Jeff Thompson, my partner at Aventi Group, and I recently worked on a project where we helped an important client revisit and optimize their channel strategy. The problem was that our client who sells directly and indirectly to the SMB segment, had partnerships agreements in place with over 9000 partners. But what they did not have is a clear picture of which partners were performing or even active. Note that this is a client for whom the SMB segment (yes I know it is not one monolithic segment) is key and selling through partners is very important. Also our client is a leader in understanding this segment and providing incentives for making their partners successful in selling to SMBs.
I've now worked on several strategic positioning projects for clients and have come to the realization that the harder part is not developing strong positioning for companies or their products. The greater challenge actually lies in implementing it successfully. Don't get me wrong. Developing strong, distinctive and meaningful positioning is crucial. And, contrary to popular belief, it actually takes effort and skill to create it. Sridhar Ramanathan — a dear friend & partner — of Pacifica Group actually wrote a blog entry describing the characteristics of good positioning. He's right on.
But I am sure you've heard the countless stories where a lot of time was spent and a fancy positioning was created only to gather dust. While positioning can be targeted at any stakeholder, for the purpose of this article, I am going to focus on positioning targeted at customers. I want to talk about how and what determines that a positioning will be successfully implemented. Some of it has to do with the development process, some with characteristics of the output and some with your internal company workflows.
I went to a NorCal-BMA breakfast on March 20th where Drew Meyer (Senior Product Marketing Manager at Network Appliance’s StoreVault division) spoke about selling to SMB – a hot topic among many enterprise companies looking to expand their footprint into this space. Drew spoke about his experiences in selling to this segment and his findings made a lot of sense. There was good discussion about this segment (if we can call it that). I’ve worked now with a couple of clients who sell to SMBs and I want to share some thoughts with you based on this talk and my own experience. Tell me if this resonates.
