How do we prioritise marketing support for products and solutions?
The goal of solution prioritisation is to align the whole marketing organisation on a single model for balancing limited resources for optimised value. Having global teams prioritise one set of solutions while Geo or local area teams focus elsewhere leads to inappropriate application of resources and incomplete customer journeys.
For many marketing teams, the pressures of supporting the every whim of product owner, sales person or General Manager can result in a cacophony of competing demands. Without a way of keeping them in check – that is to say, explaining how the marketing strategy will give them what they need, even if it’s not what they necessarily want – these demands sap the energy of the marketing function, reduce the value the team delivers and create noise in the system. Using data and strategic decision making to communicate the focus, impact and strategy of Marketing with aligned, prioritised motions that support the business meeting growth and performance measures reduces and removes these distractions.
There are many ways to arrive at a prioritised list of solutions but the simplest is the five steps in the table below. Capture data for these five areas in a way that you can compare them against each other and make well reasoned decisions with data points that can easily be communicated. I call this the Prioritisation Matrix. Data and KPIs from both marketing activity run to-date and the wider business should be used to populate this matrix and wherever possible that data should be qualitative and normalised. Where necessary data doesn’t exist, qualitative judgement can applied to standardise on a scoring methodology, but try to at least apply consistency in how you approach it.
| Measure per solution | Description |
|---|---|
| 1. What is the annual target that needs to be achieved? | What are the pipeline and sales goals for the next financial year in total and with an industry lens. Solution targets will be comprised of multiple product-level objectives so accurately planning these targets will be essential. Industry views should break out priority industry targets against a total pipeline target. |
| 2. What is the long-range opportunity that can be realised? | What are the projected revenue goals for three to five years in the future. The goal of looking at these is to understand projected growth across different solutions. |
| 3. How do you sell the solutions? | Selling motions capture whether the solution is a target for net new customers, cross selling to new buying groups, upselling into existing buying groups or whether the solution is sold as an attach to another motion. Industries needs to be prioritised by whether they need to be marketed and sold at an industry level or could be positioned with a horizontal lens. |
| 4. What is the business problem that needs to be addressed? | Against the objectives we defined in the performance framework, what is the state of the business.
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| 5. Which sales areas is this relevant to? | Do solutions have global applicability or is there focus on a limited number of areas? This may impact whether global investments are made or they are applied at a geo level. |
The objective of a Prioritisation Framework is not to tell you what marketing activity you should run but to provide a consistent dataset to evaluate those decisions against. Key questions about the way you go to market need to be considered. Does marketing support only landing new customers, or cross-selling and upselling into new buying centres? Does marketing support them all equally, or is more focus placed on one objective? Do all solutions have the same level of maturity or should growth solutions be given more investment relative to their size? As you work through questions like these my advice is this: find a way of applying data to your decisions. It’s certainly possible to overthink these type of questions and bind yourself into too much detail that does little to help you differentiate solutions and get to a priority list, so be careful to check this as you progress. For now let’s look at an example of the last question above: how should you support different maturities of your solution? Since we’re looking to use a data-driven approach, lets start by standardising definitions and language by grouping solutions. Example maturity groups could be:
New solution – targeted incubation
Low value, high-growth solution – emergent amplification
High value, high-growth solution – global strategic
High value, low-growth solution – tactical maintenance
You could then define each your solutions within your Prioritisation matrix based upon these maturity types and apply investment guidance to them:
| Tier 1 solutions – Global strategic | Tier 2 – Emergent amplification | Tier 3 – Targeted incubation | Tier 4 – Tactical maintenance |
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