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.