Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter

“Our target market is the Fortune 500.”
“We’ll target industry leaders.”

Both of these tired sentences come up repeatedly in go-to-market plans – and they’re meaningless.

First, there are only 500 of the Fortune 500 (and they’re a pretty ragged bunch these days, in any event.)

Do you know anybody at the F500 company – anybody that can get you to a decision maker? (Sorry, but your brother-in-law, the store manager in Ponca City, OK probably doesn’t have the CEO on speed dial…)

The 800-pound gorilla leader may not be the best fit for your spankin’ new product. (Sidebar tip: the bigger they are, the safer many tend to play it. Even if they do love you, big boys tend to move slow. It once took me nine months to close a deal with Verizon, that they instigated…and I still have nasty combat flashbacks to negotiations with Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft.;-) Do you know anybody at the leading companies?

And, so we come to what I call “Kevin Bacon Marketing.” Somebody you know always knows somebody who knows…You may well only be one or two degrees away from a major deal decision maker.

You can do market research until your computer memory overflows, your eyeballs shrivel in their sockets and your budget is drained. But – when all is said and done – the quickest way to sell anything is to know somebody high up the food chain at the potential customer. And, that’s why – when I’m planning go-to-market strategies – after I’ve done intensive review and qualification of potential targets, I keep digging and digging to find the people behind the market stats, logos and titles. What interests do they have? Where did they work before? Where could we make a (real) connection? Does anybody on my client’s board know someone? Did one of the investors go to school with the chairman? And so on. Sure, it takes a lot of extra work, but it also saves a lot of wasted effort when we actually do get out there.