Factfile 24
The following are questions to ask yourself when determining how you will go about optimising your coverage model to unleash its full potential:
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What are your current and future market opportunities and how do you go about prioritising them? Comprehensive market analysis coupled with decisive account prioritisation is the starting point for any successful coverage model. Sound coverage decisions can only be made against clear market and account-level analysis.
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Who are your target customers and what do they want? It seems like a simple question, but it is an integral piece of any successful coverage model. Customer segmentation has to be more meaningful than the standard account size approach.
Understanding what your customers want will help you avoid the pitfalls such as creating massive e-business portals that no one uses, or losing high-opportunity customers due to insufficient coverage. Remember, ?customers choose channels, channels don?t choose customers.?
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Do you have visibility to the current costs of covering differing types of customers for different types of transactions? Whether current data is readily available or not, a sound coverage model will require some view of costs and resources. By aligning transaction costs with elements of your customer and product dimensions, you can gain the clarity necessary to decide on future coverage trade-offs.
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Do you have a comprehensive channel strategy that considers all relevant marketing, sales and service elements? We mean comprehensive in terms of considering customer sets, product sets, geographies, multiple business units and ties to corporate financial and strategic goals.
The many dimensions of a Go-to-Market model are only further complicated when new channels are introduced. Clear rules of engagement and defined roles and responsibilities across all channels are vital in reducing channel conflict and minimizing channel stacking.