In today’s marketplace, companies are looking for every advantage they can get to not only survive but thrive. And to do this, you as a chief marketing officer or CEO must find a way to change the game for your company.
“The market has changed, the economy has turned and clients aren’t thinking about the rational buying decisions they made in the past,” says Jonathan Fisher, CEO of BrandExtract. “If you’re selling the same way and approaching and reaching out in the same way you’ve always done, you’ve probably lost all competitive advantage. You really have to think about new and fresh perspectives in the way you do business to change the game and make the playing field a little less level.”
Smart Business spoke with Fisher about how to take a fresh look at your business and leverage that information.
How do you get started with looking at your company in a new way?
It’s about rethinking what you know and what you’re doing in the marketplace. It’s about looking for the obvious. You have to challenge the norms and ask, ‘What are we doing? Why are we doing it? Is there anything we could be doing differently?’
At the same time, you need to take a close look at current gaps — ‘What aren’t we doing? What’s missing from the industry right now that we can provide?’ — and then start thinking, ‘We could sponsor that. We could build that. We could survey that.’
As an example, there is a law firm that has been doing industry surveys for six years, and it creates trend data that it gives away for free. Now, survey processes aren’t new, but most companies do it for their own benefit, not for the industry’s benefit. By taking a leadership position in the industry where this kind of information previously didn’t exist and putting the survey together of its own accord and of its own time and money, this firm now owns this space. And because it has the intelligence from the trend report it does every year, it was able to completely shift its sales tactics. It’s able to use this to shape fees, proposal processes and messaging on the Web, and carve the data up for vertical industry segments for a greater competitive advantage.
This firm uses the data as a door opener and a reason why you should talk to its attorneys versus someone else’s — which is always the challenge to developing new business: Why you?
When you’re looking for that game-changing idea, who should be involved in the process?
You have to be willing to step back and engage people who have the ability to offer a different perspective about your products or services, whether that’s an outside consulting or marketing firm or your customers or someone within the company who hasn’t had a chance before to bring ideas to the table.
It’s all about listening with a fresh viewpoint. Ask your clients for their perspectives on how they see your products and services being used, or bring in outside consultants who have experience helping people identify fresh points of view. Or reach down into your organization to hear from people you don’t usually have contact with.
Smart leaders look at the whole company. It takes strong leadership to recognize that there’s always something you don’t know. If you’re open and receptive to finding out the unknowns, then you are typically going to uncover a game-changing opportunity.
This means creating a culture that’s willing to constantly evaluate and improve, that knows it’s never maximized its opportunities. I don’t know any CEO who would say he or she can’t do something better. You need to create open-door policies, create a cross-pollination of ideas and get different people and different teams together on a regular basis so those opportunities can flourish.
If a business is doing well as is, why does it need to seek game-changing opportunities?
Your competition is always looking to move up, and they will find a better way to do business. The number of businesses unaffected by the economy and satisfied with current sales are few. If this describes your business, then congratulations because you’re the exception. But if not, then uncovering new opportunities and creating competitive barriers can swing the pendulum back to having the marketplace edge.
Category leaders rarely maintain their category position. It’s only a matter of time before someone will outthink you. For CEOs who say what they’re doing works just fine, obviously they’re not thinking about the future because change is inevitable, whether it comes from the competition, from the technology, or from the market forces that are out there. You always have to be looking ahead, and you have to be thinking about your game-changing strategies.
Jonathan Fisher is CEO of BrandExtract, an integrated branding and communications firm that guides growing companies by providing strategic branding solutions, market positioning communications, advertising, social, print and interactive services. Reach him at (713) 942-7959 or (214) 770-7378 or [email protected].
