Author: animeshjmathur

Referrals – a lesson from Covid vaccination

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Today I went for my first shot of vaccination.

I had heard that in India we have now reached a vaccination figure of 2.5 million a day. That’s a very large number of people. My expectation was that there will be massive chaos when 2.5 million people are being vaccinated in a day.

In India all the Covid vaccination is free. In case you want to get the vaccine administered at a private hospital then there is a very small fee which the hospital can charge for the services.

I was amazed when I reached the government hospital in Noida. I must congratulate the government authorities for such elaborate arrangements to ensure social distancing, to ensure that not a single person faced any issue while getting the vaccine. In India we are generally apprehensive of government hospitals but my view of this handling has completely changed my view of government run hospitals.

Today whoever we spoke to after the vaccination, we absolutely referred this government hospital because of the amazing service we got with everyone from the security guards who were directing the flow of people, to the people who were administering the actual vaccine, to the CoWin App which the government has made.

Which brings me to another aspect of marketing. We rarely use referrals as a strategy to grow the business. Most of us including me sometimes, think that the customer is doing us a favour by referring us to others. On the other hand as you will see from my experience, I actually wanted to tell everyone about my experience because it was so good and because I want them to have the same experience. When they have the same experience they will thank me for it, which will make me feel even better.

We will explore referrals over the next few posts more.

Till next time

Carpe Diem!!!

B2B Buying Processes in technology -II

B2B, differentiation, Marketing, Product Management, segmentation

While I keep talking consistently about segmenting the market and identifying niches, I also talk about identifying niches by use case rather by demographics and psychographics.

Typically in B2B buying especially when you are selling (I am using this term in a very broad way) to mid to large size companies there’s an hierarchy of positions within departments. In typical sales situations you want to identify a decision maker and then message to them. Unlike an individual or family buying a low value item where decisions are taken on the spot, in case of decisions which require substantial investment in technology buying, there are always multiple layers

In B2B buying there’s a someone who can say yes and a lot of people who can say no. However in most cases the decision maker herself does not evaluate the options. She typically would ask someone or some people in her team or make a cross functional team to evaluate the options and bring them to her and then she takes a decision.

Now this is where it gets tricky for the Product Management person. The decision maker does not evaluate options. The people who evaluate the options in today’s day and age are hidden because they do more than 60-70% of the sorting using the internet and reach out to specific companies whom they have shortlisted. So even if you have the most elaborate technical product, if you didn’t come in front of this team and this team does not evaluate you then you don’t stand a chance.

So how does the Product Management person identify the persona to whom the messaging has to be targeted. That’s what makes the B2B buying process complex for the marketing folks.

When you choose a very small segment of the market to target , the advantage is that you can do iterations in your messaging, you can actually interview prospects who didn’t buy from you and other things to identify what is resonating with your market and incorporate the learnings very fast.

This is not an easy task at all. Once you are able to “crack the code” as Dean Jackson puts it, you can scale in that market very fast.

Even now I have to learn so much in each new product we launch. Its never easy to say that because I launched a security product last year successfully I will be successful for a new AI product I am launching this year. While the frameworks can be in place and evolving, the learning is always new. But that’s what makes it interesting.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Sustained Lead Generation- keeping the funnel full

Business, differentiation, Marketing, messaging, Positioning, Product Management

Today is the financial year closing for all organisations in India. I had an extremely hectic day where we were trying to close a very large deal – which eventually slipped the deadline.

So again tomorrow morning we get back to figuring out how to get the deal in our favor.

As they say – There’s many a slip between the cup and the lip – so do large blockbuster deals have a way of going through multiple iterations before they fruitify.

That’s where having a sustained method of generating leads of average value orders makes a big difference to your pipeline. There’s better predictability in the system for your cash flows and you build the processes and infrastructure in your company to ensure that these orders can get revenued systematically without any chokes.

For most businesses however generating the sustained leads becomes a nightmare because we try to focus on too many things at the same time. If we were to focus on only a very few markets, by segmenting them and differentiating our offerings for each segment, there would not be too much of anxiety. The occasional blockbuster then can be managed within the existing system.

On the other hand if the growth is based on the back of the block buster while there’s no pipeline for sustained order booking then you are in for major challenges. Segmenting and niching the market is the only viable way for a Product Manager to ensure that they can get success in the market

Lets see what the new financial year has in store for us.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!

Becoming a vending machine for your customer…..Part-II

Marketing Ecosystem, Product Management

Taking the analogy of a vending machine – where you put in the money and choose the item you want and it is delivered to you. If you were to offer all the things which are needed – before, during and after your product or service is deployed – by your customer , then you could become the center of the universe for the technology product or service that you are marketing.

I was thinking of taking this analogy a little further.

Suppose you were to think in terms of who else would be selling to the same customer to whom I am wanting to sell my product or service. I have written about how you can use this method to get a quicker access into the market.

Now however I am going reverse.

Lets say you are in city A and you have a customer in city A for your products or services. You want to get into city B. You have identified a company who has customers to whom you want to sell. You want to partner with this company.

Now in the spirit of giving first that I keep ranting about, you could bring this company to sell its services to your customers in city A. This way you become a reliable supplier to your existing customers.

You now emphasize the same logic to this partner for city B where she takes you to their customers. You could take this further jointly into other cities.

There are so many possibilities to take this vending machine concept and grow your business rapidly. As a matter of fact all the biggest IT OEMs like IBM, Oracle etc. have the concept of eco-systems precisely for this reason so that they get quicker access to the markets as well as to the latest technologies.

While we do partnerships in our company, I think this concept of a vending machine is something which I have to work deeper.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!