Solutions
Blue Canyon Partners, Inc. focuses on topics that are critical to growth in business-to-business markets. This focus helps our clients uncover and organize insights that open the door to new strategic directions and action plans that result in success. We have helped our clients understand:
- Customer Chain Market Structures: In business-to-business markets, suppliers serve direct customers who in turn sell to end customers. Many business-to-business customer chains are quite complex, involving combinations of OEMs, distributors, contractors, and other intermediaries. Changes often emerge in these customer chains that cause shifts in purchase decision processes and criteria, and promote new opportunities for value creation and capture along the customer chains. The goal for a supplier is to ensure win-win-win alignment with the customer chain participants by enabling its direct customer to succeed with other participants down the customer chain.
- Market Economics: Along with in-depth economic perspectives about the size of the market and its segments, regarding historical and forecasted growth, Blue Canyon focuses upon the economic links between the customer chain participants. This focus provides fundamental insights into the client’s strategic options, helping to understand how decisions economically impact customer chain participants. These quantitative insights and metrics help identify customer chain market segments that are most likely to yield growth and margins consistent with our client’s goals.
- Sales Channels: Conflict between the supplier and channel intermediaries, competency shortfalls, competition for margins, and pressures of price-based competition can thwart profitable growth efforts. Our approach emphasizes the careful integration of channel strategy and channel relationship management. Successful practices of suppliers who have strong channel partners involve developing a shared focus on the end customer, establishing explicit accountabilities for sustaining margins, creating defined metrics for monitoring results, and clarifying roles and responsibilities between the supplier and the channel partner.
- Major Customers: Success with major customers requires a clear understanding of the business environment(s) within which the relationship operates and best-in-class approaches to managing key customer relationships. Blue Canyon has consistently found across its many years of research that the fastest growth and the more stable relationships are associated with a well-founded approach to strategy and attention to the key competencies critical to such relationships. Blue Canyon has helped its clients implement the action plans that result in well-managed major customer relationships and fuel strategic growth.
- Pricing: Blue Canyon’s research suggests that best-in-class proactive pricing strategies involve understanding where pricing pressures will emerge, understanding the factors that are driving competitor and customer responses, and calibrating the intensity of these price pressures. Our approach involves strategies that align the supplier’s value proposition along the customer chain, avoiding the vicious cycle of price-based competition.
- Product Innovation: While creativity is an important ingredient in product development, how innovation is managed and contributes to the customer is an equally important factor. Blue Canyon’s research has identified distinct types of innovation that can create value for customers including innovations that contribute to marketing success, innovations that solve technical issues, and innovations that take costs out and improve processes.
- Services: For some business-to-business suppliers, business can be won or retained based on a superior or unique service offering. Despite the many services success stories, some companies have difficulty in determining which services to offer to which customers, and other suppliers view services as a profit drain because customers fail to value these services. To effectively develop a service strategy, a supplier must understand the factors that drive purchase decisions with each participant along the customer chain. Our research has identified the ways in which various services strategies can be profitably blended into our client’s overall approach to Go-to-Market Strategy.
- Brands: Brand building in business-to-business markets must be tightly woven into a complementary mix of strategy decisions about product features, service dimensions, channel partners, and pricing. An effective brand architecture must emerge from an overall framework to reflect customer segment specific strategies, often creating a migration path from a “good” to a “better” to “best” product and services offering.
