Research

An ambition expresses what a company wants to become in the future and is part of the pivot in a disruptive crisis. Ambition defines what it means to move forward. Technology general managers need a clearly stated ambition to effectively pivot forward.

Getting sales, marketing and product management to align and execute on a common go-to-market strategy can be difficult for many technology and service providers.

After launching a new product, product marketers are sometimes disappointed to see little change in sales behavior, and low pipeline. To increase sales engagement with new products, they need to look beyond sales enablement to address issues in seller return, effort and risk.

The health crisis created by COVID-19 presents unique challenges. Technology general managers need a framework for acting now and making decisions for the future.

Account-based marketing is an important go-to-market strategy for technology and service providers. During challenging economic times, product marketers should maintain proper investments in data and channel mix to drive ongoing engagement and continued program success.

COVID-19 presents a potential threat and opportunity for cloud providers. Reactions will vary from testing their services for outages to offering services at a discount to support remote work. Technology general managers must prepare and test their offerings to thrive during and after a pandemic.

Technology and service providers around the world have seen only moderate impact to their businesses so far. But many are only in the early stages of social distancing and lockdowns, and there remains significant risk for the pandemic to create a severe shock to economic activity in the technology market.

Cancellations of industry events due to shocks such as COVID-19 disrupt smaller players as they rely on megaevents to launch products and improve customer acquisition. Affected tech CEOs who planned or are planning launches should pivot fast to digital launches and communicate about them in a timely manner.

Peer-Indexed Performance analysis gives technology general managers a view into how their revenue growth and share compare with their peers. Technology general managers can use the PIP to know where they stand and the practices in this document to determine what to do next.