B2B

Entering a new technology based B2B business – Part V

B2B, Marketing, Marketing Ecosystem, route to market

What is the Technology Infrastructure Needed

In the last 4 episodes of this blog, we have focused on multiple things, while wanting to get into a new technology based B2B business. When I say a new technology based B2B business – there are 3 components –

  1. New – new could be for you , as in a new product or a new service that you are launching OR it could be new for the market itself
  2. Technology – the key emphasis over here being that it’s something which is related to technology driving the sale of this product. The technology could be existing or it could be a net new way of using technology
  3. B2B – so we are not selling to a consumer, the sale will typically have multiple stake holders and there could be budgets involved, which the customer will need to have, to be able to procure this item from you.

The reason I brought this issue up, in this episode, is because if the product or service is “new” for you, but has been existent in the market for a long time, then people will be aware of the technology infrastructure they will need to have. For example people have been so used to using mobile phones, now, they know they will need to carry a charger with them or a battery pack because the battery of the mobile phone can die down with usage.

However if the technology, that you are wanting to bring to the market, is new, then for you to be able to sell it successfully, you will need to see if the market already has the technology infrastructure. A simple example has been the electric car. We have been hearing about the electric car for close to 20 years. But figuring out the light weight Lithium Ion batteries and public infrastructure to charge these batteries has been a big challenge for the mass adoption of electric cars. Another assumption of course, which has not been accounted for, is the availability of electricity to charge the cars. In a lot of developing nations, you still have long durations, when electricity is not available. You may have the best electric cars in the world, but people will not buy the cars if they perceive a challenge in operating the car.

In B2B this challenge is further exaggerated, because multiple people are involved in the decision making and No One wants to be the one with a failed project. That is the most fundamental thing that needs to be addressed in a B2B market.

Whoever is the manager / director/ CXO that you are talking to, at the back of the mind they all have one fundamental question – I hope they can make it work, based on the claims they are making

If the customer you are going to, with your new technology (let us call it level N) and they don’t have technology at level N-1, then they have to think in terms of first coming to N-1, even before they can think of buying your product or service. When they will reach N-1, they would have put in the infra that can be leveraged by your technology. If the technology is new and the base infra that you need is also net new, then you have to fight the battle at two levels, which is much more complex and with a very low chance of success.

Having made the above statement, a lot of people among you may come out with the argument that the mobile phones – when they first cam out needed the “new” phones and new towers, since they didn’t work on “wires”. Well for the mobile phones to succeed, the telecom companies had to invest int he infra, not the consumer. For the consumer, it was just about having a different kind of a phone and it dramatically increased convenience – which is another variable, that I will take up in another episode.

A lot of times my sales people tell me, that the customer was “Wowed” with our solution, but after spending three or four calls, the case is not moving anywhere. One of the key reasons when cases get stalled or prospects stop responding to your calls for a technologically superior (new) product, is the fact that they don’t have the base technology which they can use to migrate to your technology. Leap frogging one technology generation, can be very dangerous and most corporate people don’t want to take that risk.

So one of the base qualifying criteria for you, when you enter into a market with a new technology is to identify the N-1 technology that will be needed for your prospects to have a smooth transition to your technology.

I can give multiple examples from my failures – we thought of coming out with a Virtual assistant with an avatar to which you could ask questions or get a job done, exactly like a person assigned to you. But for that the microphones had to be so good that they would transmit the sound clearly. Most people didn’t have that and we failed.

Sometimes it could be a combination of technologies involved at stage N-1, not just a single one. Taking the same example that I listed above, we also need to have good internet connections and good cloud usage. Since a lot of people did not have a large bandwidth, they were not able to perceive, how this solution would get deployed in their environment.

I hope with this episode of my my blog, you have been able to also get some “Aha” moment on why some of your cases got stalled, even though, initially the customer was ga-ga on your new technology platform.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

P.S: In case you are launching a new technology based product/service in the B2B market and you have a time constraint, just ask me for the list by sending me a mail on animeshjmathur@gmail.com.

Entering a new technology based B2B business – Part IV

B2B, differentiation, Marketing, niche, segmentation, Technology

Identifying the addressable market

In marketing there is a statement that is thrown around a lot – “find a niche in the market”

This is a very powerful statement. It clearly helps to identify a piece of the market , that you can “own”, if you are successful. It’s always better to own a small pond than to be a small fish in the ocean. Even P&G which has multiple billion dollar brands in its stable, has clearly identified niches for each of its products. So the statement is absolutely current.

I will just like to put a small caveat to the statement and make the statement read – Find a niche in the market and also find if there is a market in the niche.

Let me explain this with a real life experience. When I had just joined a company, fresh out of University, I was given a product which was basically about selling process control equipment . It was a very sophisticated product for its time. We created a solution using this product which we executed on a couple of sugar plants, very successfully. So I was given the responsibility to go out in my territory and target all the sugar plants and sell this solution, because we had found a “niche” in the market, which others were not targeting.

The solution which we had executed, was done on a very large sugar plant, while most of the sugar plants in my territory were small capacity plants. In addition these plants didn’t even have electric panels in the boiler room, so how would they even install such a sophisticated process control equipment. (This led me to create a Maxim for myself – if there’s no road in the town that you are going to sell, you don’t try to sell a luxury car.)

Coming back to the topic at hand – what I realised was that we had a niche in the market which none of the other process control companies, at that time, were targeting, but the market was just made up of 10 odd companies that we could sell to. No one else could afford us. So eventually we wasted a lot of energy and eventually got out of the market.

So now whenever we talk about identifying a niche in the market- in which we want to target our product or service – I want to always check how much is the addressable market. Combined with the questions that I raised in the first 3 parts of this series, if you don’t find an answer to this question correctly then you will waste a lot of time and money.

In the technology based businesses, especially if you are getting in a new technology, you also need to identify if there are enough companies who are using the earlier version of the technology or if there’s requisite infrastructure to incorporate your new technology. To give an example of this, if you are bringing in a SaaS product, one of the pertinent things to check out is – do they get enough network bandwidth across all their offices, so that they can utilise a SaaS based model. If you are trying to sell this product where network bandwidth infrastructure itself doesn’t exist, then even if you have identified a niche in the market for your SaaS product, you won’t be able to succeed because there aren’t enough companies who have the bandwidth to utilise the product.

This is a critical piece in planning your marketing activities. Let me know how you go about identifying the addressable market.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

P.S: In case you would like to get my checklist for launching a new technology based product or service in the B2B market, drop me a message.

Entering into a new technology based B2B business – Part 3

B2B, Marketing, Technology

In this, third part of my checklist, for launching a Technology based B2B business – we will look at figuring out how is the customer presently solving the problem. If you are reading my blog for the first time, I would suggest , you read Part 1 of the checklist and Part 2 of the checklist to get a better picture of the process.

That will give you a background to my thinking process and see whether it resonates with your thinking.

Companies find solutions to the problems they are facing. So even though you may have a unique product/service, they may not find it useful, if they are already solving the problem in a different way. It may not be the most elegant, it may not be the most efficient, but nonetheless it is still solving the problem for them.

Knowing this is important because as Perry Marshall says – if its not a “bleeding neck” problem, people will not move to solve it.

In a B2B scenario, this is all the more important, because there is an inherent inertia in the case of B2B. This could be because of the fact that the person responsible does not have the “power” within the organisation, or it could be because she has been given other priorities by her boss and she is trying to close those first or a plethora of hundred other things.

Another issue for the inertia , is the allocation of budgets in B2B. Most companies work on a budget which gets decided at the beginning of the financial year. Generally new things are not incorporated into the budget in the middle of the year, until and unless it’s critical.

So let’s assume that you have understood the “how” the person is solving the problem. You now need to figure out if your solution will give them incremental improvement over the existing solution or will it be dramatic.

If your solution is just incrementally better, the next issue is to figure out the amount of disruption your solution will cause to the existing process and the cost of your solution. If the improvement is incremental and the disruption is large and the cost is also considerable (relatively) then the chances of you being able to sell your solution are very limited because of the lethargy I listed above.

On the other end of the spectrum, if the solution can cause dramatic improvement in the way the problem is getting solved and the disruption to the existing process is also not much, then you may get some early adopters. If you succeed with the initial prospects then you can document the success and take it to others.

There can be many ways to skin a cat, I have shared mine above. Test it in your environment and if you think it suits you, please go ahead and use it. If you succeed, I would be glad to hear about it.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

P.S: If any of you , is however interested in receiving my 12 point checklist right now , to help you plan your marketing strategy for a new launch, just message me with your email id and I will send it out to you.

Entering into a new technology based B2B business – Part 2

Assumptions, B2B, Business, Marketing, Marketing Stamina

In my last post we focussed on identifying the problem from the perspective of the customer, that you intend to solve with your new technology enabled solution. If you would like a refresh, you can read that blog post here

In this post we will look at the second part of my checklist which is identifying if the problem was unique to that one customer or do you see it happening with other people in that industry or in that geography.

Sometimes it is easy to get confused between looking at a tree and assuming that the whole forest will be made of only those type of trees. It used to happen to me very often during my younger days. These days though, I try to ensure that I don’t succumb to this folly.

So while you are interacting with your first customer on the solution, you need to in parallel, check out all the similar type of customers in your area / industry and see if they also face the same problem.

If we were to take the same example of automating the invoice reading process, that we covered in the last blog post, the problem from the customer’s perspective was – the long line of trucks waiting at the gate.

Now you may go to other similar customers and check if they also face the same problem of a long line of trucks standing at the gate to make an entry. When you meet them, or message them, you realise that this problem doesn’t resonate with them. This is the time when you need to figure out if you have defined the “similar” correctly.

It’s quite possible that the first customer, who had this problem, could be having it because they don’t have open land near their factory, so their trucks have to occupy the road. The other customers may have the land and therefore their trucks come inside and wait so they don’t see it as such a big issue.

If that be the case, maybe you will need to decide that your similar set of customers should also have an attribute which mentions the size of the waiting area for incoming trucks. If there aren’t enough such companies, then you will need to reevaluate your hypothesis and market definition and rework all the economics of your market entry.

If you don’t do this, you will end up wasting a lot of time and money trying to break into the market. Both of these resources are scarce, so its a good idea to do this exercise as early as possible.

Next time I will take up the third item in my checklist

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

P.S: If any of you , is however interested in receiving my 12 point checklist right now , to help you plan your marketing strategy for a new launch, just message me with your email id and I will send it out to you.