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!!!

Single Target Market – getting down to the person in B2B

B2B, Business, Customers, ideal customer, Marketing, single target market

When you are looking at the B2B space, you have to keep one thing in mind always – you are dealing with multiple people not one person. In the consumer space you could look at the consumer and maybe the influencers like the wife / husband or children who can influence, but generally it’s a small set of one or one plus.

In the case of B2B sales however its always by default Many Buyer Persons getting involved even though at the company level this may be your Ideal Customer Profile.. Its very very rare to identify a single person who can take all the decisions. This however may happen if the buying value is very low.

Now if there are going to encounter multiple people that you have to influence towards your product or service then your first exercise should be to identify all the people involved. So before you talk to thousand clients in the single target market – you first need to analyse just one customer and how will the process move.

Recently in one of the cases that my team was fighting we got blindsided by the procurement team of the customer. We did all the evaluation exercises , the technical team was coordinating with us and we were supposedly rated the best. But suddenly we got to know that the order was handed over to someone else.

Our challenge was that we had not analysed the hidden agendas that were getting played out. This happens a lot when you are in the B2B space. Its called getting zigged when you should have zagged.

Once you have analysed the niche and got down to the usage, you then need to start mapping who all could be involved in the decision making in ONE customer. Once you have analysed what happens with ONE, then you can replicate the process across the whole segment that you have identified. You may still get zigged, but if you have put the identification in your process, then the chances of being zigged will get reduced.

Till next time then…..to your success in the market.

Carpe Diem!!!

Return on Relationships

Business, Partners, relationships

Relationships are all about building bonds which are generally based on trust. Once people start trust you, they also open up and share things with you. As the trust grows, the bonds grow stronger and people start wanting you to also succeed.

Return on relationships is a concept I learned from Dean Jackson. He’s one of the most fundamentally sound people and can cut through the problems and reach the core reason extremely quickly. You can listen to his podcasts on Morecheeselesswhiskers.com or Cloudlandia or Ilovemarketing.com. He talks about return on relationships from the vantage point of how many customers come back to you for more and refer other customers to you.

My concept of partnerships or “riding the elephant” are all about relationships at the core. Nothing in business moves if you don’t build relationships. How good your relationships are is measured by the fact if you get a lot of your business with repeat customers or you get referred a lot to different people.

There used to be a saying – its not what you know but who you know that is important. There has to be an extension to that statement – its not what you know but who you know, who is willing to refer you, that is important.

So you may have a lot of connections on social media platforms like Linkedin, but if they are not willing to refer you, then they are unimportant. The onus of getting people to refer you is your responsibility so that you program them to think about you when they come across something in which you excel. Getting referrals on a consistent basis is the best way to get business, because you don’t have to invest your time in convincing people to look at you.

Have a look at how much of your revenues are happening because of business coming in from the cold versus repeat customers and customers that have been referred. The lower the first part the more profitable your business.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Calling out the elephant in the room – Assumptions – 2

arrogance, Assumptions, B2B, Business, ego, Marketing

For a background to this post, I would suggest you have a look at the fist part of the topic here

Not many know that the digital camera was first created by a team in Kodak. Whether you call it arrogance on the part of the managers at Kodak, who assumed that no one would want to buy such an expensive camera. What was assumed was that the technology would make it unviable for most folks to afford the camera.

No one thought that technology was following Moore’s law, where the power of the chip was roughly doubling every 18 odd months. A similar thing happened at Xerox who actually had designed the “mouse” long before it became a standard accessory. But they never moved forward on it.

It is said , the Swiss already knew about battery powered watches, much before the Japanese, but because they prided themselves on their engineering and movement, they never bothered taking a patent. Suddenly the Japanese were all over the place with watches leaving the Swiss, gasping for breadth. Again technology assumptions can go wrong very badly.

Brainstorming on the assumptions you are making and listing them, gets you grounded to think better. Also its a better idea to ask an outsider to check out your assumptions.

In marketing, because you are dealing with human perceptions, understanding and accounting for the assumptions can help you avoid expensive mistakes. In B2B scenarios where there are multiple people involved in a decision and there’s general inertia, not accounting for these assumptions can be fatal.. Its a good idea to keep asking ‘what else are we assuming”.

Like assuming that the person on the production line will easily adopt the new technology you are bringing in via the CIO and /or the CFO. More IT projects have failed because of these faulty assumptions than the problem with the technology itself.

Especially when you are making the marketing or sales plan at the beginning of the year, if you don’t account for these assumptions, very soon when you hit the road, all your plans will fall flat.

Don’t make the mistakes that I have done. Whenever you make a plan list out all the assumptions and make everyone aware about them so that collective wisdom can find a better solution.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!