B2B Marketing and Management – It’s time to make the change to Agile

Why You Need to Start Investing in Agile Business Acceleration Now!

For B2B organizations and their executives to survive, accelerate and thrive they must embrace agile company practices, not just in development and/or manufacturing but throughout their organization.

The economy is still wavering. Competition is getting faster, smarter and more innovative.

Leading competitors will be embracing and competing with new technology. Technology that includes: social media, mobile, cloud / SaaS, big data, analytics, and collaborative solutions. They will use innovation and speed to drive new value to customers including new products and features, changes in business models, and broadened partnering and alliance ecosystems. They will decrease time to market, deliver better interfaces and workflows, and vastly improved user experiences.

These leaders are investing in

• Innovating the total customer experience
• Creating cultures and operations inspired by agile principles

Regardless of the economic outlook, CEO’s and Investors are going to task their teams to deliver new markets, new products, and services with new growth and profitability. For the most part, they aren’t going to be handing out buckets of cash or supporting the hiring of a lot of new people.

The entire market facing organization will be asked to step up. Product managers and product marketing managers will be asked to deliver increasing differentiation, deeper and more analytic understanding of their customer, to adopt and use new marketing technologies and methodologies. They will be expected to deliver deeper levels of content. Content that can be personalized and contextualized to support richer lifecycle care and nurturing of leads, prospects, and customers.

Teams responsible for product design, development will be asked to increase the rate of delivery and the value/impact of products. Business development teams that engage customers early on will be expected to champion customers through collaborative design and development of the new products.

Market leaders, the predators, will continue to drive innovation, awesome customer value and experience, new technologies and alliances just as they always have. By being better, faster and smarter. The rest will be the prey.

At Spice, we passionately believe that sustainable – better, faster and smarter lies in adopting agile principles not just in manufacturing or development, but throughout the organization.

Mike Connor, Principal, Spice Catalyst