Be the Go-To: How to Own Your Competitive Market, Charge More, and Have Customers Love Y

By Theresa M. Lina

Are customers failing to see what sets your brand apart, pushing your prices (and margins) down? Healthy prices and profits are a company's lifeblood, critical for funding current operations and future growth. Yet too many businesses look alike and are then forced to compete on price alone. Instead, they should aim for clear, sustainable differentiation, owning the market as the enduring Go-To brand.

Theresa M. Līna will help you escape the commodity trap.

In Be the Go-To, Theresa reveals a groundbreaking, step-by-step approach called the Apollo Method for Market Dominance. It's a detailed, pragmatic recipe for becoming your market's Go-To brand, brought to life through fascinating, behind-the-scenes stories from the Apollo Space Program, Tesla, Disney, Apple, Lego, Salesforce, Amazon, REI, and more.

Use her four pillars of sustainable differentiation to call your own moonshots and dominate markets for highly profitable growth. If you want to drive game-changing solutions into your markets and deliver results that have customers flocking to you, this entertaining and well-researched strategy playbook will help you develop your own plan for becoming the Go-To!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781544514345

Book preview

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Be The

Go-To

How to Own Your Competitive Market, Charge More, and

Have Customers Love You for It

Theresa M. Līna

Copyright © 2020 by Theresa M. Līna. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission by the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles and reviews, provided there is full attribution.

Apollo Method for Market Dominance™, Be the Go-To™, Be the Go-To, Not a Me-Too™, Media Food Chain™, Influencer Food Chain™, and Why/What/How Storyline™ are trademarks of Lina Group, Inc., 268 Bush St, #828, San Francisco, CA 94104. The contents of the methodology are the proprietary intellectual property of Theresa M. Līna and Lina Group, Inc. Copyright © 1999-2020 by Theresa M. Līna and Lina Group, Inc.. All rights reserved.

Be the Go-To

How to Own Your Competitive Market, Charge More, and Have Customers Love You For It

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN

978-1-5445-1436-9

Hardcover

ISBN

978-1-5445-1435-2

Paperback

ISBN

978-1-5445-1434-5

Ebook

To my career-long mentor, friend, and role model, Al Burgess, who gave me limitless opportunities as a young executive and taught me what it takes to be the Go-To.

To my husband and daughters, who are the loves of my life and make it all worthwhile.

To my parents, who made it all possible.

Contents

I. Why

Prologue

Introduction

1.

Commoditization Is Enemy #

1

II. What

2.

Remedy: Be the Go-To for a Solution to a Market Problem

3.

What a Go-To Brand Does Differently

III. How

4.

Overview: The Apollo Method for Market Dominance

5.

Launch Phase

6.

Ignite Phase

7.

Navigate Phase

8.

Accelerate Phase

9.

Your One-Page Flight Plan

Author's Note

Acknowledgments

Select Notes

About the Author

Part I

Why

Prologue

While at a reception hosted by the Soviet Union’s embassy in Washington, DC, New York Times reporter Walter Sullivan received a panic-stricken phone call from his Washington Bureau chief. It was October

4

,

1957

. Meant to cap off a week of international scientific meetings among prestigious rocket and satellite researchers from seven countries, the reception proved to be an intentionally timed public relations and propaganda coup for the Soviets and a complete humiliation for the US. What had the bureau chief relayed to Sullivan? Soviet news sources had just announced the launch of the first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite, Sputnik

1

.

The Soviet Union had beaten the United States into space.

Sputnik

1

was simply a twenty-two-inch metal sphere weighing less than

200

pounds, orbited the earth in ninety-six minutes, and stayed up for three months. But it had officially kicked off the Space Race.

In what would come to be known as the Sputnik Crisis, this event set off alarm bells. NASA archives say it had a Pearl Harbor effect on American public opinion. In NASA’s own words:

It was a shock, introducing the average citizen to the space age in a crisis setting…In the Cold War environment of the late

1950

s, [with the looming threat of nuclear war hanging in the air] this disparity of capability portended menacing implications.

Just a month later, Sputnik

2

carried a living creature, a dog, into space in an even larger vehicle that orbited for almost

200

days.

Over the next several years, the United States (representing the free world at that time) made only occasional incremental gains in the space race against its Cold War opponent. US space exploration then consisted of a hodgepodge of initiatives. There were numerous independent projects in progress, spread among multiple government agencies and contractors, involving thousands of people and investments of billions of dollars per year. And with little to show for it all.

According to Apollo astronaut Dick Gordon, in looking back:

The only driving theme was speed, to be the first at something, anything. All of that time and money was being expended while the Soviets kicked our butts with one historical achievement after another.

By

1961

, newly elected president John F. Kennedy realized the US space mission needed focus. He said:

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

He didn’t set this goal quietly either. He branded the initiative as the Apollo Space Program and launched it with a grand gesture in the most public way possible: a historic speech to Congress on May

25

,

1961

, that the entire world heard. He put a stake in the ground with a proud declaration of a singular goal. No one knew at the time how to do it, but if achieved, this feat clearly would establish the US and the rest of the free world as the dominant force in space.

(Image: NASA)

Requiring unprecedented funding and public support in order to keep the program alive over such an extended period, Apollo Space Program leaders continuously ignited engagement and support from politicians, the general public and influential scientists, and researchers inside and outside of NASA on how to make it work. Apollo astronauts became the faces of the program, even visiting schools and civic meetings to drum up support. Some regard the program as the most successful public relations campaign in history.

But the Apollo Space Program had to walk the talk—it had to deliver. To do this, it navigated an eight-year, multi-mission journey from inception to successful Moon landing involving thousands of people inside and outside of NASA, including academics, defense contractors, and other partners who helped bring myriad pieces together.

And despite a declaration of success with a Moon landing on July

20

,

1969

, the Apollo Space Program didn’t stop. It accelerated its efforts with continued Moon landings and additional accomplishments over the course of six more missions in order to maintain US dominance in space, until an easing of tensions led to an era of US-Soviet cooperation in space endeavors.

The Apollo Space Program has gone down in history as a shining example of what can happen when an organization decides to become the Go-To for a specific problem and takes a methodical four-phased approach toward achieving it.

Introduction

"How in the world is that person making

$50,000

a day?"

This is the question that started it all.

A few years into my consulting business, one of my colleagues told me about her close friend who had less hands-on client experience than either of us and was personally commanding $

50

,

000

a day to provide expertise to top executives. I was at once terribly envious and incredibly inspired.

This conversation occurred while I was in the midst of a reevaluation of my firm’s strategy, because we, on the other hand, were being forced to lower our prices. Somewhere along the way, our consulting services had come to be viewed as commodities, even by loyal clients who knew our capabilities well, understood how deep our expertise was, and had been engaging us for years. They were starting to put pressure on us to lower our fees and talk about replacing us with less expensive, less experienced consultants as though we were interchangeable parts. We were also getting pushed further down into our clients’ organizations, with less and less influence.

Meanwhile, and quite ironically, we were finding it increasingly difficult to convince our clients that they didn’t look, sound, or act any different from the competition; that it wasn’t clear as to whom they were trying to serve; and that they didn’t have a clear message that resonated with prospects. Even leading technology companies were beginning to face the same challenges as competitors started matching them on functions, features, and price.

These experiences were in stark contrast to my earlier experience in helping to launch and grow what was then called the Communications Industry Group (CIG) at Accenture. Starting from ground zero and operating much like a venture-backed startup, we had lots of market forces working against us and still managed organic growth to revenues of over $

850

million in less than a decade…in the midst of a recession. This despite the fact that, at the time, if you weren’t a telecommunications company, you had no credibility in that industry; no one knew who we were or what we did; there was no existing market for what we were selling; the industry was already dominated by a few gigantic, well-entrenched providers; and we didn’t start out as experts. Nonetheless, we managed huge and very profitable year-over-year revenue growth, became the dominant player in our target markets, and laid the groundwork for what is today a multibillion-dollar business unit.

What did my colleague’s friend and CIG do right? What did my firm and most other companies need to do to achieve this kind of sustainable differentiation in order to ensure ongoing, profitable growth? Somehow, certain companies were each succeeding at becoming and remaining the dominant Go-To brand, able to command high prices relative to the competition, while everyone else languished as me-too providers. I became obsessed with figuring out the recipe, embarking on an intensive research and analysis effort.

One day, on a plane to Chicago to meet with clients, I sketched out a strategy for my company. With so many years of Accenture’s methodology and project management training ingrained in me, it was a step-by-step framework in the form of a flow diagram. I looked at it for a few minutes and said to myself, "This is what all of our clients need to be doing! This is how companies dominate a market space and become the Go-To."

Somehow, certain companies were each succeeding at becoming and remaining the dominant Go-To brand, able to command high prices relative to the competition, while everyone else languished as me-too providers.

Having grown up in NASA territory where many people in the neighborhood had once worked on the Apollo Space Program, I immediately saw parallels between this approach and how the United States put a human on the Moon when that seemed an utterly impossible task. The US had been losing the space race in the midst of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and Kennedy finally decided to skip incremental achievements and go for broke by landing a person on the Moon.

What’s useful about the Apollo Space Program as a metaphor is that the fundamental circumstances were very similar to what many companies are facing, but the stakes were infinitely higher and the challenge infinitely greater at a time when technological superiority represented the power of liberty over oppression. You’ll read throughout the book about how the Apollo Space Program leaders had to rally all the necessary players around the goal; manage the program, projects, and business processes; build and motivate numerous organizations and engage partners; demonstrate milestone successes along the way and continuously make the case to both the public and Congress for continued funding; and the list goes on. There were many ups and downs, including a devastating tragedy you’ll read about later. It was not an easy journey, but it was immensely rewarding and made history. If the Apollo team could accomplish its seemingly unachievable task in less than ten years, anything is possible in the corporate realm.

Now let me be clear. As with any metaphor or case study, there is not a

100

percent, precise parallel of the Apollo Space Program with circumstances facing corporations, startups, and individuals. Some of the many differences will cross your mind as you read. However, if you fixate on those, you’ll miss the opportunity to learn some excellent lessons and apply them to your situation. The intent is to give you a vivid point of reference that helps you easily visualize the general path you need to take. The collective Apollo team’s ability to overcome adversity in the face of so much uncertainty, so much complexity, and so many obstacles is as impressive as its ultimate achievement. The Apollo Space Program is an incredibly inspirational story and serves as a useful model for companies to follow in pursuing market dominance, as I hope you’ll see throughout this book.

When I sketched out my plan that day on the plane, it was immediately apparent that the framework should be called the Apollo Method for Market Dominance.

That was many years ago. Since then, I have been seeking out the method’s weaknesses. I’ve gone inside companies as a full-time strategy and marketing executive to find out what’s hard about implementing it in practice. I’ve looked for better alternatives. I’ve continued to research it, conducting over

500

executive interviews. I’ve lived through the dot-com boom and bust of the

1990

s and the Great Recession circa

2008

–

11

. And I’ve watched hundreds of companies go out of business because they didn’t implement one or more of the key elements.

Through all this, it became clear that the approach works, especially now that enterprise customers and even consumers are demanding full solutions to their problems and not just generic products or services, which is a key underpinning of the Apollo Method. This means they want to buy results—they want offerings that take them all the way to the outcome and not just buy functions or features. You’ll learn more about what this means and how to do that.

Through all this, it became clear that the approach works, especially now that enterprise customers and even consumers are demanding full solutions to their problems and not just generic products or services, which is a key underpinning of the Apollo Method.

My research and experiences have resulted in some fascinating stories, examples, and analogies, which I share in this book. Beyond Apollo Space Program lessons, you’ll learn how to build momentum in the marketplace around your point of view and solutions the way successful companies have done it; the way political campaigns build awareness and support for their candidates; and the way musicians build a following. You will read inspirational stories about how companies like Disney, REI, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tesla, and many others each became the Go-To in a relatively specific area of focus and then built from there. And you will find out about spectacular failures and lessons learned, including some of my own.

One company you will hear a lot of inspirational stories about is Salesforce, which provides cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) software to companies. Salesforce was a David versus Goliath story upon its founding in an apartment in

1999

, taking on huge players and enduring a market crash just as it was finding its legs. At that time, CRM was jokingly referred to as consultants raking in millions, because a CRM implementation required hundreds of people and millions of dollars to accomplish. As you’ll read, Salesforce founder Marc Benioff believed this was ridiculous. He declared his own moonshot and led a movement to change the entire industry: he wanted to eliminate corporate dependence upon expensive, complex, installed software by offering software-as-a-service based in the cloud. Within three years, Salesforce revenues were $

24

million. By year seven, they were $

175

million. Now, twenty years later, the company has grown revenues every single year and dominates the crowded CRM space with

16

.

8

percent market share (the next closest competitor has a mere

5

.

7

percent share). In

2019

, the company posted revenues of $

13

.

3

billion (

26

percent year-over-year growth), with another $

25

.

7

billion in bookings (revenues under contract but not yet recognized) and $

3

.

4

billion in operating cash flow, an increase of

24

percent over the prior year. According to eTrade, its gross margin (cash available to spend on operations) is

75

percent. It’s also number two on the Fortune list of Best Companies to Work For and is fourteenth on the list of Most Admired Companies in the World across all industries. And indeed, the company did spark a revolution in its own industry, given that KBV Research expects global spending on software-as-a-service to reach a whopping $

185

.

8

billion by

2024

. You’ll read about how Salesforce achieved all of this by instinctively implementing each of the four key strategies that we’ll talk about in the coming chapters (the four phases of the Apollo Method for Market Dominance).

Who This Book Is For

This book is for you if your company operates in a highly competitive market full of me-toos. It’s for you if your company is having trouble differentiating from the competition and is competing on price. It’s especially for you if your company sells some kind of intangible product or service—the kind of product or service that is difficult for customers to hold in their hands, evaluate, or compare to others until they have bought and are using it. These concepts even apply to individuals seeking to build a personal brand. Regardless of the sector, you will find that many, if not all, of these principles apply and can improve your margins and prospects for growth.

This book is for you if your work has a direct or indirect bearing on revenue and/or margins. This includes direct or support roles in business unit operations and management; sales, business development, and partner relationships; marketing; product, service, and/or solution development and maintenance; client delivery and support activity; human resources and training; infrastructure and information systems; and financial management.

What You’ll Get from This Book

In short, this book will give you an actionable path to higher revenues and gross margins that will then provide the money to invest in innovation and growth.

A pile of bricks is nothing but an obstacle, but organize those bricks and add some mortar, and you have sturdy walls that serve many powerful purposes—a structure within which to operate or live, protection from outside threats, and much more. Take a pile of LEGO bricks, and you can organize them into countless functional structures and sculptures, including an operational car—which has been done!

One of my frustrations as a strategy and marketing practitioner is the dearth of books or even articles that lay out a step-by-step rationale and approach for achieving market dominance. Many discuss concepts but not the precise tasks, start to finish. I have written or created generic strategic planning and marketing methodologies, but they are templates—they don’t explain how to achieve a particular business outcome. There are plenty of methodologies for systems development, project management, process improvement, product development, and even generic marketing plan development and digital marketing initiatives. But the weakness with most marketing plans is that there is a terrific analysis of the situation, the market, the competition, the strategy, and so forth and then one big giant bucket of tactics you may as well call Stuff.

I’ve never found anything that tells you, step by step, how to win in your market. Neither have I seen anything that shows a methodology for deciding which strategy or marketing tactics to choose and how to best implement them. Shockingly, no leadership executive or board member I’ve ever worked with has asked for one. In presenting a plan, I’ve always expected questions like, Of the thousands of options to choose from, how did you decide on those specific tactics? How do the pieces fit together and build on one another? How are these going to develop the market? How will they lead us to market dominance and attract clients? What’s the long-term roadmap—how do these build on each other over the next few years to build our brand and entrench us? How do these investments tie to business outcomes, and how are you going to measure them?

There is no reason why any business should have to languish as a thin-margin, me-too player when there is the option to become a Go-To. The key is figuring out how to deliver such superior business impact that your clients will not fixate on price but rather on the value you deliver. This book will show you how to do that.

This book will give you answers. Chapter

1

talks about your commoditization challenge and why that is a serious problem for your business. Chapter

2

talks about the advantages of being the Go-To. Chapter

3

shares what a Go-To brand does differently from other companies. Chapters

4

–

8

take you through the Apollo Method for Market Dominance step by step in guiding you to becoming the Go-To in your own market. In addition to a conceptual overview, you’ll get practical advice on how to execute key components. You’ll also see examples of how the Apollo Space Program and other companies have successfully implemented them. At the end of each chapter, there are action items and worksheets to help you immediately apply the Apollo Method to your business. Chapter

9

helps you assemble all of that work into a simple but profoundly powerful one-page flight plan to focus your early efforts. You’ll walk away with actions that you can start implementing immediately and refine as you go.

If you implement this plan, you should see immediate improvements in competitive differentiation, your brand image, and your ability to deliver more powerful results to customers at healthy prices.

Because you’re working on a strategy that will impact all aspects of your business, I recommend your entire leadership team and other key stakeholders all read the book and complete the action items and worksheets together. This gives you a common lexicon, keeps all of you in sync, and ensures buy-in throughout the process. All of this leads to more effective implementation and better results.

There is no reason why any business should have to languish as a thin-margin, me-too player when there is the option to become a Go-To. The key is figuring out how to deliver such superior business impact that your clients will not fixate on price but rather on the value you deliver. This book will show you how to do that.

Chapter 1

Commoditization Is Enemy #1

Ionce spent a Saturday night in Atlanta’s Fulton County jail with renowned actress Candice Bergen. We had both been arrested.

When the guy on the other side of the bars yelled, Cut! it was a relief to step out of that nasty, smelly cell. The outcome of that evening was a really bad, low-budget movie, but I learned some things.

You see, by day I was a buttoned-up young management consultant working for Accenture, but by night, I fed my creative side with acting and improvisation lessons. It was in this offbeat world among my eccentric acting friends that I was exposed to some of my most powerful lessons about differentiation when marketing something intangible—why it’s hard to achieve, why it’s even harder to sustain, and most importantly, why it’s so crucial to survival in a competitive environment.

Let’s start with acting auditions offering no way to obviously stand out. I remember the irony of one in particular. It was for a television commercial. The character was a young corporate type exactly my age, and those auditioning were to wear formal business attire. Easy for me. I’d just wear a suit and heels to work. Everyone would assume I was giving a client presentation that day, and I’d slip out at lunch to audition. I thought, How hard is it going to be to play myself?

Silly me.

Once there, I received a script with just one line of dialogue. They provided no story or other context about this person or situation except this: I was to run from one corner of the room to another carrying a football like a running back, while shouting, Get out of my way!!!!!!

The worst of it was that at least forty other actresses showed up looking just like me. We all wanted to think we were different, but we weren’t. Yes, we all had relevant experience, training, and talent, but those were our tickets to entry really. You didn’t get invited to the party if you didn’t have the requisite credentials. We were complete commodities with zero control over our destinies. There was no way to be memorable or offer more value than someone else. It was a crapshoot. I’d have had better odds playing the lottery.

We all wanted to think we were different, but we weren’t.

I found that aspect of the acting world to be completely absurd. Half the time, judging from the array of people at a given audition, the directors didn’t even know what they were looking for—they’d know it when they saw it. I understood that it was just how the game was played, but I quickly figured out that going from one cattle call to the next wasn’t for me. There was no going-in advantage, no control, no sure way to distinguish yourself in advance or afterward, no way to get your distinctive qualities across (as if they mattered), and low odds of success relative to the investment of time, energy, and ego required.

As it turns out, things aren’t that different when competing for business.

It was around that time that my employer, Accenture, kept losing proposals to what it felt were inferior competitors, so it decided to dig into what was happening. It hired an outside firm to conduct a win-loss analysis and prepare a report called, A Primer on How to Beat Accenture. The outside firm interviewed buyers, and this response from one summed up the problem:

Our evaluation of a variety of things that all the vendors threw up was that they were pretty much equal on them. For example, when you talk about tools, software development methods, development centers, client lists, the pace of your approach, and even things Accenture would consider proprietary…we found that all the responses were the same. And we awarded zero points to those.

When your business looks and sounds like everyone else, you’re effectively at a cattle-call audition. Like

99

percent of the companies out there, you are failing to differentiate in a way that’s blatantly obvious to customers, which makes you a me-too commodity forced to compete on price when competition increases and/or demand ebbs.

Differences No One Can See

When you’re a me-too in a crowded space, prospects can no more tell the difference between you and the competition than a wine novice can distinguish a zinfandel from a merlot. As non-connoisseurs of your business category, the differences are not just subtle; they’re impossible to detect.

Let’s take just one example of how quickly a brand can disappear into the crowd. Every year or two since

2011

, Scott Brinker has been publishing the Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic showing every company in the space. In

2011

, there were roughly

150

companies on the list. In

2019

, there were over

7

,

000

. The progression has looked like this:

The Marketing Technology Landscape: an example of how quickly brands can disappear into the crowd, even in a relatively new market. (Image: Scott Brinker, chiefmartec.com

Imagine what it takes to compete in that morass. Imagine how much harder it’s gotten every year.

As a prospective buyer trying to figure out who to call, you’d basically have to roll the dice. As a company trying to stand out, you have the same odds I did in that acting audition. Getting selected becomes a matter of dumb luck, and that’s no way to run or market a business.

Chances are that you can strip the names off the boilerplate paragraphs for companies within a category, mix them up, and find it impossible to know which paragraph belongs to which firm.

Intangible products and services are especially susceptible. Buyers can’t easily touch or experience them before making a purchase. Almost any professional service category is a great example. Go out to the websites of various doctors, lawyers, graphic designers, advertising or graphic design agencies, Silicon Valley