CEO Vision Marketing
The Cornucopia Group offers advisory services to CEOs of privately-held companies whose personal financial futures are directly impacted by the effectiveness of their company’s marketing and sales, but are having problems measuring and directing their marketing to drive sales. The Cornucopia Group shows CEOs the marketing configurations they can use to control marketing and build more predictable sales outcomes.
Unlike creative-driven ad agencies, we help CEOs make effective market-driven decisions designed to win customers. The Cornucopia Group provides a systematic framework to align all elements of your company’s promise, products, and position with the needs of the customer. Want to avoid the uncontrolled feast and famine revenue fluctuations of misaligned service firm marketing?
First, find out who we work with to determine if we are the best option to fill your needs. Sometimes you will be better served elsewhere, and in those cases we’ll be happy to recommend some appropriate vendors.
If you are experiencing some or all of these symptoms, contact us to schedule a free Map it Now Session.
CEO Vision Marketing Starts at the Top
Effective marketing does not begin in the office of the sales or marketing director. Effective marketing begins with the CEO. CEO Vision Marketing begins with a discovery process that helps a CEO identify his or her vision. By unveiling your company’s vision, we reveal who your organization is and what it is becoming, setting new destinations for what your customers need and why you are the best provider to completely fit their need. We then help you establish a superior position that will allow you to maneuver from stronger footing in the marketplace.
CEO Vision Marketing offers a method that sets new destinations for your entire organization, revealing business shortcomings and breakdowns through our powerful and specialized mental models. We do this to create action plans that lead to new organizational structures, procedures, and capabilities that will support marketing to drive sales, within the context of the vision of the CEO. These new structures carry a signal from the CEO, through the marketing department, to the sales department, to the customer and back to the CEO. This value loop allows your company to measure the results of its marketing, allowing you to increase its leverage and make it the most valuable tool your company will ever use.
Because your customer needs are not static, your company must be flexible enough to perceive the customer’s changing needs — if you are to grow. CEO Vision Marketing helps CEOs and their teams contain the complexity of the marketing and sales challenge they are facing to win market leadership, competing on value and intimacy. By aligning with your best customers’ true needs, building an effective process, offering the best products and services, and by building arguments that will outsell the competition, you can establish and retain a superior market position.
“The work that Michelangelo and The Cornucopia Group have done in the past 2 years has given my company the insight and systems to ensure success well into the future. 25 years in the business and I have yet to meet a more talented and result oriented marketing group.”
CEO Vision Marketing Gives You Control
With CEO Vision Marketing, you will be able to define the strong customer relationships on which your business depends, build mastery over your market position, and construct the business marketing systems that will help you move toward greater growth.
You’ll also be able to:
- Re-engineer sales and marketing operations so your sales force can use qualified opportunities to form valuable customer relationships.
- Use two-way communications programs to activate your sales process by generating leads and providing feedback.
- Make fact-based decisions that empower your sales force.
- Control the entire sales process, from identifying markets to converting sales opportunities.
- Clearly define ROI of marketing investments – by relating marketing activities directly to increased sales.
- Automate, manage, and measure your marketing process.
- Use qualitative measurement to align messaging, so that the organization speaks with one voice.
“Our work on this project has been hard. We have been introduced to new marketing concepts that demand a customer-centric focus, and a needs-based approach, to fashioning our marketing messages, and sales strategy. You and your TCG colleagues have also challenged us to think about our company, our vision, our goals, our target market/customers, our products, and how they must be aligned to create a successful sales environment. Our having accepted and responded to these challenges is helping to make us a better, more effective sales and marketing organization.”
The CEO Vision Marketing Process
Step 1: 90 Minute Consultation/Map it Now Session
A complimentary exploratory dialogue with the CEO to assess your situation, identify weak areas, and discuss how we can add value to your organization. A Performance Marketer will map out your current sales process, giving you immediate insight for improvements and changes to be made. Contact The Cornucopia Group to schedule your free 90 Minute Consultation or schedule a free Map it Now Session today.
Step 2: CEO Vision Alignment
Once the CEO has committed to improving the business, we use our proprietary CEO Vision Marketing methodology to clarify the corporate vision and set new destinations.
Step 3: CEO Action Planning
This phase creates high-level strategic goals formulated as an action plan, detailing where the company is, where you want to get to, and how to bridge the gaps leading to new structures, procedures, methods, and capabilities.
Step 4: CEO Performance Marketing
Working with the CEO and marketing team in regularly scheduled sessions, we help you carry out fundamental changes in your marketing and sales program design and support to fulfill the corporate promise to the customer.
Step 5: Measurable Marketing
We use constant, real-time metrics to measure and evaluate your progress, making on-the-fly changes if needed. Qualitative and quantitative feedback allows us to improve the most important metric of your business: $ in vs. $ out. To learn more, download or request our infopack.
“We have been building the highest quality custom architectural products for nearly ten years. Our number one source of business has always been word of mouth referrals. Taking our business to the next level required me as the President to go to the next level in my understanding of how to design my marketing approach to activate sales. The Cornucopia Group made it simple for me to understand the complexities of this challenge and map out a step-by-step approach so I could take action.”
The Impact of CEO Vision Marketing
How it Works
Instead of hourly consulting work which requires prior approval and the CEO’s time before projects can advance, CEO Vision Marketing is a continual process built for achieving outcomes.
- You pay a flat monthly fee based on yearly revenues
- A Performance Marketer plans your programs
- Upon your approval, execution of the plan begins
- Recurring meetings ensure progress towards goals
Our Shared Expectations Statement
We begin each engagement with a shared understanding that both The Cornucopia Group and our clients will live up to certain expectations:
- Agree to invest in yourself and meet your commitments so we can build your business.
- Be honest with us at all times, and reveal your firm’s failures and successes.
- Accept that true change doesn’t happen without effort.
- Understand that improvements won’t occur overnight.
- Be willing to devote time for continuous measurable improvement over many months, and even years.
- Be realistic in your expectations for yourself and for us.
- Be prepared to meet your goals, and be prepared for the upheavals that come with change.
- Understand that investments of time, thought and dollars are necessary for long-term improvement.
Strategy
“Strategy” absolutely has to be one of the most abused words in all of business. Yet, when it comes to marketing your organization, your marketing strategy and your business strategy are linked in a deep and important way. If you cannot market and sell your business, then it will die.
We take a very practical life and death approach to top down planning. We do not create polished business plans. We do not write 30 page marketing plans.
- We will create an effective Action Plan which will guide the design and development of a marketing and sales structure for the CEO.
- We will identify the defects in this structure and find ways to eliminate them systematically.
- We will agree who we are going to go get, how we are going to get them exactly, and why it will work.
- We will measure everything.
Why? The structure is your strategy. And you convert your structure into material – customers – via your tactics. Your Action Plan will guide those as well. Everything you truly need to know about this structure can be expressed on one sheet of paper.
Strategy is simple, but not simplistic.
Sales Process Design and Re-engineering
Most organizations have excess capacity in their ability to fulfill which means what is keeping them from growing is their ability to market and sell their business. If your revenues appear to have hit a ceiling you may have outgrown your sales process in its present state.
We can help you evaluate your existing sales process, and detail areas for strategic improvements that can get you selling more. Because the design and re-engineering of B2B sales process is a specialty area of expertise very few companies offer this service. We have been planning, executing, and managing sales process and re-design services driven by our unique CEO Vision Marketing framework for 6 years helping many CEOs achieve results that they hadn’t been able to reach for years.
What’s possible?
- Your sales people are on 2-5 appointments per day – everyday
- Sales inquiry and pipeline increases 200%+
- Increased customer profitability
- Lower customer acquisition costs
- Clear picture of sales and marketing bottlenecks – and how to overcome them
- Understanding of how marketing investments drive revenue (x dollars in = y dollars out)
- CEO alignment with organization and customers
- Relevance – the right messages, products, and services
“I had a feeling this day would come, but did not think it would be this soon. I sat in on the sales and production meetings and was shocked as to how they ran, what they talked about, and what they solved. It was almost like sitting in on another company entirely. Thank you for opening our eyes and minds to grow to where we are today. You and your team have influenced us in a way that can’t be measured.”
Dashboard Measurement & Analysis
There is a simple signal that is generated for CEOs of publicly held companies on Wall Street everyday to let them know how they are doing. That signal is either up, down or even. Unfortunately, many CEOs of privately-held companies close the door at the end of the day without any feedback on their performance. They are chasing a market that doesn’t seem to be talking to them. They feel like they are in a black box. And they are.
CEO Dashboards can be a great way to shed light on customers, sales process performance and win feedback on how you as the CEO are performing your role. The problem with most reporting structures in private companies is that they offer the CEO more data than useful information.
A CEO Dashboard can offer the CEO information in context regarding the performance of a crucial area of the business system, flagging trouble before the problem fully manifests itself. Context is easily established around a business process once the steps of the process are understood along with their cause and effect relationship on each other, and other areas of the business.
“I hired Michelangelo to help us understand the reasons why our sales were unpredictable and uneven. For years we either had sales from a fire hose or none at all. Too often this resulted in much pressure on the financial metrics of the operation. MC has helped us identify the weaknesses and put metrics to the pipeline that have yielded much more measurable and firm results. As an outcome we now have 100% more opportunities in the funnel at all levels and 300% more above 50%. The financial performance of our company is now on a growth path such that we have never seen before. He cares very much once he decides to invest his precious time in your company. I highly recommend MC and suggest that you hire him if you have similar issues.”
Lead Generation Programs
Most CEOs incorrectly conclude that poor sales performance is rooted in skill deficiencies of their sales people and attempt to correct this by purchasing sales training. The reality is more often than not that most sales forces do not have enough pre-qualified opportunities with prospects that are in the market to buy their goods.
We help organizations to keep their sales people selling by creating highly-effective and highly-scalable lead generation systems that help organizations conduct prospecting and qualification effectively. We build high end business-to-business lead generation systems for complex and expensive products and services where the sale depends on a strong customer relationship.
Our lead generation systems are delivered within the context of a full CEO Vision Marketing engagement, or as an outcome of a brief consultative engagement where we measure and set criteria for what a lead is, how many of them your company can handle, and what it will take to scale.
If your number one source of business is word-of-mouth referrals, then your sales pipeline will be erratic. You won’t be able to forecast service or production levels and ultimately your sales are limited by the number of relationships that you have under your management.
“I went from transacting with just 1% of my market to over 10% in less than a year.”
Communications
Most CEOs are using their marketing dollars to brand, when they could be using them to sell. We are a full service provider of specialty B2B marketing and communications services. All of our programs are designed to get a measurable response.
If you’re trying to get a return on your marketing dollars, but spending most of your budget on advertising or public relations, STOP. Those programs are ineffectual by design to support your sales team. You are wasting money!
We specialize in highly customized communciations solutions that allow you to achieve more scalable results in your on-going efforts to communicate with more of your market more of the time in a way that will activate sales.
We can design and create high quality content that draws you into a deeper relationship with your audience. We can oversee absolutely every aspect associated with the planning, execution, and management of your communications efforts.
“We should really use these as communication tools for all employees. When I see this I feel like ASKO is really trying to make something happen in the marketplace. It reinvigorates me and improves my attitude and makes me want to help.”
Special Projects
From time to time something really fun and cool will come along that falls outside of our defined lines of service. We like to look at these opportunities because it gives us an opportunity to stretch our minds. If you are working on something out of the ordinary – a new product, a killer business plan, a quest to sell to China, and want some folks who know a lot about marketing and sales to think about it because you are not sure it has been done before, then please contact us and dazzle away!