Description

Management professionals responsible for new product/service development, product marketing, launch, and aftermarket revenue performance seldom garner sufficient opportunity to consult peers, experts and mentors. Good advice and timely support in confronting new or emerging challenges is critical to setting the correct goals, making the right decisions, maintaining confident focus and propagating team accomplishment and motivation.

The Product/Service Growth Advisory Board is an assembly of individuals, within or outside of the firm, selected for their specific expertise or operational skills and experience. Advisory Board members are charged with the responsibility to commercialize new products and improve or extend existing products and markets. The Advisory Board is designated to nurture the initial product creation / development programs through instituting appropriate and effective development, marketing, sales and customer service processes. Honing skills, devising tactics and formulating strategies - sessions aim to provide a learning and solution-building platform for those seeking to learn, cooperate and achieve success. SOMOS provides a collaborative and discreet means of creating solutions, sharing plans, and charting progress.

Tangible results comprise recognition of gaps, action plans to overcome problems and roadmaps toward committed targets. Implementation plans are concrete with milestones that include a forward-looking strategy identifying risks, rewards and options for the future.

Schedule

SOMOS begins with a brief audit of existing new product creation, marketing and sales processes and procedures to outline a plan for creating the Product/Service Growth Advisory Board. Then, through a series of monthly 4-hour sessions, a SOMOS hands-on consultant works with the Advisory Board to: examine symptoms, assist in framing issues, stage analyses and problem solving approaches, review progress and provide mentoring.

Topics

SOMOS, through the Advisory Board, addresses topics most relevant to the client's immediate situation and coming challenges. Typically, these topics include:

•  
  • Effectively staffing and motivating the team
  • Product creation, marketing, sales and customer service processes
  • Forging a shared vision and fostering collaborative cross-functional achievement
  • Planning and managing tasks, projects, partnerships and alliance networks
  • Defining and articulating features, benefits and value propositions
  • Design-to-cost, pricing and life cycle issues
  • Predicting expenses - development, production, overhead and operating
  • Branding, channels-to-market and alliances
  • Sales pipeline, sales planning and forecasting
  • Current and evolving strategy

Supplemental Workshops

Workshops can be used to supplement the monthly 4-hour sessions to examine critical issues and address any major gaps and weaknesses. These sessions - comprising implementers, process owners and functional managers - jointly define concrete action for change with detailed plans to address and achieve realistic mutual goals. Workshops promote the advantages of attaining collaborative and practicable solutions concerning actual process and operational issues. As important, more cohesive execution across functions and a deeper culture of shared responsibility is actively encouraged.

Coaching

SOMOS provides experts with substantial and proven track records spanning the complete spectrum of product / service development activities - from generating and identifying high potential ideas to product / service development, launch and life cycle management.