B2B – Single Target Market – Deep Analysis – Part 2

B2B, ideal customer, Marketing, single target market

Yesterday we looked at the key challenges that you face in the B2B space because of the various hierarchies involved as well as the inertia because of the various stake holders and the dynamics / politics between them.

When you target the consumer market, in a lot of situations your prospective customer may be invisible (as Dean Jackson would put it). In the case of B2B customers at the industry, company and even to a certain extent on the person level, you may be able to identify the people but you may find it difficult to reach them to verify if they are actually the right people for your offering.

In case of the consumer market, if you have given an incentive or a cookie (again as Dean Jackson calls it) to make her identify herself, in case of the B2B market, a lot of times I have seen that the people just take the white paper or any other cookie just to gain knowledge whether its part of their job profile or not.

So while the B2B buyer is partially visible, getting her to qualify herself is a lot tougher in my opinion. That’s why identifying the Single Target Market makes the work a little easier.

But identifying the Single Target Market is a massive amount of work. It may require a lot of iterations to get to the exact definition with the right set of constraints defined including going down to the set of people you intend to target, their roles, hierarchies and the challenges at each level of the hierarchy. Here the concept of the Ideal customer profile goes down to the individual role. That’s critical.

Till next time then….happy identifying

Carpe Diem!!!

Theory of Constraints – and product management – Part 2

B2B, constraints, ideal customer, Marketing, Product Management

In yesterday’s post I spoke why I like the Theory of Constraints and how it can help in identifying the possible reasons, why the product or service is not taking off in the market as desired.

The key advantage is gained when you speak the logical steps and while speaking you realise that there’s a gap in the logic. As a example if you have a product or service in the B2B space. In B2B the process generally involves giving presentations, giving proposals, then negotiations etc.

Now lets take an example. If I need to have 18 proposals in the “market” in by 31st March, because only when you have proposals, can you get orders. While mathematically it is a simple equation that for 30 proposals you need to connect to 900 contacts ( I have used a multiplier of 50, which could vary from industry to industry) and then go through the process. Most people follow this method and then try to do carpet bombing with very little success.

On the other hand if we were to follow the logical process that is defined by the Theory of Constraints then the logic could look like this

If I have a clearly defined Ideal Customer profile

AND

If I have a set of 250 unique accounts confirming to my ICP to whom I can send an email

AND

If I have correct email ids of the relevant person in these 250 companies

AND

If I can send 50 emails to these companies everyday

AND

If 10 people respond back

AND

If I can show my presentation to 2 people every day or 10 people in a week

AND

If 3 people out of the 10 in a week like my solution to their problem

AND

If out of the 12 people in a month, 3 ask me for our proposal

THEN

In 6 months I will have 18 proposals in the market

Now if you will speak through the above sequence of logical statements, you will realise the flawed & undefined assumptions, in the argument. One item which is not included is the fact that the customer should have a budget, the statements don’t include the amount of followups that will be needed, what is the assumption behind 10 people responding back, etc. So just connecting to 900 contacts will not help you hit your target

Once you get that data then you can actually analyse whether your target is doable and what is the first thing that you need to hit at to open the “lock” in your constraint. You can also look at it in a different fashion to see for a given target, what all you will need to put in place to achieve it

Try this method and let me know your feedback.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Boredom in marketing …. cause for distraction – Part 3

Distractions, ideal customer, Marketing, messaging, segmentation, single target market

People have such a low attention span these days, that, anything that even remotely screams marketing, gets thrown into the delete mode even without a second thought. With electronic messaging this is even more convenient.

So while electronic messaging via email or via social media can get you very targeted audience, sometimes almost free, they also have the highest “ignore” rates.

While one of the reasons for the “ignore” is the massive number of unnecessary emails or messages people get, the other is because the messages don’t speak to the prospect in what’s important to him. So while they are trying to scan your subject line / headline , and if your message is boring, an alert pops up on their cell phone and they get drawn into it and you have lost that small window of opportunity.

Understanding what is going on in the mind of the prospect is critical – what conversations she could be having, are critical to ensuring that you are not boring. You can do this kind of specific messaging only if you have segmented the market so well, that the conversations start to become evident.

In any given market segment there will always be the early adopters, the laggards, the fence sitters etc. What is the use case that you are targeting will decide within the segment what is your Single Target Market to start your messaging with. If you are targeting the replacement market then you go with a different kind of messaging, while if you are targeting the early adopters you need to be looking at how your message can play to their vanity of being early adopters.

Creating messaging is a very time consuming job and requires a lot of subtle changes in the language. Whenever I have tried to get something out in a hurry, because the team was in a hurry, those campaigns have bombed for us. And the time which I saved at the beginning has actually resulted in a much larger waste. Boring messages, motherhood statements, just get people to select delete because of the plethora of other distractions which exist.

Till next time then. Don’t let your marketing get boring.

Carpe Diem!!!

What’s better….process or outcome

differentiation, Frameworks, ideal customer, Positioning, segmentation, single target market, Uncategorized

In our world of monthly or quarterly targets, where we are we marked in every week’s review meeting, it gets very enchanting to see the outcome without noticing the process and inputs.

Sometimes good processes can also lead to bad outcomes because of the randomness in the market that you are targeting . For example you may have identified the single target market , you would have planned your marketing activities for the long haul, you would gone about systematically educating your market, you would have identified the positioning by doing the correct segmentation, but suddenly an unexpected event occurs and throws your complete plan out of gear. The COVID-19 pandemic threw so many launches out of gear. No process can predict this kind of a situation. But because of the right process, while we couldn’t go ahead with our original OEM we now have an even more responsive OEM to launch our offerings.

On the other hand I have had situations in my life, where I was scared, because we had short circuited the process , because of lack of time, but still got amazing results. That was also a result of randomness or luck where a certain trigger of a government deadline moved all our inventory in no time. We made a lot of profit also.

Sometimes you need to tweak processes to make them more responsive for the increased pace of product launches. However I am of the belief that we need to map the process for a product launch. It could be directly from the books by Philip Kotler or it could be built on your experience but having a process ensures that you don’t miss any step.

Tell me in the comments below, what is your view.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!