Challenges in choosing B2B partners for your market

B2B, ideal customer, Marketing, Partners, route to market, single target market

While I have always maintained doing partnerships is the key to entering a market faster, I have observed some real challenges with respect to handling expectations. It will be wise to keep this in mind if you have the responsibility to create a partner ecosystem on the selling side.

To handle the expectations mismatch, the first thing to be sure is that the partner you are targeting is actually doing business with the customers (your Ideal Customer profile) you want to target. A lot of issues arise because with the secondary research that your team does, the partners seem to be in the same market that you want to target, but after you start engaging with them, there is a disconnect. So you need to be clear before you sign up a partner, that they actually have customers in your target market.

The other issue is with respect to the sales bandwidth – if your agenda for partnering is to get access to a large market, then you need to have enough bandwidth allocated to your product/service, by the partner. Most of the times the partners over commit in terms of what they will be able to do. This happens because either

They have fewer sales people than they told you.
The sales people already have too many products/services to sell so your product/service is an overload on them
Your product/service is technically more complex and the sales people don’t have the ability to take this to the market

One other item which I encounter often is the expectation mismatch on both sides. In my opinion this happens because from your side, the channel’s person is in a hurry to show partner acquisition without clearly understanding the partner’s strengths and weaknesses. This happens all the time because all of us have to meet our monthly/quarterly numbers.

On the other side, the partner thinks that since they are partnering with your company, you will help them sell. While to a certain extent, you will enable the partner to sell and you will have marketing programs to help the partners, at the end of the day, the partner has to sell. If you have to sell for the partner, then why do you need a partner.

I have noticed these as the key challenges. If you ensure that communication are clear, the qualification criteria for a partner that you want and the type of people that they employ is clear then a lot of heartburn and wasted time can be avoided.

As we progress I will share other challenges that you should be aware off.

Inspite of that, I would still think that the partner route is the fastest way to get into a new market.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

What do you want to achieve – from the partnership

B2B, ideal customer, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, Partners, single target market, Symbiotic relationship

I wrote 3 posts on riding the elephant – and how the relationship with an elephant can help you get through any forest (market).

What was not clear from those 3 posts was one fact – which elephant should you choose…..this is as critical as identifying the single target market that I keep talking about.

The elephant that you choose to partner with, should be focussed on the market in which you want to operate. If the elephant has a different area of interest compared to you then taking this elephant is going to take you into the wrong forest.

To be able to choose the right elephant therefore you need to ask the fundamental question – what is it that we want to achieve with this partnership. Once this question is clearly answered then it become easier to identify you partners that you want to work with.

This question gets answered even better when you have identified the single target market that you want to address, because then you will know if the partners that you are looking for has product or services for those customers that you want to work with.

If you want to target B2B customers in the enterprise space as an example then your partner needs to be someone who already has customers in the enterprise space, and who does not have a product or service which directly competes with yours. If the partner already has something that is similar to yours then they will never move your product.

Keeping the above example in mind, you then need to figure out how you will work with the various sales people of your partner and why should they take you to the customer.

While partnering is a very valid concept, there are a lot of human issues which need to be addressed. The bigger the target partner you are trying to work with , the more sales, pre-sales and marketing people involved, the larger is the challenge of engaging them and larger is the stamina you should have to wait for success.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Competition is a good thing – Part 3

B2B, competition, differentiation, Marketing, Product Management, Sales, single target market

I had written 2 posts on this topic in March this year. I got a lot of likes for those posts.

For all those of you who are in marketing and sales, you can look at competition in a slightly negative way because they they take your deals away or they feed all the negative news about your company and you.

The first aspect that you need to be clear about is who is your direct competition and who is your indirect competition. For a computer seller who is selling a spreadsheet program in the market – Microsoft and Google resellers could be competition directly. But a paper register and a calculator can be an indirect competition. Depending on the size of the transactions that are done, a paper register can be used to note the transactions and a calculator can be used to do the addition, multiplication etc.

So why is this important. You need to see from a customer perspective – what is the outcome you get for the customer. What are the various ways that a customer can achieve the same outcome using your competition.

So taking the example above you know that you cannot provide value to a customer who can achieve his transactions on a paper register. So that segment of the market gets eliminated.

Now lets look at the other end of your competition which is direct. For example purposes we said its Microsoft and Google. So if you are in marketing , product management or sales, your first agenda will need to be to identify the specs on how your product performs on non-Microsoft platforms. Put another way, you would like to enhance the qualities of the product on non-Microsoft platforms.

Which makes your target market segment that much more well defined.

Its always better to dominate a small segment of the market than to be a nobody in a very large market.

Whenever you are entering a market, I have always maintained, you have to start with only a well defined Single Target Market only. Only after you dominate that, should you look to expand.

Till next time then…..keep looking out for competition from all directions.

Carpe Diem!!!

Testing for marketing messaging

B2B, messaging, Testing

Everyone is given the motivational talk about Edison and that he failed to 9000 times before he was successful with the light bulb. While you cannot take away the fact that he was a master inventor, he also utilized the principles of mass testing. He tested vigorously and kept learning from each test….so they were iterations not failures.

When a company says that the electric motor they manufacture has an average life of 3000 hours, they would not test each motor for 3000 hours. They would typically create a sample and then keep the sample on for 3000 motor-hours. If no motor fails then 3000 hours is a safe figure to commit. By continuously testing samples over a long period of time you will be able to come to a figure which is then extremely reliable.

What Edison did was employ multiple people for testing different filament options at a mass level on the electric bulb. So even though there were more than 9000 failures, these failures were not all sequential done by one man, but parallel tests.

In messaging also you can’t keep trying to check which message will stick to your target audience in B2B. What you need to do is test parallel messages and see on which message you get traction. Then the message that gets you the best traction, becomes your “control” piece. Now you start testing against this message by changing one variable at a time.

You need to test very fast at mass scale. One of the challenges I have faced in doing these mass testing procedures is that the people involved lose patience and the tests go haywire because people start compromising. The testing process has to be rigorous, for you to get a clear winner.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!