Today’s businesses face mounting competitive pressure to innovate quickly. Speed to market is driving the need to be more agile. More IT organizations are embracing agile processes, but it doesn’t start and stop with IT. This trend will spread beyond IT, pushing the entire company to become agile. This new way of working requires more communication across teams. It’s truly about culture and process, and it takes time.

What most concerns me about go-to-market right now is the tendency to get stuck. Sometimes companies do so much back and forth and aren’t agile enough to get to market fast enough. Then a competitor swoops in and takes over. There are many strategies to prevent that from happening. In this post, I share two.

2 Strategies for Go-to-Market Success:

1. Send Your Idea to Test Groups

Companies can sometimes get so stuck in strategy and overthinking they never take the first step, and that first step is so critical. Bring your minimum viable product to market, and get responses immediately. Determine whether or not adjustments are needed. Many venues are now available to test products. It’s easier to produce smaller quantities of a product to roll out for a trial and gather feedback. Instead of working internally on iterations, start working with end users from the beginning. Get your idea into the hands of people who will really use it. Let them find every way possible to break it so improvements can be made immediately. Don’t wait for that perfect product to come about before launching it.

2. Mind the Gaps

Go-to-market is strategy. Your organization needs to establish a starting point to understand where you fit in the market, what your customers are looking for, and what your competitors are doing. Fill the gaps between what competitors currently offer and what customers demand.

Want More Digital Transformation Advice?

The digital transformation strategies I share in this blog post draw from Perficient’s e-book, “How to Make Digital Transformation Gains in 2019.” In it, Perficient’s Chief Strategists share real-world examples from conversations with today’s leading brands at various stages of digital transformation. The 10-chapter e-book features business insights, actions to take now, and client success stories. Download it here or via the form below.

Next in the Series

This blog series is part of a special series inspired by our e-book. In the next post, Perficient Chief Strategist Bob Vanek will discuss how to focus on optimization and continuous improvement.

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I’ve embarked on a new journey with Perficient. After more than four years as part of the management consulting team, I am now responsible for launching our go-to-market (GTM) strategy for our firm’s cloud services. One of my first projects focuses on our partnership with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) providers like Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Red Hat OpenShift.

The task at hand is to significantly increase the size of our current business with these PaaS products, which continue to grow in demand. I’ve done GTM work in the past. In 2004, I was working for a telecom company and launched one of the first Voice over IP products specifically designed for calling cards.

I helped Gap Inc. determine whether to go into inner-city markets and how best to go about it. I led one of the most popular baby products’ in a launch internationally and into hospitals. So, this shouldn’t be too different except for one primary difference – the train has left the station on this one.

There is already an exceptional team in place delivering successfully for a number of clients. Marketing has put forth messages and sales has spread the word around something that is resonating with prospects to get them interested enough to buy. And, there is already a process in place for recruiting and training the best talent to ensure our delivery is superior to the many competitors clamoring to get in on this business.

So… this is a little bit different.

First, I’ll step back, though, and explain my view of what GTM is. GTM is simply getting a product or service to a customer who needs it. Done right, it is the confluence of customer demand, gaps in competitive offerings or capabilities and the strengths of a company and its products, and takes into consideration the macro environment (Are there mergers and acquisitions? How is the economic environment? What are the varying industry trends?).

Under normal circumstances, we would start with the customer first and understand customer demand, competitive gaps and know our strengths. Where I’m stepping in, much of the typical go to market analysis has been determined: we’ve noticed a massive demand for cloud services from clients. In fact, this market is estimated to be $16B, and only around 16% of companies have engaged in digitization in a meaningful way, despite the clear, measurable benefits.

With this in mind, we’ve selected a few technology offerings to meet this demand, including cloud partners like AWS, Google, and Microsoft, as well as PaaS solutions like Pivotal and Red Hat OpenShift. Lastly, we know that there are gaps in competitive offerings that we can fill with our unique ability to provide the best in delivery with our talented, experienced, and well-trained developer team. Moreover, our thought leaders are always ready to direct customers with the newest and greatest innovation.

So, I would typically research, ask lots of questions, and then develop a unique solution to meet customers’ needs. The process looks a bit like this:

However, much of this was solved before my new role. This means that I need to catch up and answer questions like the ones outlined here:

Over the next several weeks, I hope to be able to answer many of these questions and develop a plan for our best means of evolving how we go to market in the cloud. More to come…

I’ve had the pleasure of working with many small and mid-sized manufacturers. These companies are typically much more flexible and able to mobilize quickly compared to their larger counterparts.

If you have a concept for a marketing campaign, financial reporting, or an improved process, you have the opportunity to walk into the head of that function’s office, grab a small team and execute.

Companies like this may not have the buying power to get lower costs with suppliers, but have a tremendous opportunity through staying nimble and creative, without layers of management approvals to alter new products to keep costs low and get to market faster.

However, many of these smaller companies do not behave this way. When it comes to product innovation and monetizing a concept, smaller companies cannot keep up with the larger ones. In recent conversations with CEOs of some of these companies, they list getting a new product or feature to market fast as one of their biggest concerns.

So, why are these small, nimble, and creative companies having so much trouble? They do all the right up-front analysis. They asses the market size, as well as the pricing and distribution models. They know what competitors have today and how they can differentiate, and they have the marketing launch plan laid out and budgeted.

The problem is that this waterfall approach often leads to over-planning. They throw flexibility as a competitive advantage out the window when it comes to product development.

While taking the time to make everything “perfect,” plus taking the time to receive perfect mockups shipped in from overseas, competitors have launched similar products with similar new features. At the same time, prices have come down, and retail buyers have lost interest. The finish line has moved.

Instead, companies could consider an agile framework. Agile is focused on open and constant communications between the development team and the end-user of that product. The consumer is typically represented by a “product owner” whose role is to put a stamp on a product when it is at its absolute minimum.

When the most fundamental type of this product is ready to go to market, it is considered the “minimum viable product” or “MVP.” The development team can leverage this “MVP” to understand what users like about the product and can continuously build upon it. This ensures their foothold in the space and maintains their first-to-market status.

Products that must go through a retailer offer a different layer of complexity, but frequent check-ins with your buyer to share and get feedback on the iterations will make all the difference. If you have a good relationship with your merchant, run a small test in a few stores on the MVP and request feedback from customers through a direct-to-consumer campaign.

There is no better way to get direct, real-time feedback, and understand whether you are headed in the right direction!

Whether your product is direct-to-consumer or through a wholesaler, the agile approach provides immediate feedback that will guide you in the right direction, ensuring that your innovative new product is actually appealing to your customer!

Our Perficient colleagues share how they live and breathe our core values. Here, Allison Fries, Chief Strategist, Go To Market for Cloud Strategy, shares how her teammates stepped up in a big way to help a local nonprofit, We Don’t Waste, fight hunger. Allison is also on the board of directors for We Don’t Waste.

I take great pride in the work my Perficient colleagues and I do, not only for our clients but also for our local community. We recently had the opportunity to tackle a pro-bono project for We Don’t Waste, a Denver-based nonprofit for which I am on the board, and I’m extremely proud and grateful for the team that helped pull it together.

Addressing the Needs at We Don’t Waste

Today, 40 percent all food produced is thrown away. We Don’t Waste collects unused food from venues, caterers, restaurants, and other outlets and redistributes quality items to underserved populations. For years, the organization survived on two trucks. That meant they had to pick up food that might spoil and deliver it to community organizations on the same day.

We Don’t Waste was able to secure a warehouse this year, and that enabled the organization to provide food to so many more individuals and smaller organizations, which was the organization’s heart and soul in the early stages. As they grew, however, they needed to stick primarily with the larger feeding houses and suppliers.

Eliminating the Growth Obstacles

We have a tremendous amount of supply chain expertise within our Management Consulting group. A small team from that practice took a lot of their own personal time to support We Don’t Waste with these skills.

We laid out We Don’t Waste’s warehouse to make it as efficient as possible and we recommended to them the technology we thought would be most appropriate for supporting the warehouse and logistics around it. We showed them how to best utilize the technology, so it could also help with efficiency, and volunteered hours to get their warehouse set up.

Continuing Our Work

We’re in the process now of helping put together a volunteer plan for the We Don’t Waste team, so that they know how to best utilize volunteers when they have them available. In the past, they couldn’t really use volunteers, so they had to keep community outreach to their minimal staff. This is really going to provide We Don’t Waste with the opportunity to grow dramatically in scale.

MORE FROM OUR COLLEAGUES

Perficient colleagues share what our core values mean to them as part of our special “We Value” series.

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