Manufacturing Case Study

Recovering Market Share

Through Marketing and Product Realignment

0 %

achievement of year 1 revenue goals for new product development

0 %

reduction in product and marketing headcount

Challenge

Legacy Strength Meets Modern Market Challenges

A century-old global industrials client had a strong legacy but struggled to maintain momentum. The company faced eroding market share with its existing products and under-realized rollouts for new products.

On top of this, an engineering-minded product team dominated decision-making, which created unclear responsibilities and accountability across the organization’s product management and product marketing functions.

After previously working with Alexander Group on a successful go-to-market assessment, this industrials client sought our expertise in primarily reversing declining market share and strengthening the product marketing team’s capabilities.

Solution

Clarifying Department Ownership and Strengthening Marketing

Our team conducted a comprehensive discovery process to understand how the client’s current product lifecycle was structured and which department owned what pieces across the map. This review included holding interviews across business units and global regions as well as having a time study of product and marketing teams. Following this, Alexander had two primary recommendations:

Clarify global, regional and business unit responsibilities for product management and product marketing roles

By doing this, the product marketing function would be strengthened and there would be clear accountability across the organization.

Delineate responsibilities between product management and product marketing

Moving forward, product management would focus on user needs and product development whereas product marketing focused on buyer needs and product rollout.

These changes addressed frustration among individual contributors and created a more effective operating model that aligned roles with strategic priorities.

Impact

Improved Win Rates and Marketing Productivity

Alexander Group’s solution created a customer-centric process that would enable the client to successfully launch new features and new products. Within six months of implementation, the sales and demand generation marketing teams saw increased customer engagement through new buyer journey materials, personas and value messaging.

By the one-year mark, the client was able to hit 122% of its’ new product development revenue goals in year one of implementation. Additionally, the company also reduced product and marketing headcount by 9% without sacrificing results. The client reported higher win rates for the sales organization and a greater volume of marketing-qualified leads at the same spend. All of these results were thanks to improved persona targeting and messaging.

For individual contributors, employee engagement scores reached their highest level in seven years following the rollout—reflecting the positive impact of clearer roles and responsibilities.

Alexander Group’s solution allowed the client to clearly identify, validate and quantify the issues within its existing product organizational model to then implement a clear solution that would drive accountability.

Don’t let marketing confusion hinder product momentum

Alexander Group will partner with you on strengthening your marketing function to support existing offerings while also ensuring that your organization can still take advantage of new market opportunities. Contact us today and be on the path to marketing success tomorrow.

About Alexander Group

Alexander Group understands your revenue growth challenges. Since 1985, we’ve served more than 3,000 companies across the globe. This experience gives us not only a highly sophisticated set of best practices to grow revenue—we also have a rich repository of unique industry data that informs all our recommendations. Aligning product, marketing, operations and finance efforts behind a successful sales organization takes insight and hard work. We help the world’s leading organizations build the right revenue vision, transform their organizations and deliver results.