Author: animeshjmathur

Marketing Stamina

B2B, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, persistence

This is a phrase I first heard from Dean Graziosi. I have written about it earlier also . Its a very simple thought process. I have used it in terms of B2B marketing but I would guess it would apply in all kinds of marketing.

The logic is that every market takes time to adapt to a new offering that you bring to the market. It could be because of inertia in B2B setups because of the sheer number of people involved in making decisions as well as the complexity of processes.

If you don’t have the stamina to last through the cycle before the adoption of your offering “crosses the chasm”. This stamina is both in terms of finances and your own abilities to persist.

Today I got a different view of this . You would have read about my philosophy of riding the elephant to get access to markets. We had been riding one very large OEM for a certain set of tools. Between 2014 and 2016 we invested a lot before we got any business. But subsequent to that we got a lot of business which suddenly dried up by 2019 because the OEM decided to take a different direction (I have written about these in the challenges when riding the elephant)

Now however today I got a call from one of the reps of the OEM checking if we still have the team that was created. Generally we prefer to play the long game. So we had kept the team because we had some residue business that we were closing, while we were evaluating our options with other OEMs.

The OEM now wants to utilize the same team to go out in the market with the new products that they are launching.

If we didn’t have the marketing stamina (if we had not planned with a long term view) we would not have been able to today get a jump start.

Think long-term and plan accordingly.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!

Root Cause Analysis   – in product management

Assumptions, Marketing, Product Management, Sales

Most engineers and technical folks would understand Root Cause Analysis, RCA in short. People use various tools like the fish bone diagram that the Japanese developed or the 5 Whys to figure out the root cause

The root cause analysis as the name suggests, helps you get to the key constraint, the main reason , instead of just monitoring the effects. 

How that helps,  is that once you rectify that specific cause, the problems which are related to that cause would not surface again. It does not mean that no other problems will show up. It just means that you will then need to work on the next root cause and so on. In effect over a period of time your whole system will become better and better.

In operations,  manufacturing,  production,  there’s a  lot of numeric data which keeps coming in, which can be useful in running analytics and analyzing the causes.

In product management the analysis of root cause becomes a little more difficult. First, you generally end up doing RCA only when something has failed.  Which means there are already emotions running high with everyone from finance to sales to production looking to find the scape goat.

Second, marketing has a lot to do with markets, which means people – the buyers – are involved. When you have people involved the psychological aspects are also important. 

So when doing the root cause analysis of why a product did not make it in the market,  you need to ensure that even trivial things related to inputs of people are not missed.

These small subjective things can change your analysis to help you identify the key reasons why your product didn’t do as well as expected.  Sometimes you will come across multiple causes which all seem to be equally important.  Generally this means somewhere in the analysis there are assumptions which have not been substantiated clearly.

Once you have called out the assumptions then generally you will end up with only one or two causes. 

Once you handle those, chances are you will recover your sales again.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Using reverse psychology in our daily life

mindset, possibility thinking, psychology, Sales

When we are in school we are taught to follow a rule book and solve problems in a given manner. If you don’t solve it that way the teacher may actually deduct marks. There are benefits of this system,  because it helps the teacher grade her students on a fixed set of parameters.  It’s not good for the students because when they do go out in the real world they find moving targets with no method to directly use.

Since we get so used to being spoon fed through the school system,  we are not able to think different possibilities.

One method which I  use is to let people experience the  challenge of the  straight jacketed way of solving a problem. If I try telling people the challenges in their solution then they resist my ideas.  So I  tell them how I  would go about it and then I  ask them.

I ask them of how they think they would like to solve the problem.  Once they tell me the solution and if I  don’t think it might be a workable solution,  I  ask them to proceed with solving the problem their way. But I  put a low risk milestone.  Only if the low risk milestone can be realized, are they allowed to move ahead otherwise they have to find another way.

This way they don’t feel that I don’t listen to their ideas and I am also ‘not betting the whole farm’. In addition if their solution works then, I have learnt a new way to solve the problem.  On the other hand if it doesn’t work,  I  can then tell them the reason why doing it my way has its benefits and they get to learn from me.

As we grow older, we get more and more fixated with our ideas and resist ideas from others.  So if you try to push something , it doesn’t work . On the other hand you let them try their idea with a low risk outcome and then show the problems , they may be more willing to listen to your ideas.

Professional negotiators have a complete arsenal of these kind of techniques to get people to come to a win – win solution. Sales is another specialized negotiation. In yesterday’s post I had written about how you could use the same concepts.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Using reverse psychology to win in sales

education, Human Brain, Marketing, mindset, psychology, Thinking

Most customers believe that when a sales person comes / talks or meets them, they will talk superlative about their company products and services. A lot of that will be worthless and baseless.

So most customers raise their guard and are ready with all kinds of objections to counter the claims of the sales person. Its just a mindset issue.

I have mentioned many times that marketing and sales are all about applied psychology. So if we know that the customer will come up with various objections to our offer, why not give out all the things that your offer does not have – upfront. This way you will puncture all the arguments that the customer could have been trying to add up against your offer.

Obviously you need to word it in such a way , that it does not demean the solution that you have provided. You could put it as …. most of the vendors have policies that completely disregard the customer’s need for authority….we were also like that….however we have now got better sense and brought about this change so that you have the authority….

By acknowledging the challenges upfront, you disarm the buyer with whatever objections they were intending to raise against you.

In addition if you have been educating your buyers , using your marketing, then the buyer would already have been primed with the fact that you keep the customer’s interests in mind first. Which helps reduce the pressure on the sales team when they are selling.

It’s taken me many years to utilize the understanding of human psychology in improving my customer handling capabilities and I am trying to still learn everyday. You should also see how you can utilize this knowledge.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

As an example