Finding out “where” to meet your B2B buyer

B2B, ideal customer, Marketing, Marketing Ecosystem, messaging, single target market

In the consumer space its generally possible to identify which places your audience visits physically and on the web. It is possible if they visit discount stores or if they visit the high end malls.

With B2B buyers the biggest challenge is in identifying the role different people play during different phases of evaluation of a solution.

Since most people do the evaluation using the web even before connecting to a sales person from one of the companies on their shortlist, its a major challenge if you don’t make it to the shortlist.

One way to handle this is with companies who give you “intent” data. I have used some of these companies for their services. What is challenging is we don’t know the method of how these companies run their algorithm and with what data points. So I have personally not had too much success though a lot of people do think this kind of service helps.

Since B2B buying is not impulsive, its easier to identify the things a customer will do before they use your technology and after they use your technology.

If you can have some kind of a marketing partnership with the companies on both the before and after, you can automatically identify the set of people you need to reach much earlier in the buying cycle and be in front of them consistently and build your BRAND in their minds .

I would love to hear your comments if you have successfully used “intent ” data or if you have tried another successful method.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Who’s not your customer – how it helps in messaging

B2B, Business, differentiation, ideal customer, Marketing, messaging, Positioning, segmentation, single target market

Last 2 posts I have been talking about the benefits of identifying who’s not your customer to ensure a better focus.

Once you know whom you don’t want to target consciously, you can actually build your messaging to ensure you make it clear for whom its not applicable and therefore your Ideal Customer recognises that the message is Only for her.

Whether its in the advertisements or in the email messaging that you build you can consciously list out all the people you don’t want to target. A positive way of doing this from the real estate market could be – “where millionaires reside” – which clearly tells people that if you are not a millionaire you can’t afford the homes.

There are clubs which mention the minimum criteria for joining the club. This way they ensure that they don’t waste time with wannabe’s.

In case of technology and B2B companies – you can decide to target companies who don’t use cloud and eliminate all companies who use cloud by doing messaging – “offer for first time cloud users only”.

By identifying “whos not your customer”, you don’t need to have negative connotations to it. Its just a method to ensure you can get your messaging for your specific niche very strongly aligned to the niche.

Try using this for building your messaging and let me know your results in the comments section below.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Creating Dissonance in the B2B buyer’s mind

B2B, Business, Marketing Stamina, messaging, persistence, segmentation

Most B2B purchases are not impulsive in nature, until and unless they are really low value or for some reason are whimsical in nature.

The advantage of doing B2B business is that because its not impulsive, if you do a good job then most often, you end up staying with that customer for a long time.

One reason for this way of things is the inertia in the procurement department, the other is the cost of doing re-evaluation of vendors so until and unless its something which is periodic in nature, procurement departments don’t want to upset the “apple-cart”. If you are the incumbent, then this is good news.

If you are the outsider, then its bad news, because you have to wait a long time to even get entry – if at all into the account. In B2B accounts you have to have a lot of what Dean Graziosi calls “Marketing Stamina” to keep pounding on the doors of your so called prospects.

What helps though is if you have a small niche to focus on. Then you can concentrate your energies and work with what Dean Jackson calls the “inevitability concept”, which is basically saying that over a 2 year period or 3 year period, some incumbents will make a large enough mistake for the customer want to check you out.

Now this wont happen if you are not in front of the customer on a regular basis with some story which drives what Robin Robins calls “the wedge” into the customer’s existing set-up, so that when the wedge is deep enough the customer feels immense pain and calls you. The dissonance that you create should be large enough for the customer to feel a material impact.

It however needs to be understood that if you have 100 possible customers in your niche, then over a two-three year period you may end up picking up maybe 10 of these. What you then need to keep working on is how can you get these 10 to refer you more clients.

In B2B or for that matter in all kinds of customers a “referred” customer is always a better customer to have both from profitability point of view as well as long term engagement.

If you can keep increasing the share of the customer’s wallet on a regular basis and also get referred then you can have terrific growth.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Sustained Lead Generation- keeping the funnel full

Business, differentiation, Marketing, messaging, Positioning, Product Management

Today is the financial year closing for all organisations in India. I had an extremely hectic day where we were trying to close a very large deal – which eventually slipped the deadline.

So again tomorrow morning we get back to figuring out how to get the deal in our favor.

As they say – There’s many a slip between the cup and the lip – so do large blockbuster deals have a way of going through multiple iterations before they fruitify.

That’s where having a sustained method of generating leads of average value orders makes a big difference to your pipeline. There’s better predictability in the system for your cash flows and you build the processes and infrastructure in your company to ensure that these orders can get revenued systematically without any chokes.

For most businesses however generating the sustained leads becomes a nightmare because we try to focus on too many things at the same time. If we were to focus on only a very few markets, by segmenting them and differentiating our offerings for each segment, there would not be too much of anxiety. The occasional blockbuster then can be managed within the existing system.

On the other hand if the growth is based on the back of the block buster while there’s no pipeline for sustained order booking then you are in for major challenges. Segmenting and niching the market is the only viable way for a Product Manager to ensure that they can get success in the market

Lets see what the new financial year has in store for us.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!