Personal differentiation- what’s the Value, You get to the table

differentiation, differentiation, Habits, Positioning, Sales

In any relationship and more so in sales, it’s the value that you bring to the other side which makes people want to be connected to you.

When you are doing marketing, the agenda is to create a relationship between the company’s product and the customer. But when you are in sales, it is all about the personal brand of YOU.

That brand of You gets created with the Value you bring to the table specifically. If the prospect does not find you knowledgeable on different aspects of his business and requirements, he will consider you a waste of time. So even though you may have the best product or service in the market, they will not buy from You.

As a sales person today, its table stakes to get to know about the person you’re meeting, about their business, industry challenges, regulations etc.

You also need to be able to challenge the assumptions that the customer is making and showcase the same to them. Most professional customers today like to interact with equals. When you create a differentiation with Value, you become the trusted advisor. That’s how you also improve your personal “positioning” in the market.

Gone are the days when salesmen could just wing a conversation about the weather, the photo frame in the customer’s office etc.

Its getting more and more difficult to get an appointment with a customer for a meeting these days. Get better prepared, figure out Why should the customer even talk to you. That “Why” will then help you create your Value.

Till next time then, create your own differentiation with the Value you bring to the table.

Carpe Diem!!

B2B Messaging – finding the most effective channel

B2B, Business, differentiation, differentiation, ideal customer, Marketing, Marketing Ecosystem, messaging, segmentation, single target market

In consumer items there are a lot of ways to reach a customer – television, print, social media etc. Depending on where your demographic audience is and how the psychographics work out, you could also use good old direct mail and leaflets and tele-callers.

In B2B markets there are unique challenges. There’s a massive fall in print magazine circulation especially the business focused magazines. Not sure how many people watch television to check out the next business strategy.

In the B2B market, mail does not reach the person on the desk, because a lot of times people don’t have a desk and are mobile. So the mail has to be collected by the person by going to the mail room. Since people don’t come to the office so often and with Covid19, even fewer are coming to office so no one visits the mail room and the mail you send does not reach the intended recipients. So if you are targeting professional services companies, financial services etc. I have found direct mail to be a tough ask.

On the other hand if you were looking at companies which were more into manufacturing, utilities etc. I would guess direct mail would work especially for the back office functions and factory / warehouse functions.

Email is a quick, free medium and that’s it very basic problem. In B2B all the people are inundated with mail and you get a fraction of a second on the mobile phone, before the person ignores or deletes your mail. That is if your mail even reaches the person’s mailbox, because the spam filters will block your mail if they even observe a single item in the mail which smells of spam.

Before the pandemic started, webinars was a good way to get people to join you and hear your message, but I am observing a definite sense of exhaustion with webinars. The registration and attendance and company sponsored webinars has fallen dramatically. It may still be possible to get some attendance if the webinar is being run by an industry body or an independent analyst or a reputed media group with some respected industry veterans.

As a B2B marketer I am always looking out for some effective ways to get in front my audience. By ensuring that I target a “single target market”, and try and target only my ideal customer profile, I try to learn from each interaction that we have with a client and see how we can incorporate that learning into our next interaction. Its always a good idea to send a personal email to a person so that the spam filters don’t think you are spamming. You try to use as much knowledge you have of the industry to make this email so that the person reading it finds it useful.

Please let me know in case you have found any other method to reach your prospects in B2B in the comments below.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Single Target Market – again

differentiation, differentiation, Marketing, Positioning, Product Management, segmentation

I can’t stop myself from seeing the magic of focusing on only one small segment of the market.

Today I was working on one offering after my team had yesterday isolated 3 possible segments based on data. Based on data I was to work on identifying the right niche for this product.

I have mentioned multiple times earlier and would like to recommend the podcast at Morecheeselesswhiskers.com. By far its one place where you will see how Dean Jackson goes about analyzing single target markets.

Coming back to my experience today. I first eliminated 2 of the markets because there was nothing to create a common strategy.

Then I came to what we club – as BFSI – Banking, Finance, Securities and Insurance. As I stated thinking about the geographic differences that can come into these customers. So I decided to stick to just North India.

As I started to think of the conversation going on in the minds of my audience I realized that I was thinking of the marketing heads, the CTO, the CIO. All 3 would have different things which keep them up at night.

While these differences not enough , I realized that even the marketing head of an insurance company would have different concerns than the marketing head of a securities company.

So now we had brought down our single target market to just the marketing head ds of insurance companies in North India. However I still have a nagging feeling that I may need to splice this further. But we will leave that for another day.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!