance but are expensive to modify and difficult to enhance. Others have understood, however, that Moore’s Law ensures the ever-increasing performance of Intel processors will enable them to maintain state-of-the-industry performance. This saves millions of dollars in R&D and enables the company to rapidly develop new software capabilities independent of the restrictions associated with ASIC-based systems.

Marketing can steer the company’s product development by championing flagship customers, the initial users of a new product, or strategic partners whose satisfaction measures progress in real-world terms and signifies an acceptable level of perfection. Working through product requirements and needed refinements with these key customers and partners helps to ensure that a product’s feature set, performance level, and price point meets or exceeds customer needs and provides a compelling differentiation to competitive products.

Ultimately, marketing is not an afterthought to the process of innovation; it is the essential catalyst that takes technology from the concepts of technologists to the reality of customer acceptance. With marketing organization as navigator, the emerging company knows where it is going, chooses the best road to get there, and arrives on time to the welcome of an ever-increasing legion of satisfied customers.

# # # #

A Running Start

Whether you are a freshly promoted marketing decision-maker or a new marketing leadership hire, you only have a single chance to make a first impression. This is an awkward period. Senior management is expecting you to immediately produce an action plan without knowing much about—or anything about—your company or its products. You want the honeymoon time to create a beautiful annual marketing plan that will impress everyone and put your fingerprint on the company. The reality is you are never given the luxury of time, as a thirty- sixty- ninety-day marketing plan is expected first.