Author: animeshjmathur

When will the tide turn

Human Brain, mindset, Turn around, Worry

The last 3 weeks in India have been dreadful to say the least. We have had an explosion of the Covid19 pandemic in the second wave.

Everyday we only see dreadful pictures and hear about near and dear ones who are either infected or someone close to them is infected or is dying.

Even though I am an optimist and the tide always turns, I am not sure if this is the bottom or we are still some distance away from the bottom.

While I am trying to utilize this time when we are locked in to read some intelligent stuff, which I am also sharing with you from time to time, I do get disturbed with information about my colleagues and their loved ones.

So while on books, right now I am reading the book Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham. A book with some really good questions already laid out to help you think about your business and therefore life. The positive about the book is that its not got lengthy chapters so you even if you get interrupted you don’t have to restart from a long way away. The best part like I said earlier is that he’s already laid out a lot of questions for us people to get our thinking process started.

Will share with you if there are some specific take aways that I got.

Meanwhile, I know the tide always turns, its just when will it turn now for the better so that all our people are better soon.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Discipline – not money – for financial independence

Affirmative action, compounding, Financial Independence, Human Brain

Yesterday I was listening to a talk by Keith Cunnigham. He is an author of multiple books including the book “The Road Less Stupid”

During this talk with Joe Polish, Keith asked a very pertinent question and I paraphrase it here- “If you were to look back at your 3 financial decisions seriously would you have been better off by not having taken those decisions”

I started thinking about my major decisions and one of them was buying a house. I have written a full post earlier also on this – that it was not a decision I would like anyone to take because it chokes the financial bandwidth – if you are buying it with a loan. If you are buying it all cash then its a good asset or taking a loan of the amount which gives you some kind of tax advantage then its worthwhile.

But then I started thinking again whether I would have been better off financially by not buying the house. On a theoretical calculation, the amount of installments I am paying on my mortgage, if I had been investing the same amount in equities or mutual funds, because of the compounding over 20 years, I would have been much better off to buy this house today and still have lots money left over.

However when I think on the flip side, by buying the house and having monthly mortgage payment, I had to exercise a tremendous amount of discipline to ensure that the payment was done on a given date. I am not sure I had the maturity at the time of putting up SIPs and I was financially illiterate to ensure that I block of the amount into an investment on a monthly basis.

Which brings me to the bigger point – for financial independence – which I have devoted a lot of my posts on – has very little to do with what you earn. It has more to do with what you invest automatically. The key word over here being automatic.

If you think you can have the discipline to ensure consistency every month , to invest on your own, chances are your brain will play games and you will find multiple excuses for not investing. On the other hand if the money will go out of your account automatically even before you get to use it, then you will find a way to manage your finances with the remaining money.

To come back on Keith’s point, yes I would have had a better financial position, provided I had the discipline to ensure my monthly investments.

How are you doing on the financial discipline side, look forward to hearing your comments.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!

Single Target Market – Determining the viability in B2B

B2B, Business, differentiation, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, persistence, segmentation, single target market

I have consistently been harping on the fact that you need to find a niche in the market and a market in the niche. Finding a market in the niche is the critical part in determining if the market is even worth looking at. This is not about prioritizing on the different niches. Its about discarding a niche all together. Please understand that B2B buying is generally not impulsive. Which means you need to play this game over a long term.

For priortising of niches we will have a separate discussion.

Criteria for the B2B segmentation / niche viability

  1. Your average deal size – recurring or one time
  2. Gross Margin
  3. Number of addressable prospects in the niche

Lets look at bundles of 100 or 1000 addressable prospects and I will share a simple model to do a quick calculation of the viability of the market.

Lets say you have a B2B prospect base of 100 and each deal is worth $100000/- per annum recurring. Which means the whole market is worth $10m per year and over a 5 year period if you were to be able to pick up 20 clients you can get a revenue of more than $20m cumulative approx. That’s a good market to be in, because with referrals and other things put together this market may actually end up being very large. Even at a 20% gross margin in 5 years you would make about $4m.

On the other hand if your average size deal was only $1000/- per annum recurring, then the market in 5 years may not be more than $200 thousand. Even if you make 50% gross margins, you will make at the end of 5 years about $100K.

So depending on the size of your average revenue you decide if the size of the niche is viable. The same $1000 product in a niche which has 1000 prospects could be worthwhile over a 5 a year period if you were able to pick up an share of 20% of the clients.

I have found that looking at a bundle of less than 100 tends to be scary because you don’t know how many of the clients will actually move away from their incumbent vendors. From a 100 prospects, Dean Jackson’s inevitability principle will lead to around 20 prospects in 5 years coming your way because some incumbent will make errors and if you are in front of the customer on a regular basis they will end up calling you just because they see you as persistent. A lot of time people don’t have the marketing stamina to last that many years.

Try working with this model and let me know if you found this useful.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

B2B Messaging – finding the most effective channel

B2B, Business, differentiation, differentiation, ideal customer, Marketing, Marketing Ecosystem, messaging, segmentation, single target market

In consumer items there are a lot of ways to reach a customer – television, print, social media etc. Depending on where your demographic audience is and how the psychographics work out, you could also use good old direct mail and leaflets and tele-callers.

In B2B markets there are unique challenges. There’s a massive fall in print magazine circulation especially the business focused magazines. Not sure how many people watch television to check out the next business strategy.

In the B2B market, mail does not reach the person on the desk, because a lot of times people don’t have a desk and are mobile. So the mail has to be collected by the person by going to the mail room. Since people don’t come to the office so often and with Covid19, even fewer are coming to office so no one visits the mail room and the mail you send does not reach the intended recipients. So if you are targeting professional services companies, financial services etc. I have found direct mail to be a tough ask.

On the other hand if you were looking at companies which were more into manufacturing, utilities etc. I would guess direct mail would work especially for the back office functions and factory / warehouse functions.

Email is a quick, free medium and that’s it very basic problem. In B2B all the people are inundated with mail and you get a fraction of a second on the mobile phone, before the person ignores or deletes your mail. That is if your mail even reaches the person’s mailbox, because the spam filters will block your mail if they even observe a single item in the mail which smells of spam.

Before the pandemic started, webinars was a good way to get people to join you and hear your message, but I am observing a definite sense of exhaustion with webinars. The registration and attendance and company sponsored webinars has fallen dramatically. It may still be possible to get some attendance if the webinar is being run by an industry body or an independent analyst or a reputed media group with some respected industry veterans.

As a B2B marketer I am always looking out for some effective ways to get in front my audience. By ensuring that I target a “single target market”, and try and target only my ideal customer profile, I try to learn from each interaction that we have with a client and see how we can incorporate that learning into our next interaction. Its always a good idea to send a personal email to a person so that the spam filters don’t think you are spamming. You try to use as much knowledge you have of the industry to make this email so that the person reading it finds it useful.

Please let me know in case you have found any other method to reach your prospects in B2B in the comments below.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!