White Papers
Converting Customer Challenges into Solutions
White Paper
Converting Customer Challenges into Solutions
In business-to-business (B2B) markets, customer loyalty can accelerate growth and create a competitive advantage. But, loyalty has become elusive as buyers ask for more and suppliers ask, “What else can they possibly need?” This paper shows how B2B companies can successfully identify profitable solution opportunities that chart path towards profitable growth and rewards customer relationships.
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Lessons Learned from the Aftermarket
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Lessons Learned from the Aftermarket
Businesses that touch the aftermarket most likely are dealing with a host of factors related to assessing and integrating a revitalized aftermarket strategy—increasingly complex end customer segments with different requirements, the need for speed when it comes to service times and delivery, and last, but not least, the emergence of alternative channels that challenge traditional go-to-market approaches. From the highest ranks of corporate leadership to those involved in day-to-day operations, business-to-business companies are looking to unfold ways in which growth can be accelerated in the aftermarket. In this white paper, Blue Canyon identifies several aftermarket trends, which, if capitalized on appropriately, can improve an organization’s ability to win in the aftermarket. The industry stories included provide perspective on areas to evaluate within a business.
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Expensive Decisions: Getting Pricing Right
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Expensive Decisions: Getting Pricing Right
Pricing pressures, commoditization, and competition are just some of the challenges companies face when it comes to pricing. Yet, pricing is often one of the quickest ways to make an impact to an organization’s bottom line. Finding the right pricing strategy is an important element of a company’s growth strategy. Being able to establish optimal pricing to maximize profitability and ability to win can be a challenging process—even more so in complex markets where suppliers do business with increasingly large customers and construct deals that are becoming larger, longer, and more involved.
In this white paper, Blue Canyon addresses intense price pressures and commoditization challenges, and provides a framework for how to approach pricing decisions given the characteristics of the market. Three scenarios are used to illustrate how the framework can be used to enable strategic pricing decisions that lead to an ability to win and maximize profitability.
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The Imperative for Active Channel Management
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The Imperative for Active Channel Management
Creating value for your customer goes well beyond the product or service. Value often extends throughout the customer chain, involving other intermediaries who touch the end customer to ensure that they have an excellent and positive experience. One of these intermediaries is the channel partner. As companies begin to plan and forecast for organic growth, a key element of growth will be to understand their channel network—how to design, manage, and motivate these partners.
This white paper provides a framework for understanding what drives a strong, successful channel. It also highlights critical areas that can weaken a relationship. This knowledge can then be used with the framework to identify critical success factors and plan for future growth opportunities.
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A Market-Driven Framework: Aligning Product Development and Markets
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A Market-Driven Framework: Aligning Product Development and Markets
Product development can make a significant contribution to business growth if such initiatives are correctly focused on the needs of various market segments that create economic value and competitive advantages. The analytic framework described in this paper for developing market-driven product development strategies yields tremendous payoffs by enabling achievement of superior alignment between markets and product development management. The framework developed in this paper shows how each of the dimensions of major product development strategy can be addressed in accordance with the factors that are critical to success in the corresponding business environment. Several case studies are provided showing the linkage between characteristics of the market environment and decisions on product development priorities.
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China: The Bad News and The Good News
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China: The Bad News and The Good News
Spanning over two decades of 10 percent annual economic growth in China, we frequently heard reports that the numbers were fabricated and/or the growth was unsustainable and based on a shaky foundation. Although the visible changes in China during this time make it impossible to argue that the rapid growth wasn’t real, China’s economy currently is on track to grow significantly more slowly in the near future. However, all news is not bad news. In this white paper, author David G. Hartman explains that while China’s slowing growth is serious news, there is a silver lining if one looks beyond the day-to-day headlines.
David thoughtfully looks at both the bad news and good news, and highlights how China’s future developments will impact foreign manufacturers, the heavy equipment industry, consumer products manufacturers, and business-to-business suppliers. David closes with advice to executives on how to assess both the short-term and long-term trends in China.
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A Strategy Diagnostic: How to Optimize the Success of Your Go-to-Market and Get-to-Market Efforts
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A Strategy Diagnostic: How to Optimize the Success of Your Go-to-Market and Get-to-Market Efforts
When it comes to devising and implementing a business growth strategy, those responsible for strategic planning, marketing, and sales within an organization have a lot at stake to ensure its success. When a strategy does not meet expectations or goes off course, it can be difficult to determine if it was the strategy itself or the implementation of the strategy. Unfortunately, the more common reality is that certain elements of the strategy and the implementation are missing or incomplete. Without the proper tools, many executives are unable to quickly identify where the gaps are in the strategy and in the execution of the strategy. When this occurs, incorrect assumptions are often made as to why certain areas within the organization are underperforming and corrective actions become misguided.
This paper shows how organizations can quickly identify disconnects, gaps, and areas for improvement for a strategy and the execution of that strategy to be successful. It also identifies ways to involve the sales and support organizations in the upfront marketing strategy to ensure marketing and sales alignment.
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Creating New Data-Driven Business Models for Profitable Growth
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Creating New Data-Driven Business Models for Profitable Growth
Over the past several years, business-to-business companies have recognized that Big Data should be managed and used, but struggle to create value and be rewarded from it. However, some visionaries have recognized how Big Data can be used to change the way they do business, rethink their business strategy, and enter into new businesses while driving value throughout the customer chain. In Creating New Data-Driven Business Models, authors David G. Hartman and Atlee Valentine Pope present cases studies that demonstrate how Big Data is being used to create value and highlight three important lessons learned along the way.
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Channel Management: The Customer Chain – Value Chain Framework
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Channel Management: The Customer Chain – Value Chain Framework
To achieve sustainable growth, best-in-class companies work with their channel partners to periodically review end customer expectations. By understanding how end customers receive value from their supply chains and by clearly defining the end customers’ expectations, a supplier is in a position to ask and to begin to answer important questions about the value chain. By combining this customer chain framework with an understanding of the value chain, it is possible to have a clear discussion with existing channel partners about services that are required, how they are to be provided, and by whom. This framework provides an essential tool for defining what services are needed and who will provide them in the future, and provide the basis of a thoughtful, progressive discussion between a supplier and its channel partners on what will be needed to be successful with the end customer in the future.
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Adjacent Markets: Choose Your Battles Wisely
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Adjacent Markets: Choose Your Battles Wisely
Adjacent markets represent attractive growth opportunities for many businesses, but there are many adjacent markets from which to choose. Which markets are the most attractive? Of even greater importance, which markets offer the greatest potential for success? In this white paper, Blue Canyon offers guidance on how to determine which opportunities will set your firm on course for successful growth.
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Discovering Your Next Growth Opportunity: Adjacent Markets
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Discovering Your Next Growth Opportunity: Adjacent Markets
Adjacent markets are often the best answer when a business is faced with the question of “what’s next?” In certain cases, adjacent markets may be the only answer if growth opportunities in existing markets are limited or there is a strong need to diversify the business. Before considering which adjacent markets are the best prospects, a business needs to know all of its options. However, identifying potential adjacent markets is often not as straightforward as it seems, and there are a limited number of tools available to aid in the process.
In this paper, we present a framework to simplify the process of identifying a business’ adjacent markets and ensure that all potential growth opportunities are uncovered. Specific questions are provided to help to uncover attractive adjacent market opportunities. With a rich set of options at its disposal, a business can confidently move forward to discover its next growth opportunity.
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Best-in-Class Behaviors in Business-to-Business Relationships
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Best-in-Class Behaviors in Business-to-Business Relationships
Competency in managing strategic account relationships yields customers who are satisfied and see value, and, in turn, such customers reward their high-competency suppliers with their business. The evidence from our research identifies a strong and actionable relationship between particular competencies important to business-to-business customers and the growth that is realized from these accounts – one part of the Relationship Advantage that is available to business-to-business suppliers. Companies that invest some of the payoffs from growth in actions to build even stronger competencies, by nurturing their relationship management competencies and enhancing their Relationship Advantage, can start a virtuous cycle through which the growth potential of their business-to-business relationships are realized year after year. In addition, these companies can incorporate these capabilities into their response to competition that attempts to win business strictly on the basis of price.
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Supplier-Customer Success Stories: How the Best Firms Collaborate to Drive Growth
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Supplier-Customer Success Stories: How the Best Firms Collaborate to Drive Growth
This paper builds upon insights drawn from thousands of supplier-customer success stories to identify the most frequent foundations for success stories and the actions firms can take to ensure that they become part of them. Four themes that yield frequent success stories are documented and illustrated with case studies: changing the roles and boundaries between suppliers and customers, focusing the relationship on the needs of later-stage customers, bringing lessons from other environments into the relationship, and investing in relationship processes that build trust. The paper also describes the characteristics of the companies and leadership teams that become participants in supplier-customer success stories.
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Creating – Rather than Destroying – Value through Acquisitions
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Creating – Rather than Destroying – Value through Acquisitions
Acquisitions can make important contributions to a company’s growth strategy. The strategic due diligence process described in this paper brings customers and markets into acquisition decision making in a forceful and important fashion. As a result, it allows firms to move to a proactive approach that defines and uncovers the acquisitions that have the potential for value creation. The end product of these new concepts of strategic due diligence is an increased likelihood that acquisitions can become an even more important element of growth strategy, with a strong probability of rewarding shareholders with profitable growth. Throughout the paper, short case studies are used to illustrate the elements of the strategic due diligence process.
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The Mandate of Global Presence
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The Mandate of Global Presence
In 2010, as the global economy began its rebound from the Great Recession, Blue Canyon Partners was in the midst of helping many of its clients identify growth opportunities in a changing world. This paper was written to inform and warn of a very different future in which familiar markets would no longer offer great growth prospects. Just over four years later, we again looked at the data and it reaffirmed our belief that developing markets need to be at the forefront of every global enterprises’ strategy.
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‘Supplier Driven’ and ‘Channel Driven’ Business Models
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‘Supplier Driven’ and ‘Channel Driven’ Business Models
For many business-to-business suppliers, their customer chains involve channel organizations and one or more stages of end customers, and such suppliers must address the business needs of their channel partners and also the business needs of its end customers. We find that there are two distinct clusters of business-to-business customer chains that involve both channel organizations and end customers. Some such customer chains involve a ‘Suppler Driven’ environment, in which the supplier has a direct and often intense relationship with the end customers one or more stages further down the chain. Other customer chains involve a ‘Channel Driven’ environment in which the channel organization has most or all of the direct relationship with the end customer. In the context of overall strategy, the effectiveness of various tools for channel management can be linked to the `Supplier Driven` and `Channel Driven` environment, allowing suppliers to design programs with greater likelihood of success.
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The Unwritten Rules of China
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The Unwritten Rules of China
While identifying the potential of the China market is not difficult, realizing this potential is complicated by a set of ‘Unwritten Rules’ that firms must understand and navigate. This paper describes ten of China’s ‘Unwritten Rules’ and their implications for companies operating in that country. Several case studies link these rules to the actions that a firm can take in order to increase its probability of success. An assessment tool is provided that can be used to determine the strength of a firm’s position vis-a-vis China’s ‘Unwritten Rules’ and to identify the areas in which actions are most necessary. With careful evaluation, plans, and actions, it is possible to make the ‘Unwritten Rules’ an advantage for your firm.
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China Economics: Unraveling the Mystery of China’s Low Cost
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China Economics: Unraveling the Mystery of China’s Low Cost
This paper offers insights into the economics of manufacturing in China. While the game is rigged to some extent by the way business is done and the involvement of government, the real answer as to why Chinese companies seem to have a much lower cost base lies in a low-labor-cost mentality that pervades their operations, resulting in a low-cost environment that Chinese companies create for themselves. Business methods that use labor to creatively save on other costs, the management of extremely low-cost supplier networks, and a customer satisfaction approach that substitutes extraordinary customer service for product maturity and quality are among the factors that create a cost advantage. The paper presents evaluations and scorecards to assist in evaluating whether a given company can achieve these “China cost” efficiencies. We then discuss the business environment, presenting our methodology for evaluating whether “pushing the envelope” on cost is a business mandate versus a matter of choice versus a matter of little importance. Finally, the paper discusses the potential for outsourcing to substitute for internal means of achieving cost efficiencies.
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Business-to-Business Economics
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Business-to-Business Economics
Business-to-business suppliers face a complex market and economic environment. Their direct customers and end customers bring a wide spectrum of criteria into their purchase decision processes, reflecting distinctions in business models, firm economics, market characteristics, and other factors. In this paper, we develop explicit economic models which can help suppliers understand their own potential for margin improvement and the ways in which they can help to improve their direct customer’s profitability. These models can help the business-to-business supplier identify approaches to pricing and segmentation that can simultaneously improve profitability for both themselves and their direct customers.
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Finding New Pathways to Profitable Growth
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Finding New Pathways to Profitable Growth
Identification of the most promising new markets, customer segments, and product and service offerings is critical to sustained profitable growth. The Opportunity-Fit Methodology described in this paper provides a convenient way for business-to-business corporations to compare and select from among the numerous and widely-diverse growth options that are candidates for investment funding. This methodology allows for comparisons among options that involve new geographic markets, new products and services, and new customer segments, in various combinations. The paper also describes how careful attention paid to the customer chains involved in the business-to-business markets under consideration can help to ensure that the maximum benefits are realized from the application of this methodology.
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Five Growth Lessons
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Five Growth Lessons
This paper describes five growth lessons that business organizations and their leadership teams can use to meet the mandate of profitable growth. These lessons reflect the reality of business markets, building upon the defining characteristic of complex customer chains and the imperative that a supplier must deliver value to its customers. An approach to segmentation based upon customer buying behavior is outlined.
This segmentation structure identifies distinct business environments within which distinct strategies are appropriate. Firms that understand these segments and the strategies that work within them can target opportunities that fit their own capabilities more effectively and focus upon the value-creation levers that are connected to success in these markets. This structure also defines a new perspective on competition, suggesting the directions from which competitive challenges are most threatening and the responses that can be put into place to ward off such challenges. Finally, the importance of strong relationship-oriented competencies to growth strategy are outlined and linked to the environments in which strategy is likely to be implemented in business markets.
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