Opportunity Mapping Service

What is Opportunity Mapping?

Think of Opportunity Mapping as a way to figure out the DNA of your company so that you are better positioned to win in the market and satisfy the needs of your customers and prospects.  This service helps you to develop effective go to market strategies that link the emerging customer needs to the great potential buried in your products and services. Through a series of modules, Hurwitz & Associates consultants can help you capitalize on your opportunities to make your customers successful including:

• Assessing the current state to prepare for the future
• Conducting primary research to assess your opportunities
• Assessing the competitive landscape
• Positioning products based on emerging needs
• Repackaging of existing components
• Creating effective partnering programs
• Amplifying your new strategies with go to market services such as webinars, video podcasts, audio podcasts, speeches, white papers, and surveys

What Problem does the Opportunity Mapping Service Solve?

Most product companies do not correlate market changes or customer pain with their opportunities to package and sell their products for success. Too often company executives make assumptions about the value they are offering to customers without taking a step back to reevaluate their assumptions. Are you really as good as you could be? What happens when companies are too inwardly focused? Here are a few examples:

• Too many technology companies focus exclusively on features and functions of their offerings. This leads them to lose sight of important emerging markets and opportunities to package and sell their intellectual property to untapped markets.
• Companies hang on to old products that no longer help customers solve problems. At the same time these companies overlook valuable assets buried in these products.
• Companies with valuable IP that could solve even bigger customer problems do not understand how to up-sell new capabilities to those same customers.

What's the solution?

Hurwitz & Associates Opportunity Mapping Service utilizes a sophisticated methodology that maps your core competencies to changing customer pain in the market. This approach provides your team with a common vocabulary and method for creating successful go to market solutions that build on and profit from the hidden value inside technology innovators.

Hurwitz & Associates have worked with a variety of companies within the technology market to help them unleash the power of their knowledge, technology, and customer success. Here are a few examples:

A company with good IP but an aging platform

A software company had been in business for more than 30 years. Its products were designed for an aging platform. Customers were still using the old product but it was very difficult to get new customers to sign up. Hurwitz & Associates was asked to figure out what the company should do to revitalize its opportunity in the market.

The results of the process demonstrated that customers were frustrated by the inflexibility of the platform. They liked working with the company's consultants because of their knowledge. They stayed with the product because of the best practices embedded within the system. It was hard to land new customers because they were frightened by the complexity of the environment.

Through a series of workshops, the company was able to find a way to repurpose the best practices from the aging product. The company made a commitment to develop a new graphical, modular environment that would better support the significant IP. At the same time, the company focused its marketing and positioning on the problems that these best practices solved for customers. Through repositioning and finding new partnership opportunities the company was able to revitalize their brand as they create a new product to appeal to existing and new customers.

A company with technology that wasn't packaged for customer pain

Sometimes companies have the right technology to solve customer problems but don't know it. A software company had some great technology but was offering it to solve the wrong problem. The company assumed that customers wanted a slick tool for programming code on lots of operating systems. After going through a pain mapping exercise, it became clear that customers wanted something completely different. They still wanted the underlying tool but they needed it to be packaged in a way that would reduce development time and training costs. The company developed a new packaging for the product that really solved customer problems.

A company with great technology couldn't go to market alone

An emerging software company had a product that effectively let end users and partners customize the interface of an application without impacting the underlying code. The company had a problem since it was too small to get the attention of large customers who were nervous about their size. The company needed partners. Through the opportunity mapping partner workshop it was determined that a large company with a complementary strategy was the right match. Introductions were made and the company was able to establish a good partnership.

The Opportunity Mapping process is based on creating a benchmark foundation for the building blocks of your go to market strategy. Our consultants provide an objective and knowledge-based approach to discovering what you sell, how you sell it, and where you stand in the market. For example, we conduct in-depth interviews with customers, partners, sales personnel, and senior management. We also review current marketing materials and look for patterns in your sales history such as identifying which types of customers in which market sectors were most easily converted from prospects into customers.  All of this information is put into context with our deep understanding of technology markets. We put this benchmark to work to help you with everything from deep competitive analysis and partnering strategies to thought leadership and advice on entering adjacent markets.

How the Opportunity Mapping Service Works

The Opportunity Mapping Service is modular. You can buy as much or as little as you need to meet your needs. Once you complete the mandatory foundational mapping service you select the modules that focus on the problem you are trying to solve.

Foundational Opportunity Mapping Service

This foundation service provides you will the insight, assessment, and information you need to discover your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities in the market.  Once this foundation is in place, Hurwitz & Associates consultants can move in whatever direction you need to focus on the areas that have the greatest potential for success.

What's in the foundational service?

• Discovery Phase. During this phase, Hurwitz & Associates consultants provide a benchmark for where you are today review your marketing materials, white papers, technical reports to assess how you position yourself to customers. We also interview members of your management team, key salespeople, and a selection of customers.
• Benchmark Report. Based on the analysis of the discovery phase, Hurwitz consultants will create a benchmark report. This initial phase becomes the foundation for other modules of the Opportunity Mapping Service. The report highlights issues such as how is your company currently positioned? How do customers perceive your company's value? How does this match management's perception of your company's mission and value to customers?

Opportunity Mapping Retainer Service

Many of our clients discover that creating the strategy and plan is just the first step. Therefore, we offer ongoing support for your go to market efforts.  After you select the foundation service, Hurwitz & Associates can offer any of the workshop modules in whichever way meets your needs. In addition, we offer a retainer-based service to give you ongoing support for the plans you put in place.  This service can be purchased for a single month, quarter, or a full year.

Go to Market with Opportunity Mapping

Once our consultants have partnered with you to establish a strategy, we are in a great position to help you magnify your messages to the market. We offer a continuum of services designed to help you be successful. These services include:

• Speeches and Webinars. Hurwitz & Associates consultants can speak at your events, serve as an objective expert in your webinars
• White papers. White papers are useful in explaining the value and benefit of your products to prospective customers. After all, prospects will not buy a product that they don't understand. A typical paper from Hurwitz & Associates will include examples of customers that have successfully used your products. Focusing on how you solve customers problems is the best road to success
• Primary research studies. Asking questions and using these results as a marketing tool is a very effective platform to get the attention of prospects. Our senior consultants have decades of experience creating and executing sophisticated studies that get results.
• Total Cost of Ownership analysis. Successful products offer a good return on investment. Our consultants have designed sophisticated models for determining the total cost of ownership for successful technologies.
• Market research. How do you compare to key competitors? What do their customers like or dislike about their products? How can you capitalize on market shifts or the holes in your competitors' offerings? This is the type of in-depth, probing research that our consultants perform.