This report measures:
This report will help you:
There’s two types of sales plateaus every marketing org needs to plan for:
A performance plateau, coined by the magnificent Tom Roach and Dr Grace Kite, happens when brands over-invest in short-term, in-market activities at the expense of reaching and influencing out-market buyers in advance of purchase.
As you capture more and more in-market demand, and as more and more competitors enter the market who do the same, and as your sales goals get bigger over time, eventually you’ll exhaust your limited pool of in-market buyers and hit a sales plateau.
To get out of a performance plateau, brands can add new products or segments to their in-market program (though that doesn’t change that their first product or segment has plateaued) or make long-term investments in building future demand, pipeline, and revenue by targeting their biggest pool of potential buyers: out-market buyers.
To identify a performance plateau using this report, use the ‘sales by product line’ chart below. Then look for the point on the chart where the line(s) start to crest. That’s your plateau point- and an indication that there’s no more further growth from performance marketing alone.
A penetration plateau, on the other hand, happens for one of two different reasons:
In the first scenario, brands launch out-market demand campaigns focused on the rational story of the problems they solve and the solutions they’ve built.
But any conversation about today’s problems and solutions is inherently built for the people who experience those problems now.
All good. But what about:
Any talk about problems/solutions is inherently more rational in its delivery, more narrow in its reach, and less memorable in its effect than true brand activity.
Consequently, though you’ve managed to make investments in future buyers, you’re only reaching a fraction of the future buyers you could reach if you also incorporated emotional brand building (broad reach, universal relevance, emotion over logic).
As for the second scenario…
In this case, you’ve built a short-term and long-term marketing engine, and you’ve balanced brand with demand and acquisition, but you still see declining sales because you’ve outgrown your service market (SAM).
In other words, you’ve run out of market to penetrate and need to expand your buying pool once again.
In either scenario, you can use the ‘sales by ICP,’ ‘sales by region,’ or ‘sales by pricing tier’ to identify which target segments you’ve started to exhaust.
To identify a penetration plateau, use one of the reports below to track historical sales by pricing tier, ICP or persona, product, and/or region.
For example, track sales plateaus by pricing tier:
Track sales plateaus by ideal customer profile (ICP) segment:
Track sales plateaus by product:
Track sales plateaus by region:
A plateau happens when the line begins to flatten. This is a sign of declining growth rate and what could be an impending sales plateau. If you’re tracking sales by segment historically, you’ll see the flattening coming before it’s too late.
No. Not at all. Loads of economic, market, customer, and business conditions factor in. However, this is the simplest way to gut check a plateau on the horizon.
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