Many alt-nets are now operating in choppy waters, but time and time again we see that the most successful adopt the following tactical ways to beat the headwinds.
1. Validate your value proposition and establish how best to differentiate your offering in an otherwise commoditised environment.
Are you cheap and cheerful? Do you have the best SLAs and the quickest deployment? Is your culture and approach to account management perfectly aligned with your target audience? Are you offering the best, most robust and reliable solution? Are you experts in certain industries? Whichever it is there is a market for you.
2. Map your network against value-added partners and ideal prospect profiles – identifying which are on-net. What picture does this paint?
Having a bird’s eye view of your network and where helpful partners and resellers sit, in addition to your customers and ideal prospects, will help you focus and drive tactical decisions. What exists on-net which poses an opportunity. Where should you be collaborating, recruiting and selling?
3. Cleanse your sales and marketing data. In our experience most business data is only 40% accurate.
This is just a no-brainer. Inaccurate, out-of-date, incomplete data is a waste of everyone’s time and money. It can lead to missed targets and sales opportunities, de-motivate employees and disappoint customers. We cleanse and integrate M&A data for our clients and it’s a gamechanger.
4. Identify and focus on a small number of priority verticals and build referenceability within those sectors to help you gain more traction and differentiate your expertise.
It can feel scary to focus on a specific set of industries, but we aren’t suggesting you spin around and then stick a pin in a random subsection. Look at what’s on-net, their adoption profiles and propensity to buy then focus your marketing on messaging that will resonate specifically within those industries.
5. Look at ways to collaborate with partners.
How can you increase revenues through collaboration? The market’s eagerness to consolidate supply chains is both an opportunity and a threat. For those which can form an ecosystem of sensible alliances it will be the former.
6. Make sure that your sales and marketing is aligned and sharing data and insight.
Everyone thinks that their sales and marketing is on the same page but there is often a lot of room for improvement. Ask yourselves: is everyone involved in helping prospects down the sales funnel working together to multiply the impact of each touchpoint?