Two-Minutes with a Chief Marketing Officer

Will your business achieve its Growth Objectives in 2021?

How do you know for sure?

Let me be your Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for two minutes.

Why? Because every business needs a CMO and if you don’t have one, YOU are it!

I am NOT going to take these two minutes to talk about

• leveraging social media

• Google ads

• better SEO on your web site

• the latest lead generation fad

Those are all tactics.

We need to use our time to take a market-based approach to build you a fact-based, actionable growth plan. And our success will be measured by your growth in revenue and improvements in gross margin not by ‘hits’ and ‘likes’ on a page.

Am I qualified to be your 2-minute Chief Marketing Officer? As the CMO for a billion-dollar business group at Applied Materials (a Fortune 100 Company) from 2000-03, I contributed to the Group's amazing revenue growth and strong gross margin performance by

• launching strong products, and

• winning new customers

So—let’s get started on YOUR growth objectives for 2021!

Fundamentally, every CMO has to be able to answer one key question for their business:

“Where is our growth going to come from?”

Growth just doesn’t happen. If you want growth, you have to figure out

• where in your addressable market growth is possible?

• how you are going to go get it?

This takes three very distinct steps, and they have to be done in the right order.

1. GAIN INSIGHT INTO YOUR MARKET

You need to gain as much insight into your market as possible. That means knowing your customers, your competitors and yourself. Most people understand the need to know their customers and competition, but why do they need to know themselves? Because every business has inherent strengths and weaknesses that give them advantages and disadvantages in their market.

2. GET SPECIFIC ON CUSTOMERS & OFFERINGS YOU NEED

You need to develop a plan that outlines for you exactly the customers and offerings you must have to win in your market. Who are the exact customers you want to sell to? What are the products you want to offer them? How are you going to position your products, so you are the obvious best choice?

3. EXECUTE YOUR PLAN WITH RESOURCES, TACTICS & METRICS

You need to put the execution behind your plan. Typically, an execution plan is made up of three key elements.

• Resources – what money, people, systems and products do you need?

• Tactics – what are you going to do to be found by your target customers?

• Metrics – what are you measuring to ensure you are getting a return from the investment?

By following these three steps and answering the underlining questions, you will be well on your way to developing a market-based growth plan that will get you on the road to growth.

If you want to be your own CMO, then I would recommend you get yourself a copy of Art Saxby’s and Pete Hayes’ book, The Growth Gears: using a market-based framework to drive business success. The book goes through all of these steps in detail, gives you real world examples and provides some valuable tools that can help you along the way.

Does this sound like a lot of work? Yes, it is—forms to create, research to perform, tough decisions to make, etc. That’s why business owners that aren’t DIYers hire people like me to help them.

I would love to brainstorm with you what steps you can take to determine where your business’ growth can come from. Click on www.talkwiththomas.net and schedule a quick, no cost call. I bet I can give you three actionable ideas in a 30-minute call.