Pushing Past Market Trends and Challenges in 2022

By Peggy Tierney Galvin, Chief Strategy Officer

Some marketing teams are facing extra headwind at the beginning of 2022. 

If your new solutions are being pushed out due to chip shortages, how do you excite customers and keep them in your ecosystem? When will you have the next version available to share with the market? What will you be announcing at the next big trade show? 

Or you might find yourself in the position of needing to share the value proposition of a product portfolio that includes all the new companies your employer has acquired over the past year.  

But wait, there’s more: The supply chain ripple effect also means that every element of your business supply chain is going to be squeezed for maximum efficiency as inflation and demand press into profit margins along the line. 

Excited for the new year yet? 

Back to basics 

Fortunately, the way to cut to the chase with these challenges requires answering the same questions: What are customers getting out of your service? What are their business needs? And how are you helping them get there? 

For your customers and partners, the answer is making your offering all about value. How are customers and partners able to use your solution today to improve their own margins and open up new lines of revenue? 

This is an opportunity to invest in customer success management, if you haven’t already, and deepen your partner and reseller relationship with joint outreach, incentives and market education to ensure that you’re able to meet your customer where they are today with their business needs.  

Lean and mean 

Hiring is also being disrupted as employees of all levels in all industries are at a premium thanks to the Great Resignation and the “back to the office” date becomes almost comically unpredictable. This means that the trend toward automation that accelerated at the beginning of the pandemic has every incentive to keep going, both to backfill employment gaps and to improve the employee experience of those who the company is committed to keeping. 

There’s gold in them thar bills 

Finally, we feel a bit like a voice in the wilderness after writing about the massive funding legislation on the horizon, but both bills – the infrastructure bill and the semiconductor R+D bill – are still inching their way along. Though the final contours of both bills are yet to be drawn, both represent significant spending – and opportunity – for tech companies and their customer industries to take advantage of.  

In the meantime, investors are still sitting on historic levels of cash, and need to put it somewhere, fueling the ongoing mergers, acquisitions, IPO and SPAC spree, not to mention the more eyewatering applications of capital in cryptocurrencies and NFTs. 

Our advice 

For business leaders, this is a time to refine your go-to-market messaging, your value prop, and your business benefits vis a vis their technological differentiators to your prospect, customer, investor and partner audience, while strengthening your relationships with targeted members of the press and focusing on your positioning within the analyst community. 

It’s called doing the basics, and doing them well – and ultimately, this is what moves the needle for your bottom line. More questions? Don’t hesitate to shoot us a message here.