Messaging – Answering the Questions of a prospect

B2B, education, education, Marketing, messaging, problem solving, Questions, segmentation, single target market

In yesterday’s post I spoke about the pain (fear of) and pleasure (gain of) and how you can use it to get your message to stick with a prospect.

I have written multiple times earlier on the idea of a Single Target Market and how you can niche a segment further based on usage. This comes in useful when you want to build your messaging.

As an example you niched your B2B market by industry, then you further niched it by revenue. Now if you niche it further based on whether you are targeting prospects who intend to buy your kind of product or service for the first time or are you targeting prospects for whom this is a replacement. Another could be a backup to the main product for insurance purposes.

Once you have chosen the usage, you can now get into the shoes of the prospect and think what could go on in their mind. If its a first time buyer – you could help that company with messaging entered around evaluating your kind of offering from an unbiased angle. On the other hand if its a replacement market that you are targeting, then you could talk of how the technology has changed and how by replacing the old technology they could get more benefits.

Based on the usage criteria, the team of people to whom you will send the message, will also change. For the replacement market in the industry, you may need to talk to the operations or maintenance folks, while if its for the first time usage you may need to talk to the project folks. Each of these folks has a different “view of life” and hence the problems that you address and the education that you have to do is different.

You need to know your end game and then work backwards such that you have a delighted customer. Its only when you delight a customer can you hope to get referrals and move further to dominate that market.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Single Target Market and the Life Time Value

B2B, life time value, Marketing, Product Management, single target market

I came across the concept of the Life Time Value from Jay Abraham while reading his book, Getting All You Want from All You Have. It was a very intriguing book name and I couldn’t end up not buying it. Since then I have read it multiple times to find new ideas and ways of thinking.

The Single Target Market concept, I have learnt primarily from Dean Jackson. The advantage of this concept is that you can get to focus all your energies on just one segment of the market at a time and then Dominate it, before moving forward to the next Market.

Each entrepreneur, product manager, marketing manager has multiple markets, that they can focus on and it is counter intuitive to focus on only one.

The reason I keep coming back to discuss on the single target market time and again is because I use it myself and find new applications for it when analyzing different businesses.

A good way to analyse the relative economic values of each market and then choose the one which is the most lucrative. So if you knew what’s the life time value of a customer and you knew that you had the potential to pick up at least 30% of the market then you could take a call on how you could go about investing.

So let’s take a B2B example where the Life Time Value of a customer is say $100000/- at a Gross Margin of 30%. Now let’s assume that there are a total of 1000 potential customers in the segment you have chosen. The bottom 20% will never buy from you. That leaves about 800 prospects. Out of these 800 some are in pain right now, some will get into the pain stages over the next 5 years.

So your potential market yield could be $80million over 5 years or a gross margin of $24million. If you can earn $24 million what would you be willing to spend to get these customers. If on the other hand the other market segment can only do $80000 LTV per customer at a GM of 25% then the potential yield of this market is $64 million at a GM of $16 million. So how much can you now spend to get the $16 million.

So that is the combination to help you choose which is the most promising market for you to enter.

If you have any queries, please raise them in the comments section. I would love to hear them.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

P.S: If you are interested in getting a free copy of my “7 point checklist for B2B markets”, you can ask for it, by filling in your details below.

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Marketing Stamina & the Single Target Market – 3

B2B, budget, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, single target market

While consumer marketing is very tough, once you reach the right person, the decision making is generally quicker / simpler because there are fewer people involved. The other point is that within the consumer segment, there are few internal personal dynamics / hidden agendas in play.

In case of the B2B segment, even after you have reached the right people , you are unsure when the priorities change or a new person comes into a role and she scuttles the whole deal. A typical situation which has happened to me multiple times is that we are working with the department which will use our services. Multiple people from that department are involved – from gatekeepers to decision makers. Over the years, we have realised the fact that procurement and finance, do need to get involved, so we check with the users when those departments will take part in the discussion.

A lot of times even the legal gets involved, so we push our prospect to even get these folks checked out. So we have put a check mark on most of these points. By being focussed on the Single Target Market we understand most of the issues and processes and have fine-tuned our approach accordingly.

Now comes the surprise – while we have checked out all the departments and we have crossed all the “t’s” and dotted all the “I’s” with everyone, we suddenly find a new face who has recently joined the company in a new role and he is asked to attend the meeting in which we are discussing the final aspects.

Suddenly this person opens her mouth on some aspect and now, everyone is in doubt.

Now you have to ensure that all the doubts that have been raised get sorted. Until then the deal does not come your way.

If you don’t account for these kind of delays, which happen all the time, your budgets can go haywire. This is where having enough marketing stamina, helps keep you afloat and hunt for new customers while deals close.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Marketing Stamina & the Single Target Market – 2

B2B, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, single target market

To continue where we left out in yesterday’s post – you look for the highest yield within a niche and then focus on that for the long term till you get to dominate that market.

We looked at the examples of how even till today P&G’s Tide detergent powder is about keeping the Clothes whiter than white – even though they have been doing this for my guess is at least 40 years. And they have huge departments whose only focus in life, is to ensure people’s clothes stay white.

So they have segmented the market for washing clothes (usage) – between the ones preferring detergent powders to another who prefer liquid detergents. Then within detergent powders they go to the single target market of washing just white clothes

In case of B2B we look at the different possibilities of usage – so lets take an example of productivity applications. So you have applications via the web in a SAAS model on a monthly small license fee or with on-prem one time perpetual license. You could have within the productivity applications market, sales person productivity also…..so you have CRM companies bundling word processors and spreadsheets into their CRM so that the sales person doesn’t need to move out of the CRM at all.

So these companies are only targeting the sales person – anyone who’s not a sales person and not utilising “their” CRM is not a focus. This way they are ensuring that they are focussing on a very small segment of the market and working to utilise all their energies and funds in trying to dominate that market.

By focussing this way you will be able to play a longer game.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!