Author: animeshjmathur

Gatherers versus Consumers

B2B, Marketing, psychology, Uncategorized

Gatherers – I heard this term today, while listening to the Morecheeselesswhiskers podcast with Dean Jackson. I heard this in the morning and now its evening, this term is still ringing in my ear and the implications it can have in marketing.

Dean’s logic was that we are hardwired genetically to be gatherers. Since historic times, when human beings started staying in caves, they would take food and store it in the cave so that in case it rained or for some reason they couldn’t go out hunting the next day, they would have food for the family.

At that time if they found some bananas, they would “gather” it and take it to their cave. Till now that characteristic has not changed. People end up buying things, they never use, so that they however have it – just in case – gathering. If you are an avid reader like me, you may also have a lot of books which you have never read, but you bought them, so that you don’t end up missing them- another sign of gathering.

Consuming on the other hand is about something which we actually use.

Now here comes the interesting part. You can utilize this psychological concept in your marketing. How many times have you observed people offering you a free book. Chances are that you ended up taking that book by providing your email address. There’s also a very large chance that you didn’t read much of that book even though the title of the book had interestedyou earlier. So you gathered it but didn’t consume it.

So how can it be used. You offer a product worth “gathering” and in return get them to give you their emails to which you can then prospect on a regular basis. So now I have to think in terms of how I can create an item which is easy to gather which can help me generate leads.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

The happiness in being proven wrong

mindset, Sales

For the last few days I have been reading Adam Grant’s book Think Again. One of the topics is about accepting that your pre-conceived notion could be wrong and how because of it you actually grow even more. It can be extremely liberating.

That made me think how often haveI been proven wrong and accepted it in public.

One big one was Sugar and sugar substitutes. I have written extensively in multiple posts on how my father had mentioned about sugar being a poison almost 20 years back but it took me so long to give it up almost completely. Over the last few years I did try some sugar substitutes but I have now realized after reading a lot of studies, that they are equally bad in a different way.

But I also now happily share, how rectifying my liking for sugar has helped me on a daily basis.

The above was a personal realization. Another one, a few years back was on the professional front.

One of my sales person was following up on an account for almost 8-9 months. Even though our typical lead time can be between 3-6 months, anything which crosses about 8-9 months is a very suspect case.

In this there were buyers who were changing which made me even more skeptical of the whole deal. But this sales person kept after them through all the changes and brought in the order.

The reason for me to feel happy was not that he had picked up an order because of the size of the order – the order value was not anything great. The fact that this was a completely new logo that we were acquiring, was made it feel good. If I had removed this sales person from doing this deal , because I thought it would not happen, we wouldn’t have acquired this logo.

I felt happy to be proven wrong. There have been other times also when I have been proven wrong and learned a valuable lesson, but we will keep it for another day.

Till next time then

Carpe Diem!!!

The advantages of a Single Target Market

B2B, Marketing, Product Management, segmentation, single target market

Once you have identified your niche and segmented the market by usage, you may be left with a very small portion of the overall market which you had originally thought.

In context of the B2B space you should at least have a bundle of around 100 accounts to start out , as your minimum economically viable market,  to test your offerings. You can build this to a maximum of a thousand. Anything more will be unmanageable if you’re a small company.

Once you start of with this bundle of 100 accounts,  you get to learn and adapt your offerings extremely quickly.  Within these 100 if you keep sustained education based marketing,  you will be able to create a “brand” for yourself. While B2B marketing is a slow process because of the inherent inertia of a complex structure like an organisation, you can also be sure that within a typical period of 3-5 years 50% of these prospects will be looking for a new vendor for the services you offer.

Once you’re able to get into a conversation with one prospect,  you can quickly identify the challenges and mould your future communication with the new understanding.  As you grow, your interactions, your learning compounds at a much faster rate because all the prospects are similar in nature. So the challenges they face could be similar and the solutions that you deploy can also be deployed faster.

Which helps you reach critical mass faster and you’re able to quickly dominate that market before moving to th we next market.

Till next time then .

Carpe Diem!!!

Segmentation of a niche by usage

Marketing, Product Management, segmentation, single target market

I keep writing about identifying a Single Target Market.  It all starts by segmenting the market and then breaking it down further till you can reach a level of control on the market which you can Dominate.

Once you start dominating one market, you can move to the next, and next till you dominate the whole segment.

As an example you are the Product Manager for a telephone company which wants to segment the market by coming out with phones targeted at ladies. You can segment this further by either age , rural and urban, by the language options or all of them.

After you have done this level of segmentation you are left with a certain demographic profile combinations. Lets say one of the combinations you decide to choose is a lady, urban, upto 40 years of age, speaks English.

What you do next with the usage could look at this combination and see how many of these are homemakers and how many are working ladies. Now comes the interesting part. In this age group a lot of these ladies could be moms with small kids.

These days kids are smarter than us. So they could end up using their mother’s phone even when it’s locked because they have noticed the password that the mother uses. They then accidentally delete an official email or send an unwanted message accidentally to someone which is embarrassing to the mother later.

As a product manager can you incorporate a feature in the phone where working moms can physically block their phones (like child locks in cars) so that she’s at peace that her child will not be able to make calls or access official emails. You then target this specific usage to go to market. While even other ladies may like this, you’re targeting all your messaging to this segment alone and wanting to dominate it.

Till next time then….think of domination of your market.

Carpe Diem!!!