Time to Channel Effectiveness

Time to Channel Effectiveness

What is the right measure of “time to market”? Is it the ‘time to working prototype’, the ‘time to first production unit’, or the ‘time to volume production’?

The answer is none of the above. All of these are measures of internal operations that may not have market impact. Time to Market should measure when the customers have been provided with the information they need in order to buy and occurs after production. Production capacity without customer orders does not qualify as being in the market.

A more appropriate measure is “Time to Channel Effectiveness”.

Meeting this measure requires the average salesperson [including 3rd party channels] to be able to cost effectively sell the value of the product. All too often firms will focus on minimizing the time required to achieve production only to find that there is a more significant delay in the time required to achieve cost effective, value-based selling in the channels.

Once a firm realizes that market success [ie revenue] is based on “time to channel effectiveness”, then it becomes appropriate for the CMO to identify and address those factors that prolong that time required for the average salesperson to be able to cost effectively sell the value of the products.