simondelliott

Marketing your products in a down turn

Remember how I said that the profile of tenders was going to change because of the downturn?
The bell curve of opportunity value compared to frequency of deals will be squished, out in two directions.

Lets take a look a just a single company.

A large company has to speculate to accumulate. This is reflected in the internal purchasing mechanisms of the company. Roughly speaking there are sign off boundaries, the most influential people at each of these boundary levels are indicated in the above diagram. Even though a VP may have to sign off a purchase of 300k it will probably be a couple of directors at a lower level who make the real decision.

The down turn will reduce costs and therefore the whole curve will be smaller. However operations must still go on. You will see that the directors now control most of the spending rather than the VP’s. Because directors are still intouch with the delivery and are younger you have to change your marketing.

• make it more funky – remember your playing to the google generation
• make it about delivery
• dont dress your sales materials in the old school terminology – i.e. have a summary instead an exec summary