March 16, 2017
We’re building factories. While that’s a sentence I never expected to say as Chief Technology Officer of Marco, it’s not what you think. I am not talking about the traditional bricks-and-mortar factory, but rather a new way to think about delivering products and services to a specific group of clients.
As we have refined our business strategy to position our organization for accelerated growth, we’ve had to think differently about how we do business and deliver value to our clients. Growth does not simply mean doing more of the same.
Our decision to build a factory – of sorts – started when we asked ourselves: Do we have the same Target Customer Profile across all of our products?
Business consultants will tell you that the most effective companies can say “yes.” While that may sound idealistic, evidence shows that delivering a product portfolio to a clearly honed Target Customer Profile is what allows organizations to thrive.
At Marco, I’ve been a part of the team identifying our Target Customer Profile and developing an enhanced product portfolio (as I shared in these recent blogs on shifts and new offerings).
The process that we’re following has helped organizations of all types and sizes focus on their natural expertise – even as they grow. In this blog, I am letting you in on the three key steps of the process to help better position your organization for success, too:
- Hone in on 2-3 key characteristics.
This is where you begin to answer: “Who really is our Target Customer Profile?”
Before you can build a factory, you need to know specifically what product you are creating and, more importantly, for who. Too often, organizations are too generic. Knowing what factors impact your ability to sell a product is the first step to creating a Target Customer Profile.
We could argue that everyone needs technology and we can provide it. But that’s not an efficient or effective way to do business. We know that geography and the number of users are two key indicators for us. An organization with 25 users has different needs than another organization with more than 5,000 users. To date, we have served them all. But who are we best positioned to serve?
- Identify green light opportunities.
With a more focused customer picture, ask yourself: “What should we be selling to our Target Customer Profile?”
Using green, yellow and red, we color coded the results to illustrate the greatest concentration of our sales by product based on geographic location and number of users. With a glance, we could identify who our products naturally fit best with and the best opportunities to pursue. Sometimes the growth opportunity is within untapped capacity in an existing factory and other times a new factory needs to be built. - Build factories.
When building a factory, ask yourself: “How will we sell our product effectively and efficiently to this Target Customer Profile?”
The concept of “building factories” was completely new to me, but it makes perfect sense. When you build a factory (even figuratively), you think differently about the product you’re selling. You step back and create a more detailed business plan for the product.
We are currently building several new factories at Marco. During the “construction process,” we take the time to outline how many clients we plan to bring on each of the first three years for the specific product (or service), the associated start-up and ongoing costs and the expected profitability by year. These factories enable us to hone our strategy and action plan for our products and set metrics for performance.
What’s a factory you should be building to better serve your Target Customer Profile? It’s a question we’ll keep asking ourselves at Marco because we know the answer allows us to better serve our clients.
