Marketing

Marketing Stamina – Revisited

B2B, life time value, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, persistence

On the 28th of October last year I had put up a post on this topic. If you are interested, you can have a look at it here .

The reason I felt a need to revisit this topic, came up because, I was analysing the average time it takes to get traction for a new product or service in the B2B market. If you are in the technology market space I would highly recommend you read the book Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore. It will give you a more detailed context to what I am talking.

However coming back to the B2B market – the key issue that needs to handled is corporate inertia. In most cases the people in these companies are fighting so many battles, that they don’t want to touch anything that’s not broken. Also because there’s so many approvals involved, they don’t want to risk the product / solution Not Working in their environment. Especially in case of technology solutions, most companies prefer to work with “n-1” technology because it’s stable and working. They don’t want one more fire in their hand.

The other thing which plays a role in my opinion, is that the customer wants to see your resilience. They don’t trust anyone approaching them new, for the same points as I listed above and in most cases they are already covered with an existing vendor who is providing decently good service. So until and unless the incumbent screws up some time soon, they won’t look at you.

So does it mean that you can’t get into business for the B2B segment.

You absolutely can, if you can plan for the long term. You ensure that you have enough persistence and finances to last you for a long duration. While I learnt the term marketing stamina from Dean Graziosi, I learnt the application of this idea through Dean Jackson. His thought process is like this – if you know the turnover rate of any market – say 5% – 10% of the people will change to a new vendor every year – and you have a focussed list of 1000 prospects then over the next 5 years at least 250 – 500 prospects.

Now depending on what you sell and what is the Life Time Value of a client, you will need to have the staying power to last through the 5 years with consistently reaching out to these customers. If you don’t plan for this, you will be in for a rude shock and you will do things out of desperation, which is never a good thing.

Till next time then ….build your marketing stamina before getting into a new market.

Carpe Diem!!!

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!!!

Focus on Single Market & Media

B2B, Focus, lead generation, Marketing, single target market

Today I was watching a video on YouTube about productising a service offering, to make it scalable. This video is an interaction between Chris Do and Greg Hickman.

I keep talking about a Single Target Market for your offering and how you need to focus all your attention to being able to dominate that market before moving into a different market. Getting all your learning whether its about the social media platform you want to use or the message you want to convey for this one focused market.

At the beginning of the video Greg talks about focusing for one year, with one offering using one media if you want to scale up. He talks about a couple of other “ones” also.

But these stuck to me, because while I only emphasize the idea of one market, this gentleman is going a step further, to also ensure your focus on the media.

I fully agree to the idea of focus to achieve your objectives. Once you have tested the media which is getting you the most traction in the Single Target Market of your choice , then you should only keep using that medium and see how you can reduce the cost, increase the traffic and increase the conversions.

If you do this with focused attention for a year, you would have created a huge “top of the funnel” to keep you busy for a long time. In case of B2B this focus from your marketing team will ensure that your sales teams have leads coming their way.

I am going to explore this idea and will keep you posted.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Nurturing leads

B2B, lead generation, Marketing, Sales

When you are capturing leads or getting opt-ins, you need to be patient with them. Like nurturing a seed, it takes time for the plant to come out, so it is with leads.

Most leads in the B2B space could take weeks if not months, to mature, to a stage that they actually give you a requirement. During this stage you need to keep following-up with your prospect, educating them and being top of the mind so that when they have a requirement, they reach out to you. While marketing nurtures a large universe, the moment they get a lead to qualify, they hand it over to sales.

Now most sales people only follow-up for 3-4 times and then don’t bother because they want leads which can help them meet their quarterly targets. Most of them are always behind targets because they don’t nurture the leads which can help meet the quota two quarters down the line.

As the value of the orders increase the amount of lead time goes up even further. For a million dollar kind of deal, we have had to even keep nurturing the prospect for around a year.

Due to the complexity of the corporate environment, by the time a requirement is recognised and then budgeted and then a RFP raised, its quite easily a 6-8 month cycle.For a B2B process, for high value kind of business, I would advice nurturing a lead for upto 18 months at least before discarding them.

Different companies have different priorities, so its like a moving parade, some may take longer and some may immediately feel the need for your kind of service. So after a lead comes in, you need to be patiently educating them and nurturing them. You need to look at them as assets which will give returns over a long period of time.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!