Creating dissonance in the B2B buyer’s mind – Part 2

B2B, Business, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, persistence

In my post of 12th April I had written about how B2B sales are not impulsive in nature. If you’re selling something which is a hot new technology and the buyer is a technology fan then you might be able to sell based on just the technology being new.

On the other hand , most B2B businesses have different levels in a buying process for any kind of product or service, especially if you are looking at a mid to large to extremely large companies. In these kind of companies the inertia itself is very large and the processes complex, so getting a process initiated itself is a task.

So until and unless there is a real challenge with a vendor no one wants to change, even if you have done the perfect segmentation and identified them as your ideal customer.

In the post on 12th April I wrote about how your messaging should keep targeting some areas of dissonance. However you cannot create dissonance with one piece of messaging, it will never stick. The longer a vendor has been providing the services to an organisation the bigger is the chance that the vendor’s issues will be ignored. Also not all issues – using an example from calculus – tend to cross the limit/threshold – where the customer snaps.

So when entering with a regular product or service you need to look at a long term time frame of say 2 years – it could be longer depending on the product or service – airplanes as an example – people may take 5-10 years before deciding on moving from say Boeing to Airbus .

Then you need to keep at sending out a weekly mail/postcard or whatever to be in-front of the buyers so that when the limit / threshold is reached they call you out by default. This persistence in marketing or as Dean Graziosi calls it – Marketing Stamina helps you pick up business in the long term.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Creating Dissonance in the B2B buyer’s mind

B2B, Business, Marketing Stamina, messaging, persistence, segmentation

Most B2B purchases are not impulsive in nature, until and unless they are really low value or for some reason are whimsical in nature.

The advantage of doing B2B business is that because its not impulsive, if you do a good job then most often, you end up staying with that customer for a long time.

One reason for this way of things is the inertia in the procurement department, the other is the cost of doing re-evaluation of vendors so until and unless its something which is periodic in nature, procurement departments don’t want to upset the “apple-cart”. If you are the incumbent, then this is good news.

If you are the outsider, then its bad news, because you have to wait a long time to even get entry – if at all into the account. In B2B accounts you have to have a lot of what Dean Graziosi calls “Marketing Stamina” to keep pounding on the doors of your so called prospects.

What helps though is if you have a small niche to focus on. Then you can concentrate your energies and work with what Dean Jackson calls the “inevitability concept”, which is basically saying that over a 2 year period or 3 year period, some incumbents will make a large enough mistake for the customer want to check you out.

Now this wont happen if you are not in front of the customer on a regular basis with some story which drives what Robin Robins calls “the wedge” into the customer’s existing set-up, so that when the wedge is deep enough the customer feels immense pain and calls you. The dissonance that you create should be large enough for the customer to feel a material impact.

It however needs to be understood that if you have 100 possible customers in your niche, then over a two-three year period you may end up picking up maybe 10 of these. What you then need to keep working on is how can you get these 10 to refer you more clients.

In B2B or for that matter in all kinds of customers a “referred” customer is always a better customer to have both from profitability point of view as well as long term engagement.

If you can keep increasing the share of the customer’s wallet on a regular basis and also get referred then you can have terrific growth.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Persistence

Marketing, Marketing Stamina, persistence

I had written yesterday how I felt so weak after getting the vaccination for COVID-19 that I had to cancel all my meetings with my team.

Today also the weakness continues so this post will also be short.

I had every inclination to not write this post, I could have given myself the excuse that I am not well.

But then I keep talking about being persistent day in and day out, so I would not be practicing what I preach, which would be an integrity problem.

Even if we do something in limited quantity but do it consistently so that the practice is not lost, whenever you get better , you will be able to scale up very fast.

This is also very true with your marketing. If you don’t want to have a Yo-Yo business then come what may, you have to ensure your marketing engine keeps running.

This is all for today.

Till next time

Carpe Diem!!!

Larger the choices – lesser the chance of success -II

differentiation, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, Product Management, segmentation

I have consistently been ranting about choosing only one market whenever you are starting. This need not only be about when you are starting a new business. For a product manager who has been given a new product to take to the market, the logic remains the same.

See whenever you try to look at multiple choices, you have an opportunity cost involved. With multi[le options you have to spend energy between those options. Everyone has limited amounts of energy.

You could keep focused on one market and understand the conversation going on in the head of the people you are targeting. It takes an enormous amount of iterations to understand the conversations in the minds of the customers in one market. Its never feasible to get the marketing right in the “first go”. You have to keep testing and figuring out the right message which would resonate with the market you have chosen. Only once you understand those conversations, can you tailor your messaging and “Go-TO-Market” strategy to dominate a market.

Sometimes the first market you choose may not have the need you first thought it would have because the underlying “infrastructure” is still weak. The SaaS solution you have designed for a specific market doesn’t take off because the internet speed in that market is poor. So you have to rethink your “Go-To-Market” .

The moment you try to look at multiple markets you end up compromising on the depth of your engagement. This opportunity cost is very high. Since you are trying to take multiple positions simultaneously in different segments of the market you end up weak in all of them and you don’t get the opportunity to dominate any one of them.

There’s nothing stopping you from dominating one market and moving to the other but if you try to dominate all segments simultaneously you will not succeed.

For all Product Managers in the making or already there keep this fundamental at the top of your mind always – Only Market to Start – Always

Till next time then

Carpe Diem!!!