Market Messaging and Sales Execution

There is a science to taking a service offering, a product, or a business line to market successfully.

What sounds or looks good internally often lacks resonance with clients and unfortunately, all too often is how go-to-market strategies are developed and executed.

Deploying Oculus’ proven methodologies enables both internal buy-in and meaningful market impact.

Positioning first, solutions second

Any go-to-market strategy for an offering must fit within the enterprise’s overall market positioning or risk market confusion.

At Oculus, we begin with developing an understanding of our client at the highest level and then moving directly to an understanding of what is being brought to market solves for our clients’ customers.

Connecting these things in a meaningful way ensures that whatever is delivered creates resonance in the mind of the market.

Engaging sales leaders

If the work is around a relaunching of an existing offering, Oculus will focus on understanding the offering’s current positioning and value proposition while simultaneously engaging clients and intermediaries familiar with the offering to document what they find valuable and what brand equity exists.

The internal and external perspectives are not always aligned and so early discovery can have immediate impact for sales leaders when they are engaged and involved with the process.

Competitive analysis

A competitive analysis is always needed whether the offering is new to the market or not.

While the intensity of this work can vary from deep assessments of competitive offerings via primary research to less intense efforts using only desk research it is indispensable.

The output is used to develop a messaging landscape creating a visual understanding of where our client’s messaging sits relative to its competitors.

This enables a meaningful discussion around where the ultimate positioning should land and how different it will be compared to today or compared to the competition.

From here the messaging framework is developed with the definition of a specific value proposition and the key strengths and differentiators that support it.

Execution

At this point, it is all about turning strategy into execution.

Whether Oculus brings the design team and copywriters or we work with an internal team, strategy briefs for marketing assets are developed, proof points are developed and a deployment strategy is created.

Even if Oculus is not engaged on design or copy writing, we will continue to work in partnership with internal teams to ensure the creative work does not drift from strategy.

We are however, most often retained to roll out the new positioning to all client and market facing teams and will design and deliver these training programs in a manner that best serves the client.

When done properly, go-to-market strategies and their execution have both internal benefits by aligning internal teams around the mission and external benefits in improved retention and increased new business opportunities.

See our case study

To further understand our Go-to-Market Strategy services, please review our case study: “How Brand Boosts the Bottom Line.”

For your future reference and convenience, you can also download it as a PDF.

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We engaged Oculus at a pivotal point in our evolution to evaluate how the market perceived who we were as a firm and what value our product and services brought to the market. Through a competitive assessment and a brand equity assessment, Oculus recommended and delivered a revitalized brand, a messaging framework, and new collateral that better positioned the firm in the market. Our new sales and marketing documentation coupled with the revitalization of the website enabled us to meaningfully initiate discussions with firms that previously would not have viewed us as a solution to their challenges.
Chief Revenue Officer
Fintech Firm
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During our bid for a large outsourcing engagement, Oculus skillfully guided our leaders in preparation for complex, in-depth workshops, and a compelling, highly engaging final presentation. The deal value was over $1 billion USD, and we won the bid against seven industry-leading competitors over the course of 9 months. The return on investment for this engagement was unequivocally the best I have seen in comparison to any Big 4 or top consultancy engagement in my 32-year career in Insurance and Retirement Services.
Sales Leader
Global BPO/ITO Provider
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“Operating in an industry with increasing competitive parity, we engaged Oculus to help improve the overall effectiveness of our sales efforts. Initially, their work concentrated on refining our message, developing more impactful deliverables, and establishing a focused sales preparation process. We extended their involvement to include presentation coaching, emphasizing more sizable opportunities. The individuals engaged, the techniques employed, and the output produced by the Oculus team helped deliver results in two significant areas. First, measurable improvement, including a 46% increase in our win rate and a 72% increase in our average size sale. And second, inspiring a growth mindset that has permeated the organization and favorably influenced activities beyond sales and their initial engagement.”
Institutional Head of Sales
Large Market Retirement Recordkeeper
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About Jamie McInnes

Jamie McInnes

President

Jamie is a recognized leader with over thirty years of experience working in several firms across asset management, banking and insurance. His leadership roles have focused on a variety of business models and markets covering retirement, wealth management and protection. In 2018, he joined Oculus Partners as a Senior Consultant and, in January 2021, Jamie acquired the firm.

Prior to joining Oculus, Jamie spent 10 years at Prudential Financial. Initially, he worked within Prudential Retirement ultimately leading its full-service business which delivered defined contribution, defined benefit, deferred compensation, IRA and advisory services to 4,000 institutional clients and 2.5 million individual participants. His final three years at Prudential were spent in Prudential International Insurance developing and leading its market entry to Indonesia’s life insurance market. As the CEO he developed the local senior leadership team while expanding distribution inclusive of bank assurance, tele-marketing and a direct-to-consumer digital channel.

Jamie joined Prudential from Merrill Lynch where he led its Retirement Group’s institutional offerings covering DC, DB, NQDC and trust and custody. This followed his return from Japan where Jamie had initially been leading the platform development for CIGNA’S joint venture pension business as their CIO and subsequently as the firm’s Executive Director advising multi-national firms around pension risk issues and the benefits of transferring benefit programs to a DC framework.

Jamie began his career in management consulting focused on banking and insurance company back-office operations and entered the retirement business initially with Putnam Investments and then joining a VC backed on-line 401(k) company prior to relocating to Japan.

Jamie earned his undergraduate degree in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard College, has a MPhil degree in International Relations from the University of St Andrews, an MSc in Finance from the Sawyer School of Business at Suffolk University and is a Chartered Financial Analyst.

Passion/Area of Focus

Helping leaders align and enable their teams to accomplish goals they felt were unachievable.