Author: animeshjmathur

Understanding your competition

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

If you can’t think what your competitors can do you will be someone’s lunch soon.

In my earlier posts I have written about why it’s important to have competition.  For one it shows there’s a market.  That’s a very critical point.

Second if the competitor has entered the market before you then you can learn from their mistakes.  Third it helps you define your niche even better.

But competition is a very dynamic thing.  The horse carriage people did not think Automotive would make them a relic.

Especially when you are doing product management in a technology industry you need to look out where the next competition will come from.  Generally it never comes from your known competitors.

Did Nokia realize that Apple will totally decimate them.  Or for that matter Kodak even though Kodak itself had built the first digital camera.

One of the best ways to understand where you competitors could hurt you is by placing yourself in your competitor’s shoes.  Knowing the weaknesses that exist in your existing product or service or technology identify where could some other company come and displace you.

This may not always alert you to the company who could hurt you but it could help identify trends in the market which could go against you.

Which brings me to the other aspect of product management. Be out there in the market,  in the store or with a customers, consistently trying to understand why customers are looking at something else instead of buying from you.  It’s most often not only about price.

Till next time then….keep watching for your competitors.

Carpe Diem!!!

Leverage

Leverage, Marketing, Marketing Ecosystem, relationships, Sales, Uncategorized

When you think of the word leverage it generally ends up with a negative image intended mind.  It sounds like being in debt.

In financial terms, leverage can have some negative connotation but today I am going to talk about the positive effects of leverage.

Archimedes is supposed to have said “give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it and I shall move the world.” The biggest advantage of leverage that with very small effort you can achieve massive results. Little hinges swing large doors.

Moving in your car versus walking is leverage, automating a factory is leverage and all these help tremendously

In marketing (and sales also as part of marketing ) there are tremendous processes where we can leverage on things like automation etc.

But my favorite kind of leverage is relationships. These could be relationships with customers, relationships with vendors or your network. If you have enough good relationships in place, as Archimedes mentioned in a different context, you can grow your business dramatically.

However in any relationship is always better to give, before you get. That way the principle of reciprocity comes into play. Otherwise the person will feel exploited or used.

Other than relationships good sales people are tremendous leverage. A successful advertisement / message in one market can be leverage to get into other markets faster.

A CRM can help the new salesperson on speed faster to the accounts that she needs to target because all the historical information about the prospect is available.

A family of aspirational products and brands are also leverage for the company.

I would love to hear what is your favorite leverage in marketing or sales.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Travelling the world – during Covid times

travel

If you have been following my blog for sometime, you would have noticed that I keep talking about my bucket list.

This bucket list is primarily about travelling to different destinations and taking up different kind of adventures. I have wanted to visit New Zealand and Australia, do snorkeling of the coast in Australia , visit the dragon island in Indonesia, stay in the ice hotel in Iceland, watch the Northern Lights as well as the Southern Lights and a lot more.

Now since the Covid started in India in March of last year in India we have been more or less locked in our houses or at a maximum visited a few local places nearby.

With the second wave of the Covid the situation has become even more depressing out here and I was talking to my brother about it.

He knows my interest in travelling so he suggested a few videos on YouTube which take you to different parts of the world literarily. Since yesterday therefore we have been watching Jane MacDonald’s cruise trips. These are videos are so well made, that they relieved some of the places I had visited in the US and Canada and also showed us some places which we had not been.

Today we were watching the cruise trip to Australia and New Zealand. She took us to quite a few places on my bucket list and also added a few more.

I don’t know when we will have the ability to actually go out and explore the world again and meet new people and do new adventures. Till then, instead of a physical travel list , I now have a bucket list of YouTube journeys that I have to undertake .

If you have other suggestions for visiting different places around the world do share in the comments section below.

Carpe Diem!!!

Labeling your experience makes a difference

Human Brain, Labelling, Thinking

I learned this line of thinking about 20 years back.

I was in Singapore on a business trip. My partner in Singapore had a customer who was having a “problem” and they needed our expertise to solve the problem.

Till that time I always labelled a “problem” as a problem. As engineers we are trained to solve different kinds of problems. Whether they are problems related to calculus or related to magnetic interference in an electrical signal.

Now when I met my partner in Singapore, he changed my whole attitude towards ” problems” by calling them challenges. Especially when dealing with people – and all business problems are about dealing with people – if you label the problem as a challenge, the brain functions differently.

When you look at something in business as a problem the approach that your brain takes is adversarial. It kind of goes into figuring out all kinds of ways of how to oppose the person/company which is causing us the problem.

On the other hand when you label something as a challenge, you try to work collaboratively with the prospect / customer to find a solution. It now makes the whole situation completely different and easier to manage. Now your brain starts doing possibility thinking and looks for various options.

Coming back to my partner in Singapore, I was amazed at the way he labelled the situation with the customer also and then collaboratively worked out a solution between them, customer and us. This turned out to be our first order from Singapore twenty years back.

Since then a lot of times I have observed that the way I label the situation has a lot to do the way I solve it. If I am labelling the situation as manageable then I find a solution faster. The brain does get influenced by the labels we put.

Try this and let me know who you benefit.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!