Quebec is recognized as a wealth of creative minds in culture, but also within our businesses. Fourth in the world behind Sweden, Japan and Switzerland but ahead of the United States and Germany, Quebec shines in R&D in proportion to its GDP. On the other hand, there is a huge downside to bear. According to the Deloitte report entitled Update on Quebec manufacturing, “Quebec is in the forefront of research and development (R&D), but has difficulty in launching innovation.”
It’s a fact! We constantly meet companies in the manufacturing sector and in other sectors such as ICT, services, distribution, etc., which have great difficulty to ‘go to market’. The reasons are many, but some are worse than others.
Quebec companies have long been assisted by various forms of aid when it comes to R&D, such as tax credits, but receive very little relief to launching products unless received by private funds or by some financial institutions.
In addition, it turns out that many companies have developed their products or services with a ‘product’ approach that is the opposite of the “market” approach. The popular expression “Build it and they will come” summarizes this idea that encourages the development of products and services in isolated ways. As a consequence, we don’t know much about the unmet needs of the market, about the other products or services of competitors for differentiation, the process of buying from our sometimes poorly defined target. In short, we do not create a real or lasting value in many cases.
Furthermore, knowledge of sales tools and marketing their applications and benefits depend heavily on the experiences of each company and their resources (financial, human and, in terms of process) to access the best use of them.
All of this comes with competitive environments in constant transformation, as well as transformed behaviors and cycles of purchase because of technological developments.
In less than 20 years, marketing has undergone more transformations than 150 years of industrial marketing.
The APCM invites you to a conference where you will discover the best practices in marketing and B2B sales. It will, among other things, tackle tools and the most effective activities in B2B:
- Strategic and operational integration of sales and marketing
- Use of optimized and efficient web sites
- Use of social media
- Use of tools: marketing automation, customer relationship management (CRM), dashboards and performance indicators.
If the return on a marketing investment holds dear to you, this conference is for you!
Hope to see you there!
