Market sizing targets revenue. Market segmentation targets growth and profitability. Understanding customers help you find revenue opportunities. Understanding competitors show you how to win. Focusing on action translates market insight into sales results and drives operations excellence. Valuing change opportunities focuses scarce resources on value creation and sustains improvement after focus moves on.
Markets
Before you look at market value, you need a clear objective. Most off-the-shelf market assessment is targeted at strategic decision makers in the corporate head office, informing corporate’s global allocation of assets and long-term decisions. This analysis does not fit the need of country sales teams that do not recognise quoted market sizes in their regions and countries. RedStanStrategy creates a market analysis for use by sales staff to win revenue. It is granular and based on sales relevant data, delivering values your sales force will recognise in segments they can target, update on a quarterly basis. This approach is critically reliant on input from your regional teams.
Segmentation
Red Sand Strategy segmentation uses a two-stage process, first understanding how different client groups use your products to create value with understanding how they use purchasing to capture the maximum amount of the value you will create. This client view allows you to value them according to their revenue and profitability potential. To upgrade this analysis to an actionable format, each segment is then assessed against relative competitive strength to create an expected segment value to focus sales.
Customers
Understanding your customers is the fundamental that underlies all RedSandStrategy’s work. An initial analysis focuses on their business process and how your products and services allow them to create value. Much of this work can be started by analysing your internal views and data, but you will not get far without interviewing your customers to listen to their views. The key to success here is a humble view of your role in their success, a uniquely open view to customer engagements and the ability to translate your technology opportunity into their business success. More advanced customer work to improve your ability to win requires stakeholder maps that focus as much on the relationships between staff as it does on staff positions and preferences. Customer interviews inevitably focus on operational efficiency and the changes you need to make to how you present to your customer which will make their engagement with you easier.
Competitors
RedSandStrategy uses a unique approach to benchmarking competitors. While the work is deep, credible and rigorous, it is equally important to focus on making recommendations simple, easy to understand and actionable to ensure that insight translates through action to deliver increased revenue and profit. This work is supported by detailed competitive tactics to be used against each competitor communicated in low learning formats. In our experience, one key to success is ensuring that sales input helps form the analysis and that credibility demands a fair summary of strengths and weaknesses. The other key is that this sales summary is taken to the next level using customer input. Clients often request that customer and competitor information is combined into battle books that are used to create sales focus and turbo-charge sales performance.
Action
In larger organisations, RedSandStrategy’s input is focused, perhaps supporting competitive analysis, perhaps building analysis of market sizes. In smaller companies, RedSandStrategy engagements quickly extend from identifying 3-18 month sales actions to supporting implementation. With a focus on understanding the underlying business and its numbers, and with a willingness to work with sales, operations and customers to prioritise and deliver results, RedSandStrategy works with clients providing the interim support that creates a foundation for extended sales delivery.
Value
Performance reviews generate infinite sales actions for limited sales resources. Calculating the value of change for each recommendation is a key part of RedSandStrategy’s approach so that your organisation focuses on sustainable improvement. In our experience, a clear focus on value significantly increases the amount of successfully adopted change recommendations, particularly when these focus on increasing revenue through better sales and improving service through better operations.
