Video Transcript

Alright, so one of the times that you will find going back through the process of maintaining alignment to be very important is during new market entry. And so today we’re going to talk about what that looks like and why it matters.

So speaking from the perspective of an executive leader, there’s likely some things you can intuit needing to update when you go to a new market. Let’s just say, for example, your company has been regional for the last long while and you’re making a change to enter into a national footprint. And so in that time you likely noticed, okay, I need to update operations to be able to support that level of production. I need to update my sales team to actually support my entrance into these new markets and that could look like I’m going to hire some people on the ground. I need to restructure my organization so that I have regional leadership. I likely need to bring somebody in centrally. You could outsource some of your BDR opportunities. You could hire fractional sales leaders on the ground — there’s tons of options for you.

But you know, in that moment you need to reevaluate what does sales need to do and how are they going to operate. The same thing needs to happen for your marketing. So as it goes along, what we’ve experienced is a lot of companies think through the production and operations updates. They think that the sales updates, they think through the finance updates and marketing gets left alone. People keep doing what they’ve always been doing. And what happens is you get into your new market and you go, I feel like something’s off. My marketing is still doing what it did before. I kind of feel like I don’t understand why I’m investing in it exactly. And you get this feeling of uncertainty.

You hear the words I use there — kind of, sort of — that’s how it feels. So in that moment when you’re making that new market entrance, that is a great opportunity to realign around what is marketing’s role. How do I invest in it well? How do I know that I’m getting a return on my investment and how do I hold it accountable to the overall company goals and what we’re marching towards in the future?