Approach
STEP ONE
Identifying project objectives means understanding what is and is not being articulated.
To begin, Rachel has conversations with her customers — from entry level to the C-Suite. She strives to attain an understanding of the goals of clients and their customers — even when the objectives cannot be articulated clearly; reading between the lines is core to success. She quickly organizes the gathered materials, breaks down the content into understandable, logical sets of information and generates an assessment. Client collaboration is vital in this first phase to gather intelligence and rapidly gain information from all areas of the organization.
Source materials
Client delivers as many materials from internal and external resources including business plans, white papers, case studies, sales and marketing materials, product roadmaps, press releases and product and service definitions helps quickly create an understanding of the landscape.
Interviews
Client coordinates interviews with stakeholders across the organization.
Conversations
Client provides introductions to their buyers and partners for frank and insightful conversations.
STEP TWO
Researching and analyzing the position of a business, its products and its services uncovers opportunities and helps avoid obstacles.
One of the most significant barriers to entry is a lack of understanding of the competition, marketplace, as well as the inability to speak in a language target audiences can understand. By assessing and analyzing the market, Rachel identifies many factors for her clients, including:
Opportunities for growth
Identifying available whitespace.
Competitive analysis
What the competition is doing, saying and how they are performing.
Product and service benefits
Features to consider adding or refining.
Sales methodologies
Affiliated successes and failures.
Product definitions
In the enterprise and across the marketplace.
Internal roadblocks
How they impact performance.
STEP THREE
Rachel and her clients leverage learnings from steps one and two to clarify needs, define goals and assign milestones.
After discovery is complete, Rachel produces a strategic and tactical plan with milestones and metrics. She encourages clients to make the framework visible. She has found that when leaders share roadmaps, goals and concepts with staff and stakeholders, momentum increases. Objectives and priorities solidify without superfluous meetings and unproductive conversations.
Overarching strategy
The framework and plan includes identified client needs and may include:
Marketplace alignment
Product and service definition, refinement and differentiation
Pricing and planning
Public and private partnerships
Alternative growth strategies.
Tactical milestones
Incorporates a range of defined deliverables including:
Marketing plan and/or business plan
Brand development
Unique selling proposition
Distribution plan
Sales and marketing materials: advertising, trade show marketing, press releases, packaging and event marketing.
Content must be comprehensive and encourage relationships with customers and stakeholders. Rachel extracts the value proposition for specific audiences and translates it into messaging buyers can understand. She synthesizes vast amounts of disparate content, reduces it down to its core value and rewrites it so anyone can understand it. Once created it can be modified and syndicated across organizations from business plans to websites to media relations.
Rapid prototypes reduce risk, assure messaging is accurate and confirms we’re generating the right deliverables. Tangible products build trust and increase communication while comprehensive deliverables empower clients to provide feedback, collaborate and iterate. Communicating through design and content prototypes is a catalyst for building both internal and external trust. It also energizes team because they have a tangible items to share and discuss.
Sometimes companies need a bit of help getting unstuck other times they need full-time support. All deliverables are scalable based upon the client’s need.
A final deliverable may be as simple as a roadmap and messaging that leadership can use as a guiding light to launch products and services — or it may be a fully executed marketing program. Either way, metrics are defined in advance so that both Rachel and the client can monitor progress. Metrics include a wide array of goals specific to each client’s needs, for instance:
Customer conversion rate
Customer engagement and retention
Quote-to-close ratio for sellers
Brand awareness
Internal adoption rates for tools and services
Employee recruitment and turnover
Rachel executes the final products. She is a prolific user of Adobe’s Creative Suite, HTML and CSS and has extensive experience presenting data in entertaining and surprising ways online, in sales presentations and for advertising. Rachel works with data scientists and analysts within client organizations as well as licensees of products including DOMO, Kantar, MOAT and Rhiza to determine the best avenue for market visualizations. These combined experiences make moving from inception-to-completion a streamlined process.