The best companies who could use my marketing advice

B2B, Business, Customers, ideal customer, lead generation, Marketing, Riding the elephant, single target market

I keep talking about a lot on the way you should identify the market, how you should target a segment and niche it . I talk about the challenges that come up when targeting the B2B space for a complex sale and how you can go about addressing them.

While most of whatever I talk about is overall good marketing practice, this is specially useful to people who own, run or work for companies who are less than $50 million in revenue, sell mid to high value products in the B2B space.

If you sell low dollar value items, then maybe a few things – especially about mapping different people in the organisation or structuring a value proposition or identifying the ecosystem may not completely be of value to you.

If you have already crossed the revenue of $50 million then chances are that you already are doing things and putting up systems which have helped you reach such a large turnover.

Its the companies, who are reaching about half a million dollars and want to break into the million dollar league and build processes which bring regular leads, who can benefit most from what I write. These would be my Ideal Customers.

All the concepts whether its the Single Target Market or the “Riding the Elephant” can provide immense leverage to companies who want to grow dramatically.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

The concept of Value in Services – 3

B2B, Sales, services

I had written two posts earlier on this topic. I wanted to explore a couple of other things to get this topic to a logical end.

We are clear that the value is what the customer thinks it’s worth. But there are a couple of other components – one is the price and the other is your cost of providing the service. One thing that I have learnt with service projects, in B2B customers, is that, they always take longer than planned. And costing is always done on the plan.

Since most of us are under pressure to pick up the deal, we don’t like the idea of putting in buffers for the project going over time, because we are afraid that competition will pick up the order because of the increase in price.

The over runs generally happen in the final stages of the project. If you were to think of the full project as an elephant walking through a gate, then, generally all the components of the project – the trunk, the ears, the 4 legs, everything comes out but the the tail gets stuck in the gate for some reason or the other.

This is the time that the final User Acceptance is getting done and because the user feels that she should not miss anything, she tries to ensure that all the “t”s are crossed and all the “I”s are dotted.

This is where your costs go higher than you had budgeted. The resources that you had thought will get off the project, can’t leave the project to start on another one. That is the people. Then there are the pieces of equipment and tools that are getting used in the project. You will be paying for all this. Without realising, slowly the actual profit starts falling.

The customer doesn’t realise this. If you take the argument of cost over-run to the procurement person, he will find all kinds of reasons to put you on the back foot and in most cases never pay-up.

So you need to figure out a way to ensure that your “Costs” actually take this into account when you give the “Price” to the customer and you need to figure out a way to show the “Value” to the customer. You also need to be clear on the process of signing off the project from the customer end. What kind of tests will they get done, what kind of reports will be needed, the kind of dashboards that will be needed. List out all the points up front while closing the order.

Till next time then …. make more profits

Carpe Diem!!!

B2B small value sales

B2B, Sales

Generally whenever I write about the B2B customers, I write about the complexity, the inertia and the lack of interest in changing the incumbent. All these stem from the fact that I am talking of a mid to high value sale. I will define the mid to high value sale as anything more than $25000/- or greater than INR 10,00,000/-

B2B companies also buy small value items where the values could be very small and local managers have the authority to close the sale. If you are dealing in that kind of items, there’s no point in spending time tying to showcase the whole process of how you do a migration or a transition etc. It will only waste your time.

You need to manage the sales cycles depending on the value of the product or service that you are selling. If you are selling a low value deal then you cannot afford to spend time in building a proposal for each prospect. The cost of building a proposal in some cases would turnout to be higher than the revenue.

You need to therefore focus on building a volume of deals, where you take verbal confirmations and then just send them a mail confirming the discussion and asking for the order.

In case of small value orders a lot of big customers actually also enter into rate contracts so that they don’t have to negotiate these deals each time that they have to be done.

So choose your method of sales depending on the kind of values that you expect to pick up.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Focus on Single Market & Media

B2B, Focus, lead generation, Marketing, single target market

Today I was watching a video on YouTube about productising a service offering, to make it scalable. This video is an interaction between Chris Do and Greg Hickman.

I keep talking about a Single Target Market for your offering and how you need to focus all your attention to being able to dominate that market before moving into a different market. Getting all your learning whether its about the social media platform you want to use or the message you want to convey for this one focused market.

At the beginning of the video Greg talks about focusing for one year, with one offering using one media if you want to scale up. He talks about a couple of other “ones” also.

But these stuck to me, because while I only emphasize the idea of one market, this gentleman is going a step further, to also ensure your focus on the media.

I fully agree to the idea of focus to achieve your objectives. Once you have tested the media which is getting you the most traction in the Single Target Market of your choice , then you should only keep using that medium and see how you can reduce the cost, increase the traffic and increase the conversions.

If you do this with focused attention for a year, you would have created a huge “top of the funnel” to keep you busy for a long time. In case of B2B this focus from your marketing team will ensure that your sales teams have leads coming their way.

I am going to explore this idea and will keep you posted.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!