Service Offerings

Knowing where you need to go is the most important step to getting there.

There are multiple approaches for achieving sales and marketing objectives. However the strategies, tactics, knowledge, and behaviors of any approach must be aligned with the specific nature of the products and services being offered, the customers being served, and the channels being used to distribute and communicate.

If there was a time when relatively simple and standard sales and marketing approaches worked for just about every company, that time no longer exists. The exponential growth of customer segments, products, services and channels over the last few decades has resulted in a highly complex and dynamic market landscape. What works for one organization or even one segment of customers does not work for another organization or another customer segment of the same corporation because of subtle but critical differences. Sales and marketing success in today’s environment requires approaches and solutions that are carefully matched to an organization’s specific circumstances.

Hunter Business Group is uniquely equipped to guide clients to the right sales and marketing solutions for their particular circumstances. Their expertise spans all aspects of go-to-market solutions from their design to real-world implementation and evaluation. And their clients represent small, mid-size and large companies selling products, solutions and services across most industries. In addition, Hunter was the first firm to recognize that continuous improvement based business-to-business marketing was fundamentally different from consumer marketing and pioneered most of today’s accepted B-to-B tools and processes. This deep and broad knowledge and experience enables Hunter to quickly help our clients determine the most appropriate approaches and be up and running with minimal false starts or mistakes.

Project Definition

Too many customer-side initiatives have failed because a company implemented the perfect solution for the wrong situation. As with medicine, getting a correct diagnosis is critical. Hunter accomplishes this by sharing our subject matter expertise while facilitating a critical thinking and learning process that engages all of a project’s key stakeholders to challenge assumptions, drill deep, uncover obstacles and discover appropriate approaches anchored in proven principles and techniques. Hunter typically jump starts the process through a Program Foundation Workshop that clients frequently consider to be “the most important step of the entire project”. We agree.

Solution Design

Effective and efficient customer solutions don’t just happen, they must be designed with considerable thought and expertise. Companies attempt to create solutions by bolting together pieces they’ve collected along the way but such approaches seldom work. They tend to be disassociated from the organization’s strategies and almost never address the critical success factors related to their particular product, channel, customer, or market situation. Even “best practices” will fail to produce the desired results if the market and customer circumstances to which they are applied differ. Guided through a collaborative design process by an experienced “solution designer”, clients discover why certain approaches, techniques and tools are most appropriate for their unique circumstances and participate in weaving them into appropriate mid-level solutions. Once approved, the solutions are developed at the detail level.

Pilots and Prototypes

No matter how good the Project Definition and Solution Design, it is prudent to minimize risk by trying and evaluating the solution before rolling it out. These smaller scale implementations are undertaken in the form of pilots and prototypes. Advantages include: lower initial cost, less disruption of legacy processes, greater organizational tolerance of mistakes and in-field learning, ease of managing because of scale, and a tangible model for others. A primary goal of pilots and prototypes is to test the solution as quickly as possible with the least amount of investment. For this reason, pilots and prototypes often make use of “acceptable” but not necessarily optimal personnel, software, etc. Pilots and prototypes can be developed and implemented in a client’s facility, in Hunter’s facility, or in Hunter’s facility with the intention of transferring them to the client’s facility at a future point.

Solution Build

After the pilot or prototype has gone through a “shake-down” period, its effectiveness and efficiency validated, and its expansion or rollout approved, it must be transformed into a sustainable go-to-market process. The first step, however is to determine whether to outsource the process or execute it in-house. In-house implementations can be delivered “turnkey” with all components ready to go; or the client and Hunter can share responsibilities. Regardless of the scope, Hunter functions as a “general contractor” overseeing the entire project and insuring its success.

Execution and Coaching

Having the solution in place is equivalent to buying a new vehicle – you now have to learn to drive it correctly, become comfortable with it and insure that it functions the ways you need it to in order to get to where you need to go. As when you first learned to drive, or when you learned to drive a new and different vehicle, it is good to have an expert sitting next to you. In keeping with their commitment to “teaching clients to fish”, Hunter is there to help insure that clients develop good habits from the start, are encouraged and build confidence, remain current on the latest techniques and improvements, are challenged if they become complacent or sloppy, diagnose and make appropriate improvements, and nudge them back on track when they wander from committed strategies and objectives.

Outsourcing

There are a number of reasons clients decide to outsource some or all of their sales and marketing processes, including:

• The new implementation requires skills and behaviors too different from their current culture
• They wish to focus on their core competences and dilute themselves by developing new go-to-market competencies
• They wish to reach new markets or market new or mature products without drawing their focus away from primary markets, customers or products
• They don’t have time
• They don’t have the commitment or resources to execute at a high level

Whatever the reason, Hunter will work with clients to configure arrangements that work – after all the objective is generally finding the best way to achieve the sales and marketing goals.