Understanding the market
before selling the product

Emile-Pierre Badiane

Yes, indeed, I have said that a few times, particularly on LinkedIn. I admit it was slightly provocative, for reasons you can easily understand. What I really meant is that in periods of high tension and instability, basing your thinking solely on the features of the product you want to bring to market is a mistake. It can lead marketing teams to pay more attention to what the organisation produces than to understanding what the market expects. Competitors become the second priority and customers are sometimes overlooked too much. In past experiences, I was sometimes surprised to find that the centre of gravity of our discussions was the features of the solution or product, without even addressing our customers’ concerns and problems, new use cases, a potential regulatory framework or the real customer benefits. With hindsight, you realise that in marketing we sometimes forget that, in our economies, the market is the only kingmaker, with all its components: influencers, users, buyers, competitors, suppliers and, where relevant, public authorities.

I therefore think the first question we should ask in a meeting is: what have we learned from stakeholders this week? Based on that observation, I would certainly have made sure to spend a morning, or even a full day, every two weeks with my BDRs, SDRs and Sales teams to better understand our differentiators, our pain points and those of our customers, so that we could address them more effectively every day.

Emile-Pierre Badiane

When the influence of the Go-to-Market approach is perceptible, but not only then. When an organisation is able to co-create, or perhaps more modestly to think about new solutions or products with its customers. At that point, you can consider that the company is sufficiently equipped to understand its market. The quality of the relationship with the various stakeholders, more than the frequency of transactions, is essential and decisive for marketing, sales and Customer Success departments. I know that does not sound particularly marketable, because what organisations are primarily looking for is growth. But that objective can also be approached from a long-term perspective. Some companies have understood that the quality of the relationship, particularly with their customers — influencers, users and buyers — is a determining factor in the sustainability of an organisation.

I think that when the thinking starts with the customer, there is a strong chance that the strategic decision will be relevant.

Emile-Pierre Badiane

Excellent question. Perhaps that is something I did not do enough in my previous experiences. The key is cross-departmental collaboration. Marketing has to find a way to position itself at the crossroads of relationships within the company, able to work hand in hand with product development, the sales team and many other departments in order to fully understand the solution and the product. Then it has to try, by every possible means, to reproduce that same logic with its external audiences. It is no longer possible to do marketing while sitting behind a desk twenty days out of twenty.

Then you have to realise that “one size fits all”, although it may seem comfortable at first, is rarely effective in the long term. That forces us to think about different customer segments in a personalised way. Each persona has its own way of consuming communication: in terms of content — factual versus emotional — format — audio, visual, written, short-form or in-depth — and journey, meaning the point of contact. What the final decision-maker ultimately wants is to be informed, to understand what they stand to gain — the famous customer benefit — to feel emotionally aligned with the sender and to know clearly what the next step is.

I may be stating the obvious, right? Not for everyone, I can assure you.

Emile-Pierre Badiane

I touched on this briefly in the previous question. “One size fits all” is dead, and I think it is gone for good. For twenty years or more, the all-powerful brand — apart from a few exceptions — has no longer existed. With markets that are, for the most part, highly competitive and almost saturated, and with customers becoming less and less loyal, companies have understood that the balance of power may have shifted. With hindsight — I’m starting to sound old — I would say that we need to follow that logic all the way through. A company operating in a globalised market must embrace each culture as though it were unique in its eyes, while retaining what makes the company itself unique. I fully accept that a company cannot address the Indian, Chinese, Senegalese and German markets in the same way. I can also accept that there may be similarities between the German and Austrian markets. The main role of the global function is to guarantee the consistency of the company’s value proposition and positioning while giving each country or region enough freedom to adapt to the values, expectations and pain points of its respective markets.

Emile-Pierre Badiane

I really like this question. I would have loved to be asked it on the day I defended my thesis. The whole point of being market-oriented is to try to identify the implicit expectations of our partners, to go deeply into what remains unsaid or into what has already been expressed. This is still at the heart of my current discussions with certain market players. Without a strong relationship with stakeholders, it is almost impossible for marketing to detect these latent expectations that could enable R&D to develop the solutions of tomorrow.

I do not deny how difficult it is to build such a relationship with customers. But this is precisely where Customer Success has its full role to play. Why have I almost never heard someone in an organisation say: “what if we stopped communicating and finally listened to them?” A wise man — from ESSEC, obviously — once told me that a salesperson has one mouth and two ears so they can shxxxx it and listen. Perhaps we could try to copy them.

Emile-Pierre Badiane

The boundary must be clear within organisations. AI represents a considerable time saving and an aid to decision-making. It is not the decision. People are the greatest asset of a company and must remain so. Human beings are responsible for checking the sources they use, for the creativity of the campaigns and content they produce, for intuition — also based on experience — and for the decision itself. Yes, we can create agents capable of interacting with one another or with virtual personas in order to understand them better, but nothing should replace a person’s ability to interpret a raised eyebrow, a shrug, a smile or potentially a lie from the person in front of us. “Over-automation”, however tempting, must stop at the point where we feel we have handed the keys to the truck over to AI. The human brain has to be trained every day. If we stop doing that, we will lose expertise, intuition, the ability to step sideways and see things differently, and experience.

Emile-Pierre Badiane

Both, my dear Watson. A marketing director must be able to support transformations while accepting the degree of uncertainty that comes with them. They must be able to explain the positive and negative disruptions involved so that teams understand how they can be a “game changer” for the organisation. You are right: the whole difficulty for a Marketing Director is knowing how to position themselves in relation to those below them, but also those above them. Are they simply executing the board’s strategy, or can they also play the role of adviser and influencer — a woman or a man capable of shaping the company’s direction? In my view, if we follow the logic of market orientation, the second option should prevail.

The Marketing Director is a multi-bridge between the board, the operational teams and the market. They must therefore be capable of feeding what they have identified back to the ultimate decision-makers. That makes marketing not merely a support function, but one of the company’s essential engines.

How many times have you heard during a job interview: “marketing is really listened to here”? If you hear that, never take it at face value. Ask questions. Ask whether the CMO sits on the executive committee. If not, how many people are there in the reporting line between you and the decision-makers? How is innovation built within the company? Why do they need a Marketing Director? The list is not exhaustive. Depending on the answers, you will know whether the conditions are in place for marketing to influence decisions. Obviously, it would appear that I am an advocate of “do as I say, not as I do”.

Emile-Pierre Badiane

I tend to think that marketers’ experience of the sales cycle of a product or service is decisive. But I believe we have to go further. It is not necessarily about proving that a particular solution should no longer be defended; it is about demonstrating that it could be replaced by a new innovation without harming growth. Like football coaches, marketing has only one ultimate judge: its sustainable impact on the business. My view — and I very probably lack experience on this subject — is that as long as we manage to meet our growth objectives, protect our strongholds or improve our operational efficiency, that can represent a success for marketing. But to really answer your question, I would say that giving up a product, a positioning or a market is a major decision to take responsibility for, but it can become a success if, ultimately, the organisation manages to preserve or strengthen the perceived value of the brand, free up resources for more strategic directions, align the offer with the market’s real and lasting needs and, above all, remain true to the company’s purpose and values.