There are all types of strategic partnerships: co-branding, affiliate programs, distribution partnerships, content partnerships, etc. All of these can provide significant benefits to your company. Co-branding, for example, can help you better serve your customer with new products and services, leverage your assets, and increase revenues.

Zero Hour will help you develop strategic partnerships that make sound business sense and are in alignment with your overall strategy. We will help you make sure the arrangements are synergistic and pass the true litmus test - how they help your brand, and how they impact your bottom line.

Read more about Zero Hour’s Strategic Planning services.

You are not going to read on this page how we develop the most creative campaigns or have won the most awards. This is because we are not an ad agency. We use agencies, we can help you find and manage agencies, and in fact we love agencies.

But we are in the “Big M” Marketing business, which means that we are only interested in marketing tactics that fit into your strategy for moving your business forward – tactics that engage and educate customers, ultimately selling more products and services. We are not limited to one marketing tactic or another.

Services include:

Advertising & Promotion

Zero Hour can help you develop, execute and manage marketing programs that generate leads, get people to focus their attention on your company and the value you provide, increase demand and drive sales. Among the types of projects we can help you with include:

• Advertising & Promotion
• Branding
• Grassroots Marketing
• Guerilla Marketing
• In-store Marketing
• Market Research
• Messaging
• Websites & Internet Programs
• Positioning
• Public Relations

Sales Support

Your sales team is on the front line of the marketplace – how they present your company, its products and its value is critical to hitting your revenue projections. We will work with you to make sure that your brand and company are consistently presented in the field.

Zero Hour will build custom sales tools with the sole purpose of aligning your buyer’s needs with your company’s solutions:

• Case studies
• Collateral
• Presentations
• Product demos
• ROI calculators
• Sales tools
• Success stories

We’re all in business to sell something to somebody. It could be a product or it could be a service. And your customers might be other businesses or individual consumers. And chances are you’re not alone out there in the marketplace. Whether it’s a battle for market share, mind share or wallet share, there are other companies selling products and services to your customers.

To us, it all comes down to providing value to a customer: understanding what value means to them, communicating that value proposition, and then delivering the value in the actual product or service.

Zero Hour will help you translate customer needs, wants and desires into products and services that are positioned, priced and promoted appropriately.

Services include:

Market Requirements

Developing customer-centric offerings is essential to the success of your products and services. Zero Hour will make sure that your customer is front and center in the product development conversation by providing comprehensive market requirements to guide your development efforts. We will aggregate user and customer feedback and market research into concise conclusions and direction. And we will develop use cases and user profiles to clarify, with specificity, the type of customer you are targeting, how they behave, and what features and enhancements they require.

Competitive Landscape Analysis

Do you have a deep understanding of who is competing for the hearts, minds and wallets of your product or service? Who are they, what do they offer, what are the features and benefits, how are they priced, how are they distributed – all critical questions that can help drive the acceptance of your products and services.

Zero Hour will help you scrutinize the competition and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. We produce competitive landscapes that identify potential threats, opportunities and undeveloped markets. Then, we use that intelligence to enhance your offerings.

Product Positioning

After developing a deep understanding of your market, competition and customers, Zero Hour will work with you to craft strategic positions for your products, services and company. Through proper positioning, we can start the process of building a sustainable, defensible foundation for all communications.

Pricing

There are many ways to “skin the pricing cat.” But we believe the fundamental starting question is “How much do customers value our offering?” Once this has been determined, Zero Hour will help you define your pricing objectives and develop a strategic pricing scheme that is flexible, competitive, consistent with your brand, and achieves your company’s business objectives.

Go-to-Market

You have painstakingly built customer- centric strategies, products and services. Now it is time to hit the streets and tell the world about the features, benefits and value of your offerings.

Going to market means defining your channel strategies, and developing the tools you need to sell your vision: websites, sell-sheets, brochures, presentations, public relations, point-of-sale, advertising and promotions, etc.

Using these and other tactics, Zero Hour will develop a program to help drive awareness, adoption and sales. Your leadership, sales team, and internal teams will receive all the materials they need to effectively sell the value of your offerings.

An orange is an orange is an orange…unless that orange happens to be a Sunkist…” - Russell Hanlin, President Emeritus, Sunkist

Perception is reality. How people perceive your company, brand and products are determined by the verbal, written and visual messages they receive. In order to have a brand, your company must be crystal clear in presenting what you do, why you’re special and the value you provide.

Zero Hour will help you understand and define the role you want to play in the marketplace. We will also develop your written and visual brand elements so your entire organization is communicating to the marketplace in a consistent and powerful way.

Services include:

Core Brand Messaging

Core Brand Messaging acts as the foundation for all marketing programs. By working closely with your team, we will achieve brand consistency and clarity in how we talk about your market position (mission statement, positioning statement, tagline, and elevator pitch) and your value (value proposition, features, benefits, reasons to believe, proof points), plus how you tailor these messages to your various constituencies (internal stakeholders, customer stakeholders, investors, media).

Core Brand Imagery

Core Brand Imagery works hand in hand with messaging to create an image and interest in your product or service. On a more practical level, it builds recognition and recall in the minds of your customers, and it puts a consistent, professional face on your company. From logos to color palettes to graphics standards, Zero Hour can help you develop the visual foundation for your brand to make it memorable, useful and compelling.

Where is your company going and how is it going to get there? Seemingly simple questions, until it comes time to make decisions and allocate resources to make it happen. With start-ups and small companies, the challenge is even greater because strategic direction is often a moving target. Successful companies in this situation are nimble without losing control – which is only possible through continually assessing the market and their place in it.

Zero Hour will lay out programs that assess the situation your company is facing, and help you achieve your short- and long-term strategic objectives.

Services include:

Customer Understanding & Segmentation

All customers are not the same. Have you taken a hard look at who your customers are and how you’re treating them based on their characteristics? In order to maximize your revenues, profits and customer satisfaction, you need to understand what makes a good customer, how they make their purchase decisions, how they define value, and how best to reach them.

Zero Hour will work with you to divide the market and/or your current customer base into significant and quantifiable segments based on their needs, requirements, behaviors and attitudes, demographics and psychographics. Once we’ve made these determinations, we can help you use this information to: drive your overall marketing strategy, prioritize product and service development efforts, build customized marketing programs and fine-tune your pricing to maximize profit. Ultimately, this helps you identify underserved segments and maximize your most profitable segments.

Positioning

Are you able to clearly articulate your company’s place in the market? Can you and your sales team explain why what you offer is different, better and provides more value to the customer versus the competition? If you’re not clear about why you’re offerings are relevant to your customers, how do you expect them to understand when they’re making their purchase decisions?

Zero Hour will help you understand and define the role you want to play in the marketplace. We will also develop your brand and positioning messages so your entire organization is communicating to the marketplace in a consistent and powerful way.

Product Strategy & Roadmaps

There are many, many products, features and enhancements with legitimate market need, but it’s just not practical to go after every one at once. In fact, it can hurt the company by distracting focus and spreading resources too thin. There has to be an overarching product strategy that encompasses the competitive landscape, trends and market requirements, while meeting the corporate requirements of the finance, sales, marketing and product departments. Zero Hour will help you lay out a product roadmap that provides direction on how to profitably build your business horizontally (new products and features) and vertically (new market segments), meet your financial goals and keep you competitive.

Marketing Plans

Plan the work and work the plan. All companies are marketing companies – developing and selling products and services for a profit. How well you do these things will ultimately determine your degree of success or failure. A marketing plan needs to clearly lay out what is necessary to make these short- and long-term objectives happen.

Zero Hour believes that the best marketing plans couple solid strategy with detailed action plans. A marketing plan without a sound strategic foundation will be ineffective at best, and a marketing plan without a tactical roadmap is of little use.

We start the process by taking a “deep dive” into your customers and competitors to get a thorough understanding of the marketplace. Once we have a well-defined understanding of your market, we outline a strategy for acquiring, converting and retaining customers. Zero Hour will help your company build a strategic marketing plan that achieves your short-term objectives while laying the groundwork for the future.

Sales Planning

The goal of sales is pretty simple - increased revenues. In order to accomplish that goal, you have to convince new customers to buy or convince existing customers to buy more. We will help develop a program that is designed to keep the customer the focus of the sales effort, and a process and compensation program to support it. It all starts with a complete understanding of critical business issues faced by each customer. From there, we will build sales materials that help your customers understand the value of your products and services, and create in them a desire to buy.

Compensation Plans

Compensation plans for your sales force needs to answer one ultimate question: Does the plan motivate your sales force in the direction of the desired business results?

If the plan doesn’t motivate the people on the front lines, or if it doesn’t increase sales and profitability for your company, the whole company loses. Plans can come off the rails for many reasons, such as misalignment with the product lines, pricing issues, or being overly complicated.

Whether you have a plan that is in need of an overhaul, or you need to a totally new one for a start-up company, Zero Hour can help you build a sales compensation plan that is a simple, elegant, strategic tool to help your company achieve its top and bottom line results.

Strategic Partnerships

There are all types of strategic partnerships: co-branding, affiliate programs, distribution partnerships, content partnerships, etc. All of these can provide significant benefits to your company. Co-branding, for example, can help you better serve your customer with new products and services, leverage your assets, and increase revenues.

Zero Hour will help you develop strategic partnerships that make sound business sense and are in alignment with your overall strategy. We will help you make sure the arrangements are synergistic and pass the true litmus test - how they help your brand, and how they impact your bottom line.

Investor Preparation

We all know about the value of packaging in the marketplace. Good consumer packaging can get you to pick up one brand of laundry detergent instead of another. Good B2B packaging can illustrate to a buyer why your solutions provide more value than the competition. But have you thought about the packaging of your company to its “customers,” investors and venture capitalists?

When you are raising capital, you are telling a story. It is a story about your big idea, why it’s important, and how it can be turned into a great company. To properly tell this story, you have to present a deep understanding of the market opportunity, the problem you’re solving, and the value you can create. You have to explain how your product, solution, or technology is so great and how can it be sustained against the competition (and there is always competition). And you have to paint the profit picture, telling your story with the financials.

Oh…and you have to do it in 15 minutes or less if you’re lucky.

Zero Hour will help package your company and get it ready to show investors. We can help you develop presentations that engage your audience and communicate your most compelling messages ASAP. And we can help you develop executive summaries that are clear, concise and potent.