TRUST & FEAR in B2B

B2B, Fear, Marketing, Product Management, Sales, Trust

In every relationship TRUST is a very big factor.

In a B2B situation , its an even bigger issue ,because the person who’s going to be your sponsor for whatever your product or service that you sell, cannot afford to fail.

The fear of failure in B2B environments is even bigger than when you deal with consumers. Any B2B environment whether corporate, government or semi government, all have multiple hierarchies involved.

So the person you deal with can’t afford to fail in front of her peers, in front of her boss and her boss can’t fail in front of her (the boss’) peers. The larger the organization the bigger the problem.

That’s one key reason why there’s so much inertia in making decisions in organizations. This inertia causes large organizations to fail in the long run, which is another story.

For a product manager or marketing manager or sales person, its not about how good your product or service is, its more about how much does the prospect TRUST you. Fear falls only when Trust increases.

If you can’t build the Trust, the prospect will go with the incumbent vendor or technology or partner because then at least people will not directly blame her for failure. There used to be a saying in IT circles ” No CIO got fired for choosing IBM” . IBM was the default standard at one time for information technology. They were more expensive than most, but still picked up business because they were trusted.

As a product or marketing person, your primary responsibility therefore is to figure out, how you can build trust around what you “sell”, that will ease the process of getting traction in the market. If you see some of my earlier posts, I have spoken about how education is one of the best forms of building trust.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Marketing versus Sales

B2B, Marketing, Sales, Trust

In a lot of companies there’s always a tug-of-war between sales and marketing. They are considered to be two independent functions.

My way of looking at it, is a little different. I have always considered marketing and sales as one consolidated function. Maybe this has to do with my predominant background in B2B rather than consumer.

As I look at it , the job of both the functions is to get a client for whatever you make. If that be the case, then a sales person’s job is to sell face to face and close a deal. Are you still with me. However a sales person has limited bandwidth.

Whenever you’re entering a new account, that customer will do business with you only when they trust you.

This where marketing comes in. It helps you build trust and creates the environment, so that the sales person is able to close more deals faster. So its like “canning” whatever the sales person does on a mass scale, without getting in front of the customer.

With marketing the advantage you get is that you can automate a lot of the tasks, which would not be possible with sales. This allows you to create non-linear growth for your company.

Now I am not sure, if large companies would look at it this way or consumer focused companies would look at it like this. However if you’re an emerging company in the B2B space, this kind of a model will give you both efficiency and effectiveness.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Marketing Stamina & the Single Target Market – 3

B2B, budget, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, single target market

While consumer marketing is very tough, once you reach the right person, the decision making is generally quicker / simpler because there are fewer people involved. The other point is that within the consumer segment, there are few internal personal dynamics / hidden agendas in play.

In case of the B2B segment, even after you have reached the right people , you are unsure when the priorities change or a new person comes into a role and she scuttles the whole deal. A typical situation which has happened to me multiple times is that we are working with the department which will use our services. Multiple people from that department are involved – from gatekeepers to decision makers. Over the years, we have realised the fact that procurement and finance, do need to get involved, so we check with the users when those departments will take part in the discussion.

A lot of times even the legal gets involved, so we push our prospect to even get these folks checked out. So we have put a check mark on most of these points. By being focussed on the Single Target Market we understand most of the issues and processes and have fine-tuned our approach accordingly.

Now comes the surprise – while we have checked out all the departments and we have crossed all the “t’s” and dotted all the “I’s” with everyone, we suddenly find a new face who has recently joined the company in a new role and he is asked to attend the meeting in which we are discussing the final aspects.

Suddenly this person opens her mouth on some aspect and now, everyone is in doubt.

Now you have to ensure that all the doubts that have been raised get sorted. Until then the deal does not come your way.

If you don’t account for these kind of delays, which happen all the time, your budgets can go haywire. This is where having enough marketing stamina, helps keep you afloat and hunt for new customers while deals close.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Marketing Stamina & the Single Target Market – 2

B2B, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, single target market

To continue where we left out in yesterday’s post – you look for the highest yield within a niche and then focus on that for the long term till you get to dominate that market.

We looked at the examples of how even till today P&G’s Tide detergent powder is about keeping the Clothes whiter than white – even though they have been doing this for my guess is at least 40 years. And they have huge departments whose only focus in life, is to ensure people’s clothes stay white.

So they have segmented the market for washing clothes (usage) – between the ones preferring detergent powders to another who prefer liquid detergents. Then within detergent powders they go to the single target market of washing just white clothes

In case of B2B we look at the different possibilities of usage – so lets take an example of productivity applications. So you have applications via the web in a SAAS model on a monthly small license fee or with on-prem one time perpetual license. You could have within the productivity applications market, sales person productivity also…..so you have CRM companies bundling word processors and spreadsheets into their CRM so that the sales person doesn’t need to move out of the CRM at all.

So these companies are only targeting the sales person – anyone who’s not a sales person and not utilising “their” CRM is not a focus. This way they are ensuring that they are focussing on a very small segment of the market and working to utilise all their energies and funds in trying to dominate that market.

By focussing this way you will be able to play a longer game.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!