Achieving Growth through a revised go-to-market strategy
Situation
A US high-tech manufacturer had seen growth in its largest business unit stall. It was unclear why or how the company was going to reignite growth, given its limited sales and marketing resources. The company asked Market Strategy Group to help them identify and develop a new go-to-market strategy that could deliver consistent growth without significantly increasing expenses.
Solution
Market Strategy Group analyzed the company’s markets and identified pockets of opportunity for the company’s products. These opportunities were sized (both in terms of total dollars and growth rate) and characterized in several other ways: the company’s existing sales and market share, fit of the company’s sales and distribution assets with the subsegment’s buying patterns, and the existence of product for that subsegment in the company’s portfolio. All of these variables were mapped in a single graphic that allowed each of the opportunities to be objectively compared against all of the others. Most importantly, MSG worked very closely with the company’s staff to understand and vet the opportunities which resulted in a management team that felt the results were their own, rather than the consultant’s.
Outcome
Our work led to a decision to verticalize sales and marketing resources by focusing on five priority opportunities among the approximately 20 analyzed. This verticalization added one headcount, but was otherwise cost-neutral. In the nine months after the strategy was implemented, the business unit's sales pipeline grew from $18M to $141M. Furthurmore, many of the deals included multiple years of purchasing, helping eliminate (or at least reducing) the uncertainty that the company had in forcasting sales.