This week: a collaborative newsletter from Mangrove Performance Group & Sunhaven Consulting
Most companies organize Sales, Marketing and Product Development as separate functions. Sales sells. Marketing studies markets and develops positioning. Product Development builds the next innovation. However, some of the greatest opportunities for product differentiation occur when the three operate as a connected system.
And it starts with a resource most companies dramatically undervalue: The conversations their people are already having with customers.
Your Sales Team Is a Market Intelligence Network: Tap into It!
Great sellers know what customers are trying to accomplish, where they’re frustrated and what current solutions don’t deliver. That helps win the immediate opportunity. But it may be the least scalable use of what they just learned. Think about the volume of customer intelligence flowing through your commercial organization every week and how much of it gets beyond the individual salesperson. Usually very little. Those insights sit in inboxes, notebooks and CRM opportunities, and the company loses an extraordinary source of proprietary market intelligence.
Where Sales Meets Marketing
Marketing has access to industry reports, consumer trends, competitive intelligence and market data. All are valuable. But none replaces a customer telling you: “Here’s the problem nobody has solved for us.” One customer saying it is interesting. Twenty customers describing variations of the same problem may represent a market opportunity. This is where Marketing adds value: aggregating those signals, sizing how widespread the need is, and quantifying whether solving it represents a real commercial opportunity. Customer pain becomes market intelligence.
Where Marketing Meets Product Development
Now Product Development gets something more valuable than another trend report: Validated patterns of unmet customer need. The innovation conversation changes from: “What could we make?” to: “What problem are customers repeatedly asking us to solve, and how can we solve it better than anyone else?”
Product Development can then apply the company’s technology, manufacturing capabilities, IP and partnerships against a need the market has already identified.
Then It Comes Back to Sales. Sales goes back to the market with something different than another generic capability presentation: “We’ve heard this problem repeatedly from customers like you. We developed a solution specifically to address it.”
The value proposition becomes clearer. The conversation becomes more relevant. The pipeline becomes more credible. This is The Power Play!
This isn’t simply better collaboration between three functions. It’s an enterprise learning system. Most leadership teams can tell you their revenue, pipeline, win rate and number of new products launched. Fewer can answer a more interesting question: “What are the five most important unmet needs our customers have told us about in the last 90 days?”
The companies that differentiate consistently aren’t necessarily those conducting the most market research or launching the most products. They are the companies that listen better, recognize patterns faster and translate customer needs into differentiated solutions more effectively than their competitors. Your organization is already collecting some of the best market intelligence available.
The question is: What are you doing with it?
Matt Unger Mangrove Performance Group
Lisa Gandolfi Sunhaven Consulting