Lead generation in B2B

Over the years the whole process of lead generation in the B2B segment has become tougher and tougher.

About 20 years back one of the best ways to identify opportunities in B2B were things like lunch and learn or an event of an hour followed by cocktail and dinner.

The value proposition for the seller was that they got to meet people from their prospective clients first hand and understand their challenges. For the buyers, there were two key benefits.

First was that they got information, second was that they would meet their peers from the industry and share notes. Once the visiting cards were available, then the calling out teams, sales teams would target these prospects. However all vendors followed a similar process and people started getting tired of responding to calls.

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

With the large scale availability of information via the internet that aspect was lost. In addition with travel times increasing in most countries and complexities in their environment growing, they found less and less interest in socializing.

From an economics standpoint the cost per lead was pretty high, but if you had experienced sales people in the room with the prospects, you could get firm requirements also from an event.

On the other hand email is free. You can send as many emails you want at virtually zero cost. The challenge is that nobody wants to share their email with you because they realize that you will start inundation them with emails.

However if you can offer something of value, in return for an email address, people may still be willing. But that VALUE is the question we were looking at yesterday. Its becoming tougher and tougher to get people to part with their email addresses.

So one other mechanism which I wrote about in a post about a week back is to utilize snail mail once again to be in front of customers regularly. Since most companies are either lazy or don’t have the manpower to send out post cards or envelopes, its a good opportunity to stand out and get mindspace. And the economics of sending one post card to a thousand prospects over 52 weeks will not be too much.

The key is to figure out how you can cross the barrier to get the prospect to raise their hand and show interest.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

How to solve the Challenges of a Single Target Market -2

B2B, Marketing, niche, single target market, Testing

Continuing from yesterday’s post , you have identified what you think is a good Market to enter. Now if you have been working in the overall market with your offerings and you chose the Single Target Market based on that knowledge, then you have a good place to start.

But if you’re coming out with a new product or service and you don’t have knowledge and you have chosen the market based on “armchair ” thinking, then you can be in for a big shock if you deploy all your resources for this.

In these situations, especially in the case of B2B where there are too many moving parts, you need to be testing with limited investments.

Its happened multiple times with me, that the market-product match which I had thought of, for my single target market, didn’t materialize or it took a much longer time to materialize .

These things happen because while you may have observed a niche in the market there’s no “market” in the niche. And this could happen, as an example, because that there’s already a solution to the problem which you are solving and its much easier to use / lower cost or any other reason.

You can only figure these things out if you’re testing. After feedback from each test you tweak a little and test again, till you start getting a response. That becomes your base from which you start.

This testing need to be on the product itself, it could be on the market, it could be on the people that you’re targeting in the company. After testing you may realise that the solution does not have a significance for the specified problem, but when re-purposed, it can be a best seller.

The faster you can do the iterations, the quicker you’re to pick up the market.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

How to solve the Challenges of identifying a Single Target Market

Customer Delight, Marketing, niche, single target market

Whenever I talk to my team or other business folks, one major resistance that I get from all of them is on this issue of selecting a niche or single target market.

Everyone thinks that their product or service can solve so many different problems for so many people so why limit. It basically comes out to be about whether you want to be a small fish in a large pond or a big fish in a small pond.

And it takes so much of my energy to convince them, that all I am asking them is to prioritize the market entry into different markets. Once you enter one niche, you have to dominate it, take the learnings from that and then move ahead.

People still find it difficult. So I share with them this process, which is inspired by Dean Jackson and his concepts of the Eight Profit Activators.

Step 1 : Isolate all the geographical markets you have the bandwidth to operate in. These could be national , international etc. You can put this in the columns from from B to whatever in one row of your spreadsheet

Step 2: Isolate all the use cases for each of these geographical locations that your product or service can do. You can put this in column A of your spreadsheet.

The moment they start filling (not ticking, which is a copy and paste process) this two by two matrix with their ability to serve the market and get delighted customers, they start backing off.

They may still end up with about 5 or 6 niches , in which they think they can certainly delight customers. Then I ask them to look at which would give the highest probability of profit from the same effort. Since they also realize that time is limited for everyone, after this step most automatically identify a Single Target Market.

Hope the above helps you in identifying your niche and helps you dominate the market.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Budgeting for Marketing Activities – 6

budget, campaign, Marketing, media

In this last part I would like to take a very short comparison between different types of media and what needs to be kept in mind. I am not an expert on the different media and their costing methodologies. You would be well advised to look at some experts , especially if you intend to go the online and social media way.

So I will start with the physical media like print ads or physical letters or events. The positive about these is that once defined, the prices more or less are constant. So from a predictability perspective this is good. On the other hand, you only come to know the response to your ads or events after the whole thing has taken place.

So if you have targeted to do an event for 100 people and on 10 come on the day when it’s planned, the event has failed and you have spent all your money which was budgeted. So testing with physical media is a lot tougher , time consuming and expensive.

On the other hand with online and social media, you can do simultaneous testing of various ads and also put a limit on your spend while doing the tests or while running the campaigns. You can also stop an advertisement after running it for just one day on most social media platforms.

The downside with social media is that you don’t understand the algorithms that are running behind the selection of the people to whom the ads are being shown and when the site will change the rules / algorithms. So you are at their mercy. However if you have a diversified mix of social media sites giving you results then the whims of one particular site will not impact the business too much.

I hope you gain from these quick tips for doing a budget. Will look forward to hearing your comments.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!