B2B – Single target market – deep analysis

B2B, Marketing, Methodologies, single target market, Value

I keep writing about the Single Target Market on a consistent basis. For any new marketing initiatives this has to be your starting point. As I have mentioned in my posts earlier also, if you’re in the B2B space then this becomes a lot more complex.

The decision making is much more challenging in the B2B space. Depending on the size of the company, the research would be done maybe 2 layers below the actual decision makers.

Now when you think of a Single Target Market in case of B2B, you then need to go deep, to analyze the revenue ranges, the industry, the use cases, the actual people whom you will need to talk to etc.

Once you have mapped the people, roles, you will need to figure out a way to reach them. This is critical because there are both technology gate keepers (like spam filters) and human gate keepers as well. In addition these people already have incumbents who are providing them with similar products or services. So they won’t change their supplier in a hurry.

Which means you will need to have a clear methodology to ensure that you figure out a way to identify the dissonance with the incumbent and then provide value much larger than the incumbent.

By focusing on the Single Target Market you will soon understand the challenges all the customers could be facing with all the incumbents. This will help you get customers faster.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Leveraging on soft assets in the market

assets, Leverage, Marketing, possibility thinking, Riding the elephant

I have always spoken about “riding the elephant ” a philosophy which is extremely useful when you are a small player trying to get into a new market.

Sometimes you have a reverse scenario. You have something “deep ” in the market. It could be relationships withkey customers, some typically solutions which only you have, or a place in a specific location.

I remember there was a time about 20 years back, when the company I used to work for used to do trainings for internal staff. So there were multiple training rooms. These training rooms had servers, individual desktops etc.with individual network connectivity.

Many a times, these training rooms used to be vacant. Since we had already spent capital in setting up these class rooms, if left vacant, they were only getting wasted. At that time we were going through a crunch and had to figure out what other possibilities existed for making profits.

So we went about figuring out who else could need training rooms with the specifications that we had. Necessity is the mother of invention. To utilize the asset we had, we now needed to find a buyer who would use the asset only at times when we didn’t use it.

Jay Abraham is a master at building and utilizing these kind of assets. I used the strategies he lists in his book to figure out how we could leverage. We figured that companies could use these rooms, but not everyone needed the individual computers, so those companies were not willing to pay a worthwhile amount. Then we thought of software companies who need to get trainings done both for their staff and customers.

That was the master stroke. Once we could get a handle of who owned customer trainings in these companies, we showed them the rooms and to top it we offered to take care of 2 meals and tea/coffee during the sessions.

It became so good that some of the people who came for the training then asked us about our primary business and we ended up making some of them, our customers for the main business as well.

This was pure profit because the asset had already been paid for, so increasing the utilization only increased the profits.

Till next time then….leverage on what you have and count the gains

Carpe Diem!!!

Doing a deep dive for Single Target Market

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

I keep writing about the Single Target Market in many of my posts. I recently also wrote about how you can do a Root Cause Analysis (RCA) if your product is not doing as per expectations.

When you do a RCA, I have noticed most of the times in my case, the challenge has always been in identifying the Single Target Market and defining it clearly.

Since I deal primarily in B2B , its not just about the geography that I need to focus on. Its not just an industry. You have to learn to go deeper to identify to even the level of person you intend to target.

In a recent exercise that I was doing I realized that the level of person my team had to contact was based on the size of company we were targeting. However our services were not good for companies below a certain level of revenue

When we hit the higher level of revenue the level of people we were targeting were not the people looking for a solution to the problem we solve. It was a very tight line for us to figure out. But what came out of this was an even higher appreciation of the advantage of going deep for the Single Target Market.

This concept is like an onion, each layer that you peel, makes you realize what else is beneath the surface.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Marketing Stamina

B2B, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, persistence

This is a phrase I first heard from Dean Graziosi. I have written about it earlier also . Its a very simple thought process. I have used it in terms of B2B marketing but I would guess it would apply in all kinds of marketing.

The logic is that every market takes time to adapt to a new offering that you bring to the market. It could be because of inertia in B2B setups because of the sheer number of people involved in making decisions as well as the complexity of processes.

If you don’t have the stamina to last through the cycle before the adoption of your offering “crosses the chasm”. This stamina is both in terms of finances and your own abilities to persist.

Today I got a different view of this . You would have read about my philosophy of riding the elephant to get access to markets. We had been riding one very large OEM for a certain set of tools. Between 2014 and 2016 we invested a lot before we got any business. But subsequent to that we got a lot of business which suddenly dried up by 2019 because the OEM decided to take a different direction (I have written about these in the challenges when riding the elephant)

Now however today I got a call from one of the reps of the OEM checking if we still have the team that was created. Generally we prefer to play the long game. So we had kept the team because we had some residue business that we were closing, while we were evaluating our options with other OEMs.

The OEM now wants to utilize the same team to go out in the market with the new products that they are launching.

If we didn’t have the marketing stamina (if we had not planned with a long term view) we would not have been able to today get a jump start.

Think long-term and plan accordingly.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!