E-Business Market Assessment

Understanding the
Emerging Growth Opportunity

As part of its range of capabilities aimed at helping clients to understand their market opportunities, GMT offers unique insight into the role that emerging e-business channels can play in achieving strategic sales growth.

Because GMT is a full-service consulting firm, GMT focuses on the role of e-business channels within clients' broader growth strategies—answering the "business" questions about emerging e-business channels.

By leading a broad analysis of the e-business opportunities available—and examining those opportunities within the context of the business' overall market strategy—GMT helps clients to ensure that they are setting realistic and achievable objectives for their growth via Internet selling, as well as putting in place effective customer extranets and intranets to facilitate sales.

Gauging Internal Capabilities

While nearly every organization can realize significant growth from e-business initiatives, few are internally equipped to take advantage of market opportunities.

To increase clients' readiness—and their chances for both e-business and overall market success—GMT works with clients to answer such critical questions as:

	What is our top-level market strategy—and how can emerging channels support it?
	How well do our products and services fit with electronic channels?
	What internal obstacles are negatively impacting our current e-business initiatives—and can tools such as intranets address them?
	How can e-business channels improve our customer-service levels?
	How can we use electronic channels to build our brand?
	Can we use e-business tools to accelerate our speed to market?
	How can e-business tools support product and market innovation?
	Do we have the capital, technologies, and processes to sell or market online?
	What is a natural evolution from where we are today to an e-business environment?

By answering these questions before undertaking an e-business market initiative, GMT helps clients to avoid costly mistakes—and to avoid damaging important relationships with key customers and end users.

Assessing Market Readiness

In addition to measuring and improving clients' internal capabilities, GMT analyzes the willingness of the marketplace to embrace an e-business initiative. GMT's market assessment capability helps to strengthen critical customer relationships—and ensure a profitable outcome from the e-business effort.

GMT's analysis focuses on traditional versus online market sizes and growth rates, broad market trends, the needs of customers and end users, current buying and selling behaviors, and willingness to buy through e-commerce channels.

GMT also maps the "value chain" for key customers and consumers, allowing the client organization to understand where it can create a market advantage—while also generating attractive margins and return on investment.

A key facet of GMT's market assessment capability is the firm's ability to study clients' potential for channel conflict—and the degree to which selling through emerging channels will endanger existing customer relationships. Through its unique analysis, GMT assists clients in understanding—and minimizing—the risk of a downturn in traditional channel sales.

Mapping the Competitive Landscape

In addition to studying internal and market factors, GMT maximizes clients' e-business efforts through a rigorous analysis of the industry and competitors.

GMT helps client organizations to achieve e-business market success by arriving at answers to these and other key questions:

	What are the general e-business sales trends within our industry? What can we learn from companies outside our industry?
	Which product and service categories—if any—are experiencing online growth?
	Have existing competitors' efforts proven successful? How can we learn from their successes and mistakes?
	What potential competitors could enter the online arena from outside our industry?

By providing detailed answers to these questions, GMT demonstrates how clients can achieve an e-business market leadership position—instead of merely reacting to industry trends and competitors' advances.

Fact-Based Support for E-Business Market Success

As electronic selling channels continue to gain ground—and change the rules in most industries—many businesses are feeling pressure to quickly define and implement an e-business sales and marketing strategy.

Too often, the speed of the online economy leads to critical market decisions being made without upfront research and analysis.

By providing comprehensive e-business market assessment services, GMT helps clients to define e-business strategies and initiatives that will produce the greatest financial return in the long term—while also ensuring overall market share growth.