Boosting Traction

Whether your company is trying to increase competitiveness, raise investment capital, make an acquisition, or become acquired, all signs point to maximizing value. The higher your company's value, the more leverage it has in the marketplace and the investment community. Value derives from traction. The more traction a company has, the greater its value.

Anyone who has driven to Yosemite National Park or Lake Tahoe during the winter understands the definition, and value, of traction. Let's put it this way: If you don't have traction, the California Highway Patrol will not allow your vehicle into either of these beautiful destinations. Your company is a vehicle for delivering value to its customers, accepting value in return from them, and delivering residual value to its investors. Consistently successful companies like Dell Computer have great traction -- they almost always arrive at their destinations in the least amount of time, with the greatest payloads, consuming the least amount of fuel, without sliding off the road.

Boosting traction is an endlessly iterative process, and no company should ever feel secure enough to rest in this process. Having great traction -- realizing desired outputfrom an invested input (e.g., strong promotion campaign coordinated with aggressive salesforce coverage) -- is the essence of all businesses. (e.g., high percentage of prospects becoming paying customers)

Finally, NEVER try to raise investment capital without demonstrating that your company will get (in the case of a startup) or is getting (in the case of a viable enterprise) excellent traction.

Three Steps to Boosting Traction

1. Ensure That Customer Needs Drive Everything

After determining customer needs, you must make the resulting marketing strategy drive and tightly link the offering, the channels used, the communications and events, and salesforce behavior. With religious zeal, I always fought the typical internecine resistence in technology companies to this necessary discipline, to enforce tight linkage of all the steps shown above. If your company has a strong "engineering" culture, you will encounter many barriers to success here. Result of failure in this step: poor traction.

2. Keep Messaging Unified

Using a musical metaphor, messaging to the constituent groups shown above must be created like variations on a central theme, based on the specific need of each constituent. For example, when I had global messaging responsibility for a publicly traded software company, I had to take our central theme of "integrating the enterprise" and make it resonate with the agendas of both banks, endlessly seeking to maintain the competitiveness of their electronic-banking offerings, and systems integrators (from our partner channel), which succeed by increasing billings without increasing headcount proportionately. At the end of the day, all the "variation" messages must closely resemble the main message. Result of failure in this step: poor traction.

3. Tightly Couple Sales & Marketing Activities

One of the worst mistakes companies can make is to have uncoordinated sales and marketing strategies and activities. Marketing and sales strategies are time-dependent; they have their respective similarities and differences. Each, therefore, must be designed to depend on and coexist with the other. Customers respond best when talking to salespeople at the same time they are digesting the promotional messages they read and hear in the marketplace. I NEVER launched a marketing strategy without fully including and educating my salesforce. Remember: Salespeople are commissioned; if you don't tell them what to say, they'll make it up as they go along. Result of failure in this step: poor traction.