Author: animeshjmathur

Just Ask …. you never know – Part 3

differentiation, education, ego, Fear, Marketing, Product Management, single target market

Today we will come down to the exact reason, why this idea is critical for anyone in marketing, product management or sales. This quality is absolutely critical to know and understand why someone is not buying from you, or why someone is not referring customers to you etc.

Marketing and product management teams have to ensure that their product / service sells in the market. That there’s a demand for their product or service on a continuous basis.

If the product is not moving then it becomes imperative to check out the prospects on why they aren’t buying from you. Is the category itself not moving or only your product within the category.

A lot of time guys in the field assume it’s price. That’s the first statement you will always hear if your product is not moving with respect to the competition in the same category. It’s very rare that people get out, in the field to ask questions to the prospects.

Like I mentioned in the first two posts , most of the times, it is our ego and our fear , which stops us from asking the questions. Asking the right questions in the market is key to getting your marketing right. If inspite of all the systematic planning you do, with identifying the single target market and identifying the differentiators and also educating your prospects, then its critical that you get down into the market and systematically ask a large cross section of the market, on what is the hinderance in wanting to buy your product.

A lot of times its just the perception, that is causing people to resist what you have to sell. Sometimes its lack of knowledge. But you will not be able to address these things if you don’t ask. Curiosity is not always a bad thing. And curiosity to know why the product that you are selling is not moving is absolutely essential for your business.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Just Ask – you never know…..Part 2

ego, Fear, Human Brain, Risks

In my last post on this topic I shared two real life incidents of how by just asking – they were able to get things. Both the people kept their egos and fear aside and checked and they were able to get things that they wanted.

Today we will look at why most people – including me , many times – end up with the mice rather than the antelopes.

The story goes that a lion is very much capable of capturing mice and eating them. But it does not hunt mice. It hunts antelopes. Mice are to be found all over the place, but antelopes are few and have to be searched. The lions also have to chase the antelopes to capture one of them, because antelopes can run very fast. But the lion still prefers to hunt the antelopes because the calorific value the lion gets by eating a mouse is not worth the effort. But when it hunts an antelope, it can keep the lion satiated for multiple days, so it’s worth the effort. A lot of times because we see the low hanging fruit we chase that, rather than chasing the worthwhile fruit.

Most of us have extremely big egos and / or a lot of fear. That stops us from asking questions. Given a chance most of us would be scared of even opening our mouth in front of a stranger. We would rather accept what is available without asking the question.

So a lot of times what “antelope” could have been yours, just disappears, because you didn’t ask the route to get the antelopes and stuck yourself in finding the “mice” because they were easier to find. Its all in our brain.

Our brain takes its primary role as survival and fears , asking a question may endanger you or your ego (people may laugh at you because you asked a stupid question or people may shout at you). In school I remember I was taught “curiosity killed a cat”. For a long time and quite a few times even now, this comes up at the back of my mind and stops me from asking questions.

But quite often its worth the try.

Till next time then……just ask…..curiosity doesn’t kill cats.

Carpe Diem!!!

Serendipity – Part 3

Serendipity

A lot of times we think of something and just by chance , you get a message related just for that.

I don’t know – how many of you have seen the movie Serendipity. If you haven’t, its a nice romantic movie about a person who believes in serendipity and the other who doesn’t but he is so much in love that he tries all means to reach out to her.

I use an android phone and on Saturday , I was thinking about deleting a lot of irrelevant photos which have been lying around and consuming memory in my phone. I have the “files” utility from Google, on my phone which I use to identify applications / files which are consuming a lot of memory. You need to know that I did not talk about deleting the photos with anyone. It was just something that was going on in my mind that I wanted to do on “some” day.

Yesterday morning when woke up and I was seeing the notifications on my phone, I saw a notification from “files” telling me that it had identified more than 12000 duplicate photos, which if I deleted, I could save about 605MB. I clicked not he notification and it actually took me to the photos where it showed me the original and the duplicates. I went through some of them randomly to check if by chance the Google algorithm could have made errors. But there were none, so I accepted the recommendations and Google cleaned up 605 MB of space for me.

Let me give you another example. You can verify this from my post yesterday. I had written about Dean Jackson’s fifty minute focus finder. however when I was writing about it, I could not locate the link to share it with you’ll.

I am on Dean Jacksons mailing list so I keep getting mail’s about his podcasts and other things that he keeps posting. Today morning when I opened my mail box, the topic of his mail was the fifty minute focus finder. For those who read my post yesterday and wanted to know what the fifty minute focus finder is, pls find the link here. I am posting it because as they say “it was meant to be” that’s why it appeared in front of me. https://www.morecheeselesswhiskers.com/155.

Now what would you call this?

For me this is pure serendepity.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Utilising thinking time – with structure

creativity, Flow, Focus, Habits, Human Brain, Thinking

In my posts earlier, I have shared with you some of the good tools I have found for focusing our time. I have especially liked the Dean Jackson video on Focus Finder. The methods he uses are simple yet profound. The key thing is that you have to ensure you are able to ensure you are able to pull out time for thinking activities.

Since we have so many things prompting us and drawing attention to them, getting dedicated thinking time is almost a rarity even for me. The challenge is that the brain has got so used to the idea of getting disturbed, that if you keep your phone away to concentrate on some activity, you actually feel guilty and end up seeing the phone just to ensure that you have not received an urgent call. The next off course is email. You dig into one and by the time you finish that there’s another one demanding your attention.

So inspite of so called success with some of the tools which have helped me, I have not yet been able to take maximum benefit out of the thinking process.

So I am working out to see how I can make thinking time a habit using the process suggested by B.J.Fogg in his book Tiny Habits. To make it useful I have also tried to incorporate a system of identifying the next problem to be solved in advance so that when I do get time to think, my brain is not going helper skelter, trying to figure out what needs to be done.

So yesterday when I tried solving one problem, I identified problems which are two layered below it. Meaning if don’t solve those problems, the problem I was trying to solve yesterday will not get solved. Therefore even though I did not solve the problem completely, the ideas that came to me during the thinking time, gave me some items to focus on to solve, before coming back to that problem.

Today since I did not have to think in terms of the problem to be solved, the moment I focused on the problem, my mind went into flow quickly before the door bell rang and disturbed me. But in that short time, with the problem to be solved, defined in advance, my brain was getting into action faster and came up with ideas much faster. If this can work, then I may not have the most elegant solutions immediately but would have started moving faster to solve challenges.

Please see if this works for you and let me know your views.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!