Marketing & Sales

We help companies build marketing and sales capabilities, and develop and execute innovative strategies for sustainable growth.

Our cross-sector perspective, combined with proven analytical skills, helps clients tackle essential issues. These include: identifying micromarket and microsegment sales opportunities; developing customer insight; understanding end customers’ buying factors and pricing sensitivities; and designing targeted marketing strategies to increase conversion.

Our work with clients and expertise in every high-tech subsector provide clients with exceptional marketing and sales resources and insight. Specifically, we provide clients with services and assets in the following capabilities:

  • Branding
  • Consumer & Shopper Insights
  • Customer Lifecycle Management
  • Digital Marketing
  • Marketing Return on Investment
  • Organization & Capabilities
  • Pricing
  • Sales & Channel Management

These capabilities allow us to develop insightful and practical marketing and sales strategies that target opportunities emerging from high tech’s unique dynamism. For example:

  • Consumer usage and decision making around converging digital devices
  • Marketing and sales in post-merger environments
  • High-performing indirect channels (e.g., cloud computing, software as a service)

People

McKinsey’s High Tech Marketing & Sales group includes 50 partners and associate principals and more than 40 affiliated practitioners. They bring a cross-sector perspective derived from work across the value chain (e.g., OEMs to a variety of distributors), in all industry subsectors and customer segments (e.g., enterprise, small and medium business, consumer), and geographies (mature vs. emerging markets).

Proprietary tools and insights

Recent research initiated by our marketing and sales specialists helps clients sort out the causes and potential cures for some of high tech’s most challenging sales problems:

  • Marketing Mix Optimizer and Promotion ROI analytics are some of the assets profiled in “Improving Return on Marketing Investment (Marketing ROI)” in high tech, which describes how to optimize returns on marketing by focusing on a broadly defined set of marketing spending levers and on how to apply detailed analytics to monitor and track program effectiveness.
  • Go-to-Market in Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) offers essential insights for how best to reach small and medium businesses, which we estimate will constitute almost 60 percent of total spending on IT.
  • Sales Growth reveals how leveraging predictive analytics as well as tech-enabled sales approaches can help companies identify and reach underserved markets or segments accurately and quickly.

For more details about our expertise in this area, please visit the Marketing & Sales Practice section.

Additional insights
report

From buzz to bottom line: Tracking mobile apps

To assess their impact, McKinsey initiated a knowledge effort on mobile apps and user attitudes leveraging the *NM Incite organization—a joint venture between McKinsey and Nielsen. (PDF–438 KB)more

article | McKinsey Quarterly

Using your sales force to jump-start growth

There’s a reason it’s called a sales force. Here are four innovative ways companies can use their sales reps to drive growth. more

Riding Asia's digital tiger
article | Consumer & Shopper Insights

Riding Asia's digital tiger

Asia is set to add 700 million new internet users in the next five years. McKinsey surveyed 13,000 people in India, China, and Malaysia to figure out how to unlock this burgeoning demand. more

Can India lead the mobile-Internet revolution?
article | Consumer & Shopper Insights

Can India lead the mobile-internet revolution?

India could become the world’s first truly mobile digital society—if the private and public sectors cooperate. more

Profile
Latest thinking
Segmenting China's digital consumers

Consumer & Shopper Insights—China could have as many as 750 million people online by 2015. Who are these Internet users? more

Podcast
podcast

In search of sales excellence

Jon Vander Ark and Jennifer Wickland discuss McKinsey's research on sales excellence.