Lead generation challenges for small IT B2B businesses-1

B2B, Marketing, Positioning, segmentation, single target market

One of the big issues that small, B2B technology businesses face is that they try to be everything to everybody. They think that if we were to limit the market then, they may miss opportunities. A lot of technology businesses have mainly engineers driving various functions. They are very good at analysis, but marketing also has to do with a lot of psychology.

My team also has this challenge and I have to keep reigning-in their continuous “want” to try and spread the “net” as wide as possible.

One of the questions which I have to keep answering are typically like:

What if we don’t get a response to our email campaign. If we send it to many more people at least someone will respond

This is a very enticing statement – at least someone will respond. You however don’t know how long it will take before that “someone” will respond, because you don’t know the amount of time it will take to reach that “someone”. Every organisation has limited bandwidth. To be able to reach the whole “universe” of your “someone” it may take years. Everyone will be busy in the organisation, but you won’t get any results and after spending 6 months or 1 year, you will not know what you did right or wrong.

I have written multiple posts about the concept of a “Single Target Market” , at a time, which I took from Dean Jackson. All marketing books talk about segmenting and finding a niche. But when you limit your thinking to a single target market, then you focus your energy only on targeting that “one”market.

When you are segmenting, or finding a niche, depending on the interests of the people doing the segmentation, they may may make it very wide or very narrow. However the phrase “Single Target Market” makes it very clear that you are looking at “unique”, “Only One” , “Single” part of the whole market. Watch my video below to get a better understanding of this.

/One way to figure whether the Single Target Market that you have thought of is the right one one, can be figured with the following process. If you are willing to be paid only after the client gets the result, then you have the confidence that you can successfully execute for that market. If you have doubts, then you need to recalibrate your hypothesis.

Once you have isolated your focused market, you can then go about checking the market potential, first on paper and then testing your hypothesis. If you run tests quickly and your hypothesis doesn’t work out, then you either adapt your offering/messaging/value proposition or you change the market. You learn your lessons fast and you adapt your offering faster.

But by doing it this way, you are quickly testing at a low budget if the market cares about your offering or not. You will live to fight another battle. If however you target a very large market space and can’t figure out where things are going wrong, then before you know, you will run out of money to sustain your operation.

There’s no doubt that it’s sexy to be able to tell people that we can do every thing. Today Amazon, ships almost everything. But Amazon started by just shipping books. As they became better at selling books, they launched other items. Each time they launch a new geography they follow a similar formula. But if you try to become Amazon on day one, you will be grounded very very fast.

Another question then that comes up is “what if” the customer we are targeting in the single target market, doesn’t need what we offer. Then you need to do more homework on your hypothesis before going out in the market. The more well defined your hypothesis, the better your tests will be.

So if you think an offering is good for the auto industry, then you need to think, how are the customers solving the problem right now and why should they listen to what you have to offer. I have a whole series of posts covering these points, which is basically my checklist for launching a new product or service into the market. I would suggest you visit those posts to get a more practical understanding of the process.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Entering a new technology based B2B business – Part -VI

B2B, Marketing, single target market

What is the smallest size of the addressable market

In the last episode I wrote about the technology infrastructure that is needed to ensure that your market entry is successful. If you have not read that post, I would highly recommend that you read it here.

If you have determined, that the technology infrastructure exists in the overall market, then the next step is to identify what is the minimum size of the addressable market.

So why is this important?

All the investments that you make for entering the market, have to be justified by the returns. Let’s take a hypothetical example of the overall market size of the market being $100 and the market that you can address out of that is $60. Now you won’t be able to win all the business in the addressable market. Let’s assume you want to dominate the market, then a 30% market share is generally the maximum you can get. Which means you can make upto $18/-.

If the investments that you make are more than $6-$10, over the time period to get a revenue of $18, then you may just about break even or make a profit, depending on your profit margin. If however the investment needed to pick up the $18 of revenue, is $50, over the same period of time, then you are entering a losing game.

If you go through my earlier posts, you will read about my philosophy of “Riding the Elephant” if you are a small technology services company. By riding the elephant (symbolism of a large product company), you can penetrate a larger piece of the market because the elephant will help you get there faster.

The downside in this approach is, however, that the “elephant”, may itself, not succeed in penetrating the market. If however you have made investments on the technology that the “elephant” is bringing without first figuring out the minimum addressable market then you can end up making a huge loss.

It has happened to us in quite a few instances and that is why today this forms a major portion of our evaluation criteria.

You also have to look at a holistic picture, when you are taking a business decision. Maybe this product or service that you are bringing to the market, itself does not have a large addressable market. But because of the image this technology entry will give you, you may gather customers in allied areas, who would not have come to you, otherwise. Then this decision becomes an investment decision rather than just a product line decision.

So while this is an important part of the checklist for getting into the market with a new product or service, the overall decision should be based on the direction you want the business to take.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Entering new into a technology based B2B business

B2B, Marketing, new launch, single target market

Even if you have an old business but you are entering into a new market or entering with a completely new product/service it makes sense to identify the Single Target Market that you would like to focus. Most of us in business don’t have the luxury of creating a product from ground up based on market research about a need in the market. More often than not, we are given a product or service and as marketing heads, we are supposed to identify the right market, right audience etc.

I typically follow a checklist of about 12 items which primarily focus on the customer side of the issues that we should be looking for when we decide to take a product or service to the market.

Before anything else that we do, I would like to understand, what is the problem that the customer thinks that we are solving……not what we think, we are solving for the customer. So as an example – using automation, I might help the customer reduce his time for making a data entry of items that are coming into his factory by reading the incoming invoices quickly.

However for the customer, it might mean, that there are less trucks waiting in line on the road, because the entry is happening faster due to the use of automatic invoice readers. In the present situation, without the automatic readers, the line of trucks could be blocking the road and because of which the cops might be paying a visit to them often to get the road cleared. Maybe even levying a fine.

So while you may think you are solving the problem of inputing invoices and saving time, the actual problem you are solving is eliminating the hassle for the factory manager to ensure the roads don’t get blocked by the trucks coming into their factory.

Why is knowing “what is the problem” important – for two reasons – first is the perception issue – the customer may actually not think of a putting up automatic readers because they already have experienced people doing the job today and putting up an investment in a new technology may not be a priority, so your proposal gets pushed back.

However talking about the line of trucks, which are causing a traffic jam, could be a different ball game.

Its the same solution from your perspective – automating the incoming invoices with the trucks – but to the customer it may be a different aspect.

So it’s important to quickly test your ideas with customers with actual interactions to identify the right message that may resonate with customers. If you follow my blogs, you will notice, I lay a lot of emphasis on testing of different messages, strategies etc. Its absolutely critical , if you want to succeed, to quickly test what is working and what is not.

Generally if a message resonates with an audience, the response can be very quick. However if a message is not resonating, then you have to keep tweaking before giving up. A lot of times dropping the product is a much better idea then to be stuck with the “sunk cost bias”

This post focussed on one of the key starting points to help you identify the market you need to focus on and identify the issues from the customer’s perspectives.

In future posts, I will cover other points in my check list.

Till next time then.

Capre Diem!!!

P.S: If any of you , is however interested in receiving my 12 point checklist to help you plan your marketing strategy for a new launch, just message me with your email id and I will send it out to you.

The power of Silence for Focusing on your business

Focus, Marketing, peak Performance, Productivity, single target market, Uncategorized

For a lot of people who follow Buddhism , today is an auspicious occasion since it Lord Buddha’s birthday. One of the things linked to Buddhism and the overall philosophy of religions that originated in the Indian Sub-Continent is the practice of “Dhyan” and Yoga. While there are a lot of people who follow and practice Yoga across the world “Dhyan” is something that is missing in our lives. “Dhyan” involves sitting in pin drop silence and just focusing all your energy to think.

We all (me included) are so busy running after deadlines all day that we don’t give our brains the bandwidth to actually do what it can do best – which is THINK. When you get into the “Dhyan” stage you are able to connect a lot of the dots which otherwise seem impossible to connect.

I have many times earlier, mentioned a practice by Dean Jackson called the focus finder. Its a very practical way to do a brain dump and then get on to the activity of Thinking.

Today I was a little frustrated that I was not being able to figure out a solution for identifying a Single Target Market. I keep giving you folks a lot of inputs on why you should go about identifying the Single Target Market and the incredible benefits it can have in your marketing.

But today I had a mind block and I was not able to think through on what would be my STM. After lazing around mindlessly and watching un-necessary web series for about an hour, I decided to just sit down with my notebook and pencil and started jotting down thoughts as they came to me about my “bullseye ” (the STM)

While doing this my brain also kept throwing up additional items that I could include. But I had to make my STM as sharply defined as possible. So I kept listing down, all the people whom I would not be able to help.

Automatically I ended up putting a lot of AND statements to ensure that there were as little possibilities as possible for some additional markets creeping in.

Once this was done I went two steps further, I even identified the the markets, one variable away and two variables away. This would help me, in case, the STM I have defined is not viable economically and I have to expand it a little bit.

While I spent close to 2 hours dilly – dalling, I was able to achieve all this in a matter of about 45 minutes, when there was pin drop silence and I was only focusing on this activity. These 45 minutes were more precious because of the immense productivity I got.

If feasible I would suggest everyone to regularly do these focus exercises, they can increase productivity levels dramatically and because you take out everything from your brain and put it on paper, there’s no chance of missing things.

Till next then.

Carpe Diem!!!