The secret to getting the most out of your top employees lies in drawing out their best talents, quickly discovering the unspoken rules of culture and teaching them the leadership techniques that they never learned in school or from their peers

Why Internal Mentors are Not Enough

Hiring an outside coach to mentor your managers and employees should be one of the most obvious investments a growth company would make. Yet few companies commit to such a program. A good coaching program will start to show return with as little as a two-percent increase in productivity of the team of the manager who is coached but often results in a 100% increase. Research indicates that it costs on average two years’ salary to recruit, train and replace a failed management hire. New hire velocity coaching is an insurance policy to make sure your investments in training and culture take hold and get your most talented players up to speed even faster than they ordinarily would.

Why should coaching come from outside your company instead of relying on seasoned employees to mentor your new hires and managers? Certainly, internal mentoring should be a key element to your success. Unfortunately, internal mentors also face many conflicts in their role. Some mentors do not want to be upstaged by new recruits or are so committed to the status quo that they cannot objectively coach the development of new ideas. Some mentors are so busy with their own duties that both they and their trainees wait for each others’ cues and fail to get up to speed in time. New managers might bring in different playbooks, but unless your culture is unusually noncompetitive creativity may be stifled.

Your employees, especially new recruits, are willing to work hard, but they don’t know where to put their energies. No one teaches the secret handshakes, no one risks sponsoring new employees even when they’re willing to, no one analyzes what makes your winners successful in your organization, and no one teaches how to identify the home runs your new recruits could hit in the first 90 days. People cannot see their own blind spots - that’s why they’re called “blind spots.” Successful new hires succeed because they burn the candle at both ends, but often fail in finding a balance that will keep them successful over the long haul.

Managers do not share their communication styles and expectations with their direct reports. Many employees learn by trial and error and some failed employees who would have been successful employees just never learned to read the road maps.

An outside coach can afford to be objective because his or her only commitment is in making each new hire or manager as successful in your organization as possible. An outside coach also brings specialized experience that most managers lack. Your managers can teach the what and the how, but often have difficulty identifying the who and the why. An experienced coach can accelerate the success of your entire team.

Many Benefits of Coaching

In addition to coaching your new managers and recruits, there are many reasons for supplying coaching to your more seasoned employees or even hire your own coach. These include:

• Improving the existing culture of the company
• Increasing your managers’ ability to leverage their time and resources.
• Improving communication styles and techniques
• Exploring and fully developing new ideas
• Receiving an opinion from a coach who has no vested interest in the outcome of a situation
• Expanding, clarifying, and clearly communicating your company’s vision and Velocity Ideals
• Providing a secure, safe, and confidential outlet to vent, when necessary
• Pointing out what your executive team can’t, won’t, or doesn’t see

• Increasing a manager’s personal “bandwidth” in order to handle a faster flow of information

How Velocity Coaching Works

When you enroll an employee in our Velocity Coaching program, they will have an introductory training class to outline the program, perform an initial inventory of strengths and problem areas and establish expectations. Each week for thirteen weeks the employee will meet with their coach in a phone consultation supported by web collaboration tools. For every hour of coaching, our coaches typically spend an additional three hours preparing, researching solutions and communicating outside of the session.

Individual 1-to-1 programs allow the employee to schedule time when it is convenient for them. They also have unlimited access to their coach during the week through phone and email. Individual sessions can focus on specialty content such as marketing leadership or a “new manager’s toolbox.”

Group session employees will be assigned to an open group with scheduling preference given for corporate goals and synergies of group members. They do not have unlimited access to their coach during the week but are encouraged to network and share with each other.

Note: to maintain our ethical standards and protect the trust that is necessary to realize employee performance enhancement, our coaches will treat each session as completely confidential to each employee. Nothing will be shared without obtaining the employee’s permission. Coaching is not a substitute for standard supervision and performance management.

Proven Experience

Boston Turner’s experience spans over 15 years of hands-on experience in the industries and practices we serve. Our professionals have worked with executive leaders in technology, enterprise software, payments, e-commerce, distribution and education.

Our founder, Matthew Turner, made a career of managing hyper-growth companies before starting the BOSTON TURNER Group. As the Chief Marketing Officer of Mercury Payment Systems, Turner tripled both the reseller channel (to over 1,200 resellers) and revenue (from $17 to $54m) and in doing so increased the value of the company from $20m to $120m according to a valuation study by CitiGroup. Turner previously led marketing for the distribution unit of Infor Global Solutions, NxTrend Technology (as part of a team that grew company valuation from $15m to $83m in four years) and an educational subsidiary of the Washington Post Company (where he raised sales closing rates from 14% to 55%). Turner is sought as a speaker for his expertise in lead generation, channel sales, and direct response marketing. He holds a B.A. in economics from California State University, San Bernardino, and is a special interest group coordinator for American Mensa, Ltd.

The key to a clear marketing strategy is understanding that marketing is not a department, it is the central function of your entire organization. The most common error in marketing is mistaking tactics for strategy.

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”  – - Sun Tzu (Chinese General, circa 500 BC)

To CEOs and executives who think tactically, the following statements may come as a surprise. Despite what your VP of Sales thinks, sales is a marketing tactic. Despite what your outsourced web development consultants think, unless you’re Amazon, you do not have a “web strategy”; your website is a marketing tactic. Despite what your CTO or VP of Development thinks, product management and functionality is a marketing tactic.

The problem is that the word “tactic” has taken on an inferior connotation to the word “strategy.” It is a compliment to call someone a strategist, even when it would be more accurate to say they are a brilliant tactician. To say someone is “tactically focused” is often a polite way of saying “not management material.” In reality, both strategy and tactics are important to any organization and the differences in the words are more about chronology. Strategy is long-term while tactics are the who, what and when of the strategic plan. Strategic planning is more deliberate and happens less frequently than tactical execution, which should be viewed as a giant laboratory for the experimentation that will guide your company’s evolution.

This confusion of strategy and tactics has two unfortunate results. First, some companies who are either more comfortable in the tactical realm (or those who discount the importance of strategic marketing elements like brand and differentiation) stumble blindly through their markets believing they have a plan that will carry them to success. They work in a data-free, intuitive environment, believing that since they have an aggressive sales team, crack engineers and a flashy website that their marketing work is done. That is not to undervalue the importance of intuition and those flashes of tactical brilliance that spring up from all directions. But without a marketing strategy, you lack a touchstone with which to guide your efforts and measure your results. Many an executive team trades high-fives when they’ve tripled the value of their company - even when they could have seen 15 times growth with a more focused and targeted vision. Results, of course, matter; however, addiction to short term results can lead to strategies that cripple in the long-run.

Many software companies are so addicted to traditional license revenue that they are forced out of competing in the emerging “software as service” model. Many payments and transaction companies are so hooked on the rogue MLS agents that they fail to find leverage in new channels such as VARs and web companies.

The second unfortunate result of confusing tactics for strategy is that you may have too many cooks in the kitchen. The last thing you need on your executive team is five people coming up with their own “strategies” for fear of being labeled “tactical.” Like your ideals and your mission, your marketing strategy should serve as a touchstone for the decisions made in the entire organization.

Channel Development

For some time now, product features and innovation have failed to lead to sustainable competitive advantage. Is a Dell computer significantly better than a Gateway? How is it that Honda has been imitating Harley Davidson for years - with better technology - and yet fails to gain market? When a commodity business such as payment processing attempts to differentiate itself through new product offerings, how long is it before a mega-competitor like First Data or Paymentech starts adding gift and loyalty transactions or new integrated platforms to their own well-funded initiatives?

When you study what differentiates today’s dominant companies from the wannabes in their industries, it becomes apparent that go-to-market choices have a more dramatic impact on sustainable growth and profitability than product features. It isn’t about what to sell; it’s about how you sell it.

Successful companies, no matter their product, share one characteristic: successful channel marketing. With the expansion of technology into every market, companies have more choices than ever for new channels. The Internet, call centers, CRM databases, global expansion and supply-chain disintermediation have created a new source of competitive advantage: channel innovation. This new channel imperative is about one thing — connecting your products and services with customers in the way they want to connect to you.

Yet, such riches in channel options often result in channel confusion. Each channel has its own set of advantages, limitations and trade-offs. The Internet has a low cost per transaction, but the low cost of switching prevents long-term relationships from developing in business-to-business sales. Reseller channels can significantly increase your sales footprint, but they take you one step further away from your end users. Companies who go to market with a single channel limit their sales performance, increase their risk and are at a severe disadvantage to the channel gorillas in their industry. On the other hand, companies who successfully integrate multiple channels into their mix can respond nimbly to changing market conditions and better match products to customers needs.

There are of course successful product companies. But when you look behind the highly-touted feature innovations you will find a successful channel strategy. Behind every iPod are retailers, direct marketers, internet channels and a crowd of music publishers jumping into Apple’s thriving channels. While channel-focused companies often have large internal marketing departments and expertise, most successful product companies have found outside expertise to manage all aspects of their channel strategies.

Our program of Channel Development follow a customer-centric model:

• Discover how your customers want to buy from you
• Develop new channels and hone existing channels to reach your niche markets
• Integrate all channels to eliminate conflicts and create a holistic customer experience
• Measure results and feed winning channels while cutting losing channels
• Create integrated marketing and sales campaigns that invigorate all of your channel efforts

Proven Experience

Boston Turner’s experience spans over 15 years of hands-on experience in the industries and practices we serve. Our professionals have worked with executive leaders in technology, enterprise software, payments, e-commerce, distribution and education.

Our founder, Matthew Turner, made a career of managing hyper-growth companies before starting the BOSTON TURNER Group. As the Chief Marketing Officer of Mercury Payment Systems, Turner tripled both the reseller channel (to over 1,200 resellers) and revenue (from $17 to $54m) and in doing so increased the value of the company from $20m to $120m according to a valuation study by CitiGroup. Turner previously led marketing for the distribution unit of Infor Global Solutions, NxTrend Technology (as part of a team that grew company valuation from $15m to $83m in four years) and an educational subsidiary of the Washington Post Company (where he raised sales closing rates from 14% to 55%). Turner is sought as a speaker for his expertise in lead generation, channel sales, and direct response marketing. He holds a B.A. in economics from California State University, San Bernardino, and is a special interest group coordinator for American Mensa, Ltd.

Increasingly, hyper-growth companies are realizing that alignment at the executive level is fundamental to the success of their mission. Jack Welch is celebrated for building talented and cohesive top teams during his tenure at GE. No CEO working alone, no matter how talented, can assure the health of sustained hyper-growth. Talent alone does not guarantee teamwork. Teams do not magically coalesce overnight. Growth requires a coordinated top team of leaders. A poorly performing team creates conflicting agendas and turf wars; a high-performing one, alignment and focus.

Top teams are typically composed of head-strong, A-player personalities who must sometimes work at cross-purposes. Fortunately, our work at BOSTON TURNER suggests that there is a straightforward process for improving their teamwork.

Velocity executive teams focus on three areas. First, they share a common direction. After mapping out their Velocity Ideals, they commit to them together, both intellectually and emotionally. Second, they see each other as their key team taking their clues from each other and not from their subordinates. They are close professionally but know how to keep an appropriate distance personally to avoid unnecessary conflicts. Third, they commit to constant learning. They are always upping their game, sharing books and new ideas, attending classes and seminars and refusing to stagnate. The hard part is getting the team to work on all three fronts, but with effective and objective coaching, talented teams can come together quickly.

We have worked with some of the most divisive and disagreeable executive teams in the history of corporate management to break down barriers of communication and create alignment from the top down. Alignment does not end at the executive level. Hyper-growth companies must commit to the mission and values from the mail-room to the corner office. Proper alignment takes four steps: an inclusive planning process, review and measurement, rewards for results and a supportive environment that encourages hyper-growth on a personal level as well as in corporate goals. As these elements are also essential parts of our model, establishing an Enterprise Velocity culture actually guarantees company alignment.

Effective Communications Plans

You’re an expert at running your company, but that doesn’t mean you’re an expert at creating effective communications that drive alignment through your organization. Too many executives think that good communication is about frequency and send out regular company-wide emails explaining their every move in great detail. Such a communication style is ineffective because it squanders the value of critical communications by lumping them together with FYIs. Employees stop reading these emails with regularity because they cannot discern which ones are truly worth the time investment. Other executives fail on the other side of the spectrum by not communicating at all, assuming that their directors and managers are passing along the details to their teams. Even when information is disseminated in this fashion, it comes through the lens of the manager and may subtly change in tone and connotation. Most managers are busy and might leave out pieces of information in their haste.

If you fall into the first camp - executives who communicate everything - stop now before clicking the “send” button on your next memo. Don’t waste any more of your communications credibility before establishing your communications strategy. If you fall into the second camp - those who communicate sporadically or next to nothing - you must establish a communications plan to keep your company moving. Think of regular patterns of communication as the oil for your hyper-growth engine.

Establishing a communication strategy requires that you think out:

• Appropriate content by audience
• Priority and urgency of different types of messages
• Channels and frequency of communication
• Style, tone and technique

What to communicate to which audience is a step many skip. Of course, overcommunicating is always preferable to undercommunicating; however, if you send the wrong content to certain groups of people you are in effect training them to ignore your future communications. Deciding on the content needs goes beyond narrowing the distribution of sensitive information. It considers which topics are appropriate by group and what level of detail is necessary. For example, an IT manager may be tempted to send out CRM support notes in email to the entire company when what really might be more appropriate is to send a brief explanation of the content and a hyperlink to a shared folder to just the sales team.

You should consider how you want to communicate based on priority or urgency. This might mean the end of company-wide “there’s extra pizza in the third-floor refrigerator,” emails. Urgent, “must-know” messages should be communicated in multiple methods through the most public channels such as email and bulletin boards. They should be communicated immediately. Should-know information could be contained in blogs, newsletters, training videos and manuals or intranets. Nice to-know information might go into interactive forums or a knowledge base with occasional reference in mass channels like newsletters.

Consider your channels and frequency of communications in a similar fashion that you would your marketing communications. There are many channels available to communicate to your employees and partners:

Email
Pros: Convenient, consistent delivery
Cons: Competes with many messages, may interfere with mission-critical messages

Intranet/Public Folders
Pros: Repository of information for repeated use, tracking and versioning capabilities
Cons: Out of sight out of mind, requires training and  resources

Text or Instant Messaging
Pros: Great time saver especially for quick critical messages
Cons: Security concerns, ripe for abuse:

Blogs
Pros: New and trendy, good for feedback and collaboration, helpful in encouraging regular communication patterns and routines
Cons: Style may be too casual for some companies, full and honest disclosure is required to be credible so may not be appropriate for sensitive information

Newsletters
Pros: Regular and familiar, good summary of recent information
Cons: Poor design and content can actually hinder communications, too infrequent to use for more urgent matters

Interactive Forums
Pros: Great for collaboration and support
Cons: Lack of structure can make them messy, requires planning and resources, requires moderators to enforce forum standards

Bulletin Boards
Pros: Obvious and visual, accessible by all
Cons: Might be ignored, often cluttered with inappropriate content

When thinking about the frequency of your communications, think of three related issues: frequency, recency and amount of information. That is, how often should you be communicating, when was the last time you communicated a similar message and how much information has already been transmitted on the subject.

When it comes to issues of style, tone and technique, it is best to leave the work to the professionals. This is particularly true for CEOs and top executives whose every move is under particular scrutiny. As a top executive, the things you say and do are magnified in importance and issues such as grammar, tone, punctuation and word choices can inflict serious damage on your credibility. For company-wide emails, blogs, newsletters and the like, be sure to run all of your communications through your corporate communications department or consultant for consistency. If you are doing a lot of speaking to your company and partners or other stakeholders - which we heartily recommend - it is worth every penny to acquire communication coaching. Sometimes what you say is less important than how you say it in those moments and speaking is not an intuitive skill. It requires an objective coach to bring out the great communicator inside of you.

Proven Experience

Boston Turner’s experience spans over 15 years of hands-on experience in the industries and practices we serve. Our professionals have worked with executive leaders in technology, enterprise software, payments, e-commerce, distribution and education.

Our founder, Matthew Turner, made a career of managing hyper-growth companies before starting the BOSTON TURNER Group. As the Chief Marketing Officer of Mercury Payment Systems, Turner tripled both the reseller channel (to over 1,200 resellers) and revenue (from $17 to $54m) and in doing so increased the value of the company from $20m to $120m according to a valuation study by CitiGroup. Turner previously led marketing for the distribution unit of Infor Global Solutions, NxTrend Technology (as part of a team that grew company valuation from $15m to $83m in four years) and an educational subsidiary of the Washington Post Company (where he raised sales closing rates from 14% to 55%). Turner is sought as a speaker for his expertise in lead generation, channel sales, and direct response marketing. He holds a B.A. in economics from California State University, San Bernardino, and is a special interest group coordinator for American Mensa, Ltd.

Grow or die. History shows that even great companies, from Polaroid to Zenith, from Kmart to Howard Johnson, are vulnerable to sudden collapse or erosion. In today’s competitive climate, new opportunities appear everyday for competitors and start-ups to change the rules and steal your revenue base. If you are not growing, you are shrinking - at least relative to the economy.

Yet, growth is difficult to sustain. Growth itself requires a commitment of resources. The marketplace is littered with well-funded companies with strong demand who could not survive the demands of their hyper-growth periods. Growth requires a balance between many competing demands, sales delivery versus cash flow, IT infrastructure versus R&D. Such scarcity is magnified with the pressures of new product launches, new hire training, shifting forecasts and requires amazing tactical efficiency just to continue day-to-day operations.

Many consulting firms will tell you what you need to do to achieve growth; however, they often do not detail how you achieve growth. The purpose of the Enterprise Velocity Model is to let you in on the secrets that successful hyper-growth CEOs live and breathe everyday so that you can implement them in your own firm. This paper details the basics of the model and will of course require specific customization for each industry and each individual company.

The Enterprise Velocity Model is comprised of four main areas: Ideals, Velocity Measurement, and Cadence.

Velocity Principle #1: Ideals

The first step in developing an Enterprise Velocity culture is to establish your ideals. A culture can only thrive if it has touchstones for behavior. A government without laws is anarchy. A company without ideals can never dominate their niche because their actions will not be coordinated.

Many companies in start-up-mode are so tactically focused on achieving their monthly and quarterly goals that they do not take the time to establish their ideals. Perhaps they think that their employees already understand their mission and values. Perhaps they remember the lifeless and insincere mission statements of prior employers and associate them with meaningless navel gazing. I can assure you, this is never the case when ideals are established in the right way. It may be hard to take the time to set your touchstones down when you’re worried about the month’s sales performance or your next round of debt financing, but your life will be much easier when your employees are motivated and aligned. Your employees will appreciate that you took the time to establish and communicate what is important to the company for success and what the guidelines are for appropriate behaviors. It gives them security and confidence in their decisions and allows you to act at a higher level freeing you up for a true Enterprise Velocity culture.

In the Enterprise Velocity model, we collect these ideals in five related areas: mission, values, the Impossible Dream, five-year goals and the often bewildering brand contract.

Velocity Principle #2: Velocity

The second piece of the growth puzzle is what we call velocity. If your unique mission, model and product designs are your engine, velocity is the oil. It is about removing barriers to growth and avoiding the common traps into which many failed growth companies fall. It is a commitment to personal growth, both for yourself and your team. It is about pulling the oars in the same direction.

Many leaders feel too busy to adhere to velocity principles. How can you take the time to establish training and systems when your customer service team is so back-logged? How can you take time out to promote alignment when you cannot even fulfill your current levels of orders? How can you commit resources to outside coaches when your employees do not have time to absorb their current training?

This is backward thinking. You must take the time for training, systems, coaching and alignment in order to cure your current problems at the source. Investing ten percent of your resources and time into establishing velocity is like an insurance policy to sustain your organization. When you commit to velocity measures, it is like stepping into the “zone,” where everything else comes easy.

In the Enterprise Velocity Model, we detail velocity in five areas: executive team building, company alignment, constant training, velocity coaching, and marketing strategy.

Velocity Principle #3: Measurement

You would expect a star quarterback in a playoff game to always know the game score, where the clock is, field position and which of his receivers have hot hands. You should expect no less of your management team and employees. If you don’t know the numbers you cannot judge the performance of your company and manage it toward greatness. 

Some managers are reluctant to publish regular measurements, perhaps out of a fear of demotivating employees or teams who are underperforming. This is a huge mistake. It is motivating to your best employees to see their successes published to the team. Those who are not meeting their goals are not meeting them for one of two reasons - the goals are set incorrectly or they need to be performance managed out of the organization. Either case requires establishing regular metrics to define success.

There are four areas of measurement that are a must for any organization and are critical for growth organizations in competitive markets: definition of key metrics, regular goals (annual, quarterly and monthly), brand equity and communication audits. If you have uncertainty in any of these areas, you are not alone - many companies fail to measure in more than one or two of these areas. That is all the more reason to get ahead of your competition through an intimate knowledge of your organization and industry. I once worked with an area director for a national educational company who gave me one of the best reasons to publish regular measurements to your whole team: “Winners like to see the scoreboard.”

Velocity Principle #4: Cadence

Winning at business is often likened to playing a sport or musical instrument. As such, the more time you put into regular practice, the more successful your performance. This requires what we call Cadence. Cadence is setting a regular rhythm for the important elements of your business, setting standards and providing frequent moments for teaching, coaching and leadership.

Part of your cadence should be a regular pattern for the establishment and review of your annual and quarterly goals, strategies and tactics. Your company needs regular, well-run meetings to stay on track with these goals and measurements. You should design a plan for communications across your company. And of course, you should find reasons to celebrate as often as possible.

“Brand” is an elusive concept. Few words in business are so overused and abused as “brand.” Few words are so misunderstood. Brands are more than marks and logos. Brands are more than print ads. Brands reach far beyond your marketing department. I find it easiest to understand your brand as the implicit contract between you, your company, your employees and your customers.

Brand Contract

Customers are more sophisticated than ever. They demand that every point of contact with your organization live up to your brand contract. All of your employees must live up to this contract, whether they work in finance, customer service, sales, development, IT or marketing.

Successful hyper-growth companies coordinate the delivery of brand experience across channels and departments that are far beyond the traditional marketer’s influence. Our rules for a strong brand contract are simple:

1. Be consistent: Apple’s iPod lives up to its brand contract in every sense. Coca Cola broke their contract with the introduction of New Coke.
2. Create Shock and Awe: when you make a purchase from the L.L Bean catalog you can return your purchase at any time (even five years) after the purchase date.
3. Be different: Yellowtail wine is fun and inexpensive when the rest of the industry wants to be inaccessible and pricey.
4. Make sacrifices: Volvo owns the concept of safety, but could not successfully market a sporty two-seater. Burger King owns “flame-broiled,” but couldn’t sell pizza.

Public Relations

Solid brands are built through public relations. We specialize in building custom-fit public relations strategies that reinforce your current marketing initiatives and long-term corporate goals. Our state-of-the-art PR tactics guarantee that you message is heard by the right audiences — when and how they need to hear it. We do this by creating empathy with the economic buyers and influencers in your niche markets with tools like:

• media relations
• press release development and article pitches
• special events
• industry events
• reputation management
• innovative online communications programs
• blogs
• podcasts
• RSS news feeds

Measuring Brand Equity

The concept of branding can seem elusive to many executives. Unfortunately, some marketing executives and consultants hide their tactical ineptitude behind the word brand. If a postcard mailing fails to drive new leads, it can be repainted as a branding success. Lack of responsiveness to sales needs is reframed as brand conflict. What most executive do not realize is that brand equity can and should be effectively measured and tracked.

Your brand contract is a critical element of your Enterprise Velocity commitment. As such, it should not be confusing. Defining and measuring the components of your brand equity are important for two reasons. First, your brand represents the intangible value of your company versus the commoditization of the rest of your industry. Your brand creates customer loyalty and awareness which result in real financial value.

Beyond measuring goodwill in a merger or acquisition, it is important to take a regular inventory of your brand equity as you would any other asset. Second, measuring brand equity keeps your marketing team honest. To improve marketing efficiency, you need a way to measure the interactions of customers with your brand, your strategic position and the effectiveness of your tactical marketing expenditures.

Further complicating the issue are the many ways companies choose to measure brand equity. Like other aspects of our model, we believe brand equity should be intuitive and easy to understand or else the results will not be actionable. The BOSTON TURNER Group has divided brand equity testing into two areas, brand contract and brand identity. The concept of brand contract was discussed in the Ideals section above. Brand identity in our model represents perceptions and associations which your customers and partners hold regarding your brand. These could be visual identity elements such as logos, colors and package design elements. They could be unique selling propositions and slogans. They could include functional benefits, pricing and customer service.

When testing for brand equity you should consider all associations and interactions in your marketing funnel: awareness, preference, choice, retention and enhancement:

• Awareness should include testing for recall and recognition
• Preference should include product attributes and non-product elements such as price, packaging, and imagery
• Choice should test uniqueness and specific customer benefits related to functionality, customer experience and symbolic associations (such as status or contribution to self-concept)
• Retention should focus on experiential benefits and satisfaction
• Enhancement should test leverage in your marketing mix, potential for brand and product extensions and likelihood of referral business
• Finally, test for image interactions and associations such as favorability, strength and uniqueness along with industry and competitive associations.

Our experience with growth companies has shown that most marketers fall into one of two camps: brand or direct response. Typically, you are better off building an internal marketing team that is focused on tactical direct response. Direct response requires day-to-day interaction with your sales, product and service teams. It is a science experiment best left to those who are fully engaged with your company. Branding activities should be fairly infrequent events. Once you establish your brand contract and imagery, you should stick to it to build a collective memory in the minds of your customers and partners. From there, you should test for brand equity every six to 12 months. Like other infrequent activities, it is best to outsource the testing of brand equity to companies who test for it frequently rather than leave it to your internal team who have other tactical priorities.

Proven Experience

Boston Turner’s experience spans over 15 years of hands-on experience in the industries and practices we serve. Our professionals have worked with executive leaders in technology, enterprise software, payments, e-commerce, distribution and education.

Our founder, Matthew Turner, made a career of managing hyper-growth companies before starting the BOSTON TURNER Group. As the Chief Marketing Officer of Mercury Payment Systems, Turner tripled both the reseller channel (to over 1,200 resellers) and revenue (from $17 to $54m) and in doing so increased the value of the company from $20m to $120m according to a valuation study by CitiGroup. Turner previously led marketing for the distribution unit of Infor Global Solutions, NxTrend Technology (as part of a team that grew company valuation from $15m to $83m in four years) and an educational subsidiary of the Washington Post Company (where he raised sales closing rates from 14% to 55%). Turner is sought as a speaker for his expertise in lead generation, channel sales, and direct response marketing. He holds a B.A. in economics from California State University, San Bernardino, and is a special interest group coordinator for American Mensa, Ltd.