Special Markets Consulting

• Corporate Market Benefits
• Who Can Profit
• Measurable Services
• No Axe to Grind
• Deliverables
• Making Sense of Corporate Markets
• Sorting Through Multiple Go-to-Market Options
• The Process
• Who We Are

Does your organization have a product or travel service perfect for the incentive, recognition, corporate gift, or motivation market? In other words, has a corporate customer ever contacted you for merchandise or your travel service for use in a business marketing, incentive, recognition, or gift program?

Whether your company provides consumer products, gift cards, or travel, the corporate market can provide a highly profitable adjunct to your consumer business. Let Selling Communications Inc. help you determine whether or not the corporate market makes sense for your organization and determine the most efficient, measurable way to achieve reasonable goals.

Selling Communications has had years of success assisting consumer products and travel suppliers with business development strategies to capitalize on the corporate market. Our expertise will help you avoid costly pitfalls encountered by many organizations who thought that the corporate market would be just like retail but found out, to their detriment, otherwise.

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Corporate Market Benefits

• Incremental revenues and profits
• Incremental marketing exposure at no cost
• Diversification from retail with little investment required
• Minimal additional infrastructure

Who Can Profit

• Branded and unbranded consumer products
• Airlines, destinations, hotels, attractions, event planners

Measurable Services

SCI provides three basic consulting services with measurable results:

Market Opportunity Analysis: to make sure your product and service fits with the corporate market-place in a win-win fashion for your company and its potential clients.

Strategic Business Plan: a specific strategy designed to maximize your potential by clearly identifying your unique selling benefits, potential market segments, most appropriate distribution channel configuration, and implementation model, etc.

Management Recruitment: because of SCI’s depth of experience and long-standing relationships in the market, it can help with targeted recruitment efforts when you need to staff a corporate market initiative.

All three services have clear results measures to determine the ROI of your investment.

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No Axe to Grind

Since SCI does not sell on behalf of any incentive or motivational event service, it provides complete zero-based objectivity, including, when necessary, the recommendation that your product or service may not fit with the needs of the corporate market, or some other reason why you should stay away or minimize your investment.

Deliverables

• An objective Market Opportunity Assessment along with sales potential estimate;
• A zero-based Strategic Business Development Plan to maximize the efficiency and impact of your marketplace entry or repositioning.

Making Sense of Corporate Markets

While American corporations spend an estimated $46 billion on merchandise, travel, and gift cards for corporate rewards, recognition, communication, and training, the market does not fit with every organization’s objectives. Many of the biggest names in consumer products have significant corporate divisions (often called Special Markets), and the business is experiencing significant growth on multiple fronts. This corporate market requires a variety of services that differ from those of traditional retail customers. These can include product continuity, drop-shipping, and customization, and, for travel suppliers, an attention to service usually reserved for frequent business travelers and an understanding of how to make events motivational. To make matters more complicated, corporations use products or travel as part of marketing or management programs that could take a year to unfold before the actual products or travel get delivered.

While highly profitable for most companies involved, the corporate market’s contribution to the overall bottom line varies by company. The corporate market can contribute close to 30 percent of revenue and even more of profits at brand name watch companies or resort hotel properties, or less than 3 percent of revenue at major electronics manufacturers. Savvy suppliers have learned the corporate market represents a significant hedge against the ups and downs of the retail market. For some, such as the mega-electronics or travel companies, it represents a lot of volume but only a small percentage of revenues, so many executives know little of the corporate market. As a result, many corporations have wasted millions in marketing and infrastructure investment in the corporate market because didn’t recognize the significant differences between the corporate customer—for whom products or travel are a means to an end—and consumers, who consume for their own satisfaction.

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Sorting Through Multiple Go-to-Market Options

Once you’ve determined that the corporate market makes sense, you must determie the best strategy. This process includes: clarifying the unique selling benefits, the specific market segment opportunities and audiences, the most appropriate distribution channel, the most targeted and measurable sales and marketing process, and the associations, trade shows, and industry resources suited to your needs and market positioning. Just a small investment in strategic planning can save your organization potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in learning curves and provide much more measurable results than typical budget-based planning.

The number of companies selling merchandise and motivational travel to corporations now includes not only traditional incentive and meeting companies, but promotional products distributors, ad agencies, promotion agencies, branding companies, recognition companies, and a new breed of national incentive fulfillment company handling dozens if not more major lines in the corporate marketplace. Some of these channels have their own associations, trade shows, and other marketing services offerings, making for a confusing maze of potential solutions.

SCI will help you sort out the right combination of emphasis based on your products, services, unique selling benefits, and appropriate investment level.

The Process

The implementation plan depends upon the consulting service you need. You can use one service or the other, or combine them to save money. 

The Market Opportunity Analysis involves an in-person meeting with chief management in your organization to determine: overall organizational objectives, past experience in special markets, logistics objectives, sales and marketing resources, other marketing practices. Following the meeting, SCI matches the findings of the meeting against a matrix of corporate market requirements to make sure you have a mutual fit. The other part of this process involves analyzing your product line against the current marketplace to determine a realistic market potential—expressed as a percentage of your overall sales.

The Strategic Business Development Plan involves the same above meeting, but with the specific goal of developing the most efficient, measurable way to penetrate the market with an investment appropriate to the potential as well as available resources. The outcome is a thorough report and specific recommended plan with time-line and appropriate sales forecast.

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Who We Are

SCI’s founders Bruce Bolger and Jim Kilmetis have worked with Special Markets departments since the mid 1980s and have experience with hundreds of suppliers and marketing initiatives in the field. Our organization’s experience with what works and what doesn’t—and our connection to the pulse of the marketplace—saves clients time and money. The principals have personally assisted with many of the industry’s major research and corporate outreach efforts over the years, including the Incentive Performance Center and the Forum for People Performance Management and Measurement in the Medill School of Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University.

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