Raving Fans & The Single Target Market

expectations, Marketing, service quality, single target market

Raving Fans was a book written by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles. A printed version is not available easily and I haven’t seen it on Kindle when I was searching for it a few years.

If you are fans of the The One Minute series like The One Minute Manager , The One Minute Sales Person etc. then you will know that Ken Blanchard writes books which are very short- just around 100 pages – but with a deep meaning. They are written in story format which ensures your interest in the book.

I was re-reading the book Raving Fans today. Being a short book, I started it in the morning and had finished it in a few hours. By its name Raving Fans is all about customer service. But if you get down to the underlying concepts that they write about, they are pure marketing.

One of the core concepts that they talk about in the book is about choosing the correct market where you can define the perfect experience and ensure you overdeliver on what you promise.

They also therefore talk about who you should NOT have as your customer because then you cannot make them Raving Fans.

Which brings me to what I keep talking about choosing the Single Target Market, because then you get to know your customer intimately and can give them an out of the world experience. In a B2B setting as I mention you also need to go down to the role, the level etc since there will be multiple people involved in any decision.

If you can get this book the Raving Fans, I would highly recommend you reading it. In today’s world where customers shift loyalty so fast, its a must read book.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Single Target Market – Who’s not your customer

B2B, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, Product Management, segmentation, single target market

I keep harping about the Single Target Market whenever you want to enter a new market. The Single Target Market helps you define your segmentation or niche very crisply, including the use case. Sometimes though its difficult to identify this easily because you believe your service is good for different people and you don’t want to miss any market.

When I am going no where with this discussion, I change track and ask the people, whom do you not want to do business with. So to use the analogy of the picture above you could start by eliminating the blue and orange soft toys.

So from a B2B perspective, we first identify which is the geography we would like to start with so that we immediately focus our energy on the most efficient geography, then we identify who would be the lousiest industries to work with – this could be because those industries don’t have the need or they don’t pay well or they haven’t reached the level of supporting infra for your product or service to work etc. This way we eliminate more than half of the universe that we could target.

So now we start moving forward. Out of the industries that we are left which are the top 2 in terms of spending in the area that we operate. You fish where the fish are, why make life difficult. With this you eliminate may be the remanning 30-40% of the market. What is left then is about 10-20 % of the market from where you started.

Now between these, which companies can you easily make an entry versus some extremely large companies where the hierarchies are so huge that you will never be able to make an entry. Then you would like to eliminate the companies who may not be able to afford what you have to offer.

So from the whole universe where you could market or sell your product or service you have now come down to less than 5% of the market that you started with.

From here it becomes a choice of selecting the kind of customer you want to do business with. Then you have to be relentless in your focus on these customers and have the marketing stamina for the next 2-3 years if you want to make any meaningful inroads.

This is a counter intuitive way to move forward but if we don’t narrow down our choices we will not be able to dominate the market.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Force multiplier effect of Riding the Elephant

Affirmative action, life time value, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, Networking, Partners, relationships, Riding the elephant

While I keep writing about this concept, I am amazed myself by the amount of benefits that “riding the elephant” can have for you, if you nurture the elephant well. The elephant is very loyal and friendly creature if you take care of it and feed it with bananas. But if angered it also tends to go o a rampage and destroy things.

So if you nurture the elephant then while you can take 5 small steps, it can take one large one, so if you are riding it, you can cover a larger distance through the forest versus on foot. Also other wild animals won’t attack you when you riding the elephant.

Some of this is also true with hitching your bandwagon with a large partner (like an OEM) your market reach expands at an amazing speed. These large companies have massive growth agendas so they have big plans to execute and go out in the market. Once they start trusting you they will also take you along with them. You will need to do networking within these companies. Being large it is difficult to navigate through the matrix structure, but if you are determined, and take affirmative action you will be able to find your way. It may take time, so you need to have marketing stamina to last in the market.

As a small company you may not have the bandwidth to fund that kind of a growth, but with the help of the partner you can actually get the volume of business to fund your growth.

There’s once challenge though. Since the partner wants to grow rapidly they will expect you to comply with their demands in terms of the margins you make. These situations you have to manage delicately. What can help is knowing the life time value of a customer. So you know how you will make money from the customer in the long term.

If you know how to manage relationships, this is one of the best ways to grow your business.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Hedonic – Adaptation. impact on your marketing

Human Brain, Marketing

In yesterday’s post I wrote about the how you can benefit from this ability of the brain to easily adapt to the new normal. So if you get money automatically deducted from your account for a systematic investment, then your brain will quickly adapt to having less money to spend and you will be able to build a decent amount of corpus. While these two categories are considered as “sin” products, even in things like milk or bread or shaving blades you can see this “hedonic” adaptation play out.

Lets look at how this can also help you in your marketing and how some brands actually utilise this. If you look at alcohol and cigarette companies – they have been able to pass on price increases or tax increases to customers without any dent on their profits. This is because our brain gets used to the new price rise very fast and justifies the price to itself with the lack of taste in other brands.So someone who is used to having the Chivas Regal will have it at almost any cost and similarly someone who’s used to having Jack Daniel’s will have it even if they increase the price.

On the other hand in the B2B space, in IT, the cloud has been one of the key drivers for a lot of applications with a lot of software companies now offering their products on a pay per use model (also called SaaS offerings). Now once you get used to working one set of applications that you have subscribed to, then a two dollar increase on a per month basis, initially gets you thinking, but after couple of months you don’t even think about it. But the software company who has more than a million subscribers has suddenly increased its revenue by more than a million dollars a month with this minor increase. Some people who are really tight financially and find the existing price per month already on the edge of their spending capability may decide to close the subscription, but most will continue.

Therefore your agenda should be to figure out a way to get the customer, because once you have the customer and your product or service is good, then you have the ability to influence higher margins either on the same product or alien products.

Till ext time then.

Carpe Diem!!!