Strategic Marketing of High Tech and Cleantech

How do you build a strategy to create or sustain a winning product in new, fast-growth high tech or clean tech markets in a business environment facing rapid globalization, accelerating innovation, disappearing industry boundaries, and relentless competition from new and established players? How do you go successfully from idea or technology to product launch to broad market adoption?

While technology development is critical, high tech and clean tech leaders usually win on the strength of timely execution of superior business and marketing strategies.

You will discover the fundamental rules, tools, frameworks that lay the groundwork for a winning business and product marketing strategy. We will systematically analyze how to turn an idea, technology, product, or service and turn it into a winning business. The course framework methodically breaks down the strategy building process so you can learn how to create adoptable products and services, how to look for an attractive market, clear positioning, how to find the right customer base, how to build the right product, how to size an emerging market, how to expand profitably, how to build the right partnerships, how to price for success, develop the right channels at the right time, how to brand, and promote the product cost-effectively and efficiently, how and when to use social media marketing.

Alumni of this course have created hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues and market winners using the tools learned in this course.

“What I have learned in your classes has been helping me in project after project after project. I recently built a product that already generates $80 Million in annual sales by following most of the rules that you outlined and by sticking with the decision process you recommend.”

- Stoyan Kenderov, Director of Product Strategy, Amdocs

What is this master course?

This course is a must if you are in the business of innovation, entrepreneurship or new product development or commercialization.

The course has a workshop orientation: intense, hands-on, and practical. Come with a product in mind and build the business plan right there. It will help improve its business possibilities (or find out early why it may only have a limited market). The course is taught over two full days.

Who has taken (should take) this workshop?

• CEOs and senior executives of startup companies
• Directors of sales, marketing, and product strategy
• Product, marketing and brand managers
• Business development and sales managers
• R&D managers, senior engineers or engineering managers who need to interface with marketing
• Entrepreneurs starting or running new businesses
• International marketing managers
• Managers who need prioritize research and development projects

They have come from a cross-section of Silicon Valley: Google, Cisco, Yahoo!, Oracle, Microsoft, eBay, PayPal, NASA, Intel, Juniper, Genentech, Visa, Symantec, HP, solar, wind, and water companies, electric utilities, automotive and oil companies as well as hundreds of startups and large companies around the world.

“Tony Seba has given us both the strategy and implementation methods we needed to completely transform our business with clarity and confidence.”
- Richard Gill, CEO, Cyberglue Software Ltd

Mr. Seba also teaches this course in-house at companies like Google and Cisco Systems and within executive education programs at leading global business schools such as the University of Auckland Business School.

Ask Yourself

• Do you have a ‘great’ technology or product in a great market – but it has failed to gain traction?
• Are you developing a new product or service?
• Do you need to prioritize technology investments?
• Do you need to identify and capture new profitable markets (but are not sure where to go next)?
• Is your organization planning on expanding internationally?
• Are revenues going sideways or down (instead of up)?
• Is your division rethinking its product marketing and product development strategy?
• Are there communication problems between marketing and engineering? Do you want your product development team to be market savvy?
• Can your team tell the difference between a technology and a product?
• Do you need a process to rationalize development investments into technologies with more commercial potential
• Do you have “too many” technologies and need a framework to get a higher return on innovation?
• You need a refresher course with the latest winning strategies and tactics in high tech and clean technologies?

“I really liked the fact that, with some swift penmanship and open eyes, I could rough out the strategic marketing plan for our new robotics product right there in the class as you taught it.”
– Glen Slater, CEO, INRO – Robotic Vehicle Automation

Sample schedule (2-day workshop):

Day One

• Are you selling a technology or a product? Do you have the right product for the right market? Why most companies still sell the wrong products.
• Understanding how customers want you to build the product.
• Understanding tech customer needs and how to create the right value proposition. How to identify the most promising customers and markets.
• Prioritizing customers, market segments, technology development, product development, application development. Where are the right market opportunities. How do you decide on the most profitable market to target? Total Addressable Market and market sizing: how do you believably measure the size of a market that doesn’t yet exist?
• Strategic positioning. Getting past the clutter and into the mind of the customer and the market. Why it’s important to build a positioning matrix.
• How to make your product easy to buy. Developing products that are easy to adopt.
• What is the right pricing strategy? Understanding economic value to the customer, switching costs, and externalities and their implication in setting the right pricing strategy. Skimming vs. penetration pricing. How to set and maximize prices. Setting the right global pricing strategy.
• How to build the right sales and distribution channel strategy. How do you decide what channels to use? When do you use each channel? A simple framework can help you decide.
• How to build winning partnerships. The most important reason to partner in high-technology markets. Who should you partner with? How do you manage partners the right way?

Day Two

• Product categories. How do you know if you might be in a new product category? (Hint: it’s not about ‘radical’, ’subversive’, or ‘revolutionary’ technology!)
• What’s wrong with the technology adoption lifecycle?  The right way to build a strategy throughout the adoption lifecycle. How to grow and expand your markets profitably.
• Competition in high tech.
• Case Study: building a profitable, growth-oriented strategic partnership program in the enterprise software market.
• Building a winning branding strategy – without advertising, without a large budget.  Why brand names matter and why most companies do it wrong.  The importance of stories. Branding vs. Positioning.
• Case Study: pricing a new product in a global market for a small biotech company.
• How to build a winning promotion strategy – without a big budget.  How to use Social Media. Content and engagement. Do you need to advertise? When and how?
• Go-to-market strategy. Putting together the strategic marketing plan.