An Open Letter to CEOs

Lead your business to be market oriented

The market oriented series by Rachel Fairley & Mark Baker

Dear CEO,

We hope you are well and that business is thriving.

The mission of any business is to serve customers. Byron Sharp convinced us a decade ago that success comes from increasing market share by growing market penetration. We’ve always understood this as the requirement to be market oriented.

We’ve had the pleasure in our combined 50 years experience to work with great, glitterati, scary and mediocre C-Suites. We know that leadership comes from the top. We write to ask you to orientate your business to the market to drive growth.

Consider a shift to:

1. Meet with customers every day. Not because they are spending the most money, are the coolest brands, have the biggest problems, or are escalating. But because listening to customers is critical to serve them if we all accept we are not the customers and cannot know their minds. These qualitative conversations give us the colour behind our data to better understand the opportunities or issues that we see in the quantitative data.
   

2. Find the right product for the customer, don’t find a customer for the product. To be customer centric, we have to help customers find the right products for them. Offer customers a choice. The go to market has to be structured to work this way. Don’t set up competing teams to cannibalise the market under the same brand, it's a waste of resources.
   

3. Build a market oriented strategy. Market orientation is a business culture. It requires us to listen to the market and make decisions based on market realities. Segment, target, position. This strategy must permeate every department so that the market informs decisions on product, sales route to market, and marketing outreach to be authentic, relevant and differentiated in the eyes of the customer.
   

4. Take brand seriously. Answer four questions based on research that identifies what makes the business relevant, differentiated and authentic. Why do we exist? What do we do? Who are we and how do we do things? How do we look, feel and sound? That is your brand strategy. It will last a long time so don’t fiddle. Build distinctive brand assets and use them consistently. Be salient, mentally and physically available to customers, employees and all your stakeholders. Oh and there is no such thing as an employer brand, just brand, so please stop HR from running off to build their own thing. And don’t say you stand for something that you ignore in a restructure. Brand is joined at the hip with your business strategy. Every interaction has to deliver on the brand. Customer centric business and brand strategy are a leadership responsibility.
   

5. Create moments that matter. Build experiences for customers that help them in their buying cycle and create value quickly. Not all moments are equal. Getting everything just good enough won’t build our business. Some moments need to be engineered to deliver on the brand in a way that is sticky and memorable.
   

6. Make data driven decisions. Have a scalable, company-wide data strategy. Bring together all the customer data in the business into a single, usable location. Require data centric decision making across the business to move away from opinion based on limited or irrelevant data points. This is a leadership role. Share actionable insight to every team and individual.
   

7. Continuously plan. Run rolling planning, so there are always four quarters of detailed go to market plans for the whole business. This would cross traditional financial year boundaries, because the customer doesn’t buy that way. Use zero-based budgeting across the business to embed agility in every team. Only approve investments that are designed to deliver on the strategy.
   

8. Drive the business with a customer centric dashboard. To grow revenue we need to increase market share by serving customers. The best way to know we are serving customers is to measure ourselves from their perspective. Rally teams around metrics to look at the business from the customer’s point of view. Look at each target segment from the perspective of the customer. Read the emotional and rational signals. Make sure the metrics and measurements are quantitative and qualitative, and properly analysed. This will make customer centricity relevant, meaningful and actionable for everyone, every day.
   

9. Give the 4Ps back to the CMO. You cannot expect Marketing to do its job if you have taken away product, price, place or promotion. As you learned in your MBA, Marketing is more than PR, field and digital. When you empower it with all its responsibility and orientate it to the market you give the business back its ability to grow.

Thank you for listening.

Best wishes,

Rachel & Mark

Read about the 5 steps to market orientation to grow and why it is your job to embrace a customer centric approach for your B2B business.

Adopting market orientation is a cultural change but there are clear ways to make it happen. These four articles explain how to effectively re-orientate your business to the market in order to grow:

1. Creating a scalable marketing organisation that is structured and empowered to respond to market needs in an agile way

2. Why we need data strategy to unite us by telling us where to play, how well we are doing, where to improve and when to change.

3. Adopting a dynamic planning approach that aligns the whole organisation around the customer

4. Measuring what matters means seeing everything from the customer’s perspective and setting metrics that focus on delivery of the agreed strategy.

Rachel Fairley and Mark Baker are friends and work allies, with a combined experience of over fifty years. Rachel is a marketer and brand strategist whose focus is on driving growth, contributing to over 25 business transformations across more than 100 countries and many industries. Mark is an international tech marketer who leads digital transformation to accelerate revenue with the right people, strategy, technology and operational business models.