Go ahead. Ask.
- What makes Lumina different?
Let’s face it. There are a lot of sales and marketing
consultants hawking their services on the market today. You have a
range of options to choose from. You can hire your own staff. You
can engage a freelance consultant. Or you can work with an
established firm. We’re obviously the latter—by choice. We’ve been
doing this since 1995—long before the tech wreck pushed others
into it. We’re not just looking for consulting work to pass time
until the next real job comes along. This is what we do and we do
it well. You should engage us when you know that you want to get
an outside perspective from those who’ve been there. And because
we’ve been there a lot, we take a real-time approach to strategy
development—marrying insightful strategy with practical execution.
It’s very often that gap between strategy and execution that’s in
misalignment within organizations. That’s why we’re more than just
consultants: we’re advisors, coaches and mentors and we’ll help
close that gap.
What does market-driven mean?
Our approach is market driven. That's not just a catch
phrase for the latest management theory. Instead, being
market-driven means focusing all the elements of your business
from the perspective of the markets you serve, not just focusing
them around your core competencies. The tendency in the classical
approach to strategic planning is to examine customer needs from
the perspective of what the company can offer and to convince
those customers of the need for the firm’s products or services.
Market-driven strategy examines the customer’s needs as they
relate to a real problem first, and then maps the firm’s optimal
response to that problem. Market-driven strategy maintains a
balance between the sales, marketing, finance and technology
disciplines by focusing on the value delivered by the company
through the entire value chain, including its suppliers and
resellers.
How can Lumina help if you
don’t know my company and industry?
Good question. No one knows your company, or perhaps even
your markets, as well as you do. We don’t pretend to. But here’s
what we do bring: we know technology markets from having devoted
our entire careers to serving them. We know the minds of
technology buyers from having interviewed literally thousands of
executive-level technology professionals. And we’ve worked with
hundreds of IT and communications firms of all sizes. We know what
works and what doesn’t. All Lumina consultants possess that
capability. We don’t entrust your business and market strategy to
junior people to take our place. Now we’ll ask you a question: How
can you afford to be without this kind of best-practice expertise?
What kinds of companies do you
do work for?
Since 1995, we’ve served a wide variety of information and
communications technology companies from multibillion-dollar
market leaders to newly formed ventures. See our representative
client list. Typical
clients have less than $100 M in annual revenues and are looking
to expand their business into new markets or seeking to develop
strategies that can overcome an entrenched competitor.
How would we begin?
We’re also market-driven. Give us a call and let’s discuss
what you’re looking for. We’ll tailor an approach that gets you
what you need to solve your problem—as fast as you need to go. We
recognize that engaging a firm for the first time has some risk
associated with it. Will they deliver what they promise? Will they
over-charge? Will they deliver real value? It’s smart to ponder
these things. Our goal is to remove those concerns as quickly as
possible so we can get down to helping you accelerate your
business. We look forward to meeting you.
How long is an engagement and
how much will it cost?
All of our engagements are project fee-based, not hourly.
We want you to know right up front how much to budget for this
work. We don’t ever want you to get the feeling that when you call
us, you’re on the clock. Nor do we want you to wonder whether
we’re adding hours to prolong an engagement. Instead, we’ll
provide you with a fixed-cost project proposal with all the
deliverables and schedules so you can hold us accountable. Every
project is different, depending on the scope and duration of the
engagement.
How are you accountable?
We expect you to hold us to the same level of performance
you have for your best employee—yourself. That means we place a
premium on actionable output and work hard to exceed your
expectations. In the rare instance that it doesn’t happen, we’ll
be the first to take ourselves off the case. We have a policy to
not engage unless we can deliver a positive outcome. And a
positive outcome for us is not just a written report. It’s
evidenced by the success of the implementation. Whether you
implement the recommendations yourself, utilize us in transition
management or engage other outside resources, we’ll track the
progress with you and adjust the strategies we’ve developed
accordingly. We won’t let go until you’re completely satisfied
with the results.
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