B2B Messaging – Part III

differentiation, Marketing, messaging, Positioning, Product Management, Sales

Continuing from where I left yesterday you only have a fraction of a second before the person presses the delete button on your mail- assuming it even reached her.

To be able to do this, you have to be a wordsmith so you can continuously reduce the unwanted words and reorganize them so that the right nuance is brought out in your mail .

But even before that you have to think completely in terms of that person’s interests and keep your interests aside.

Assuming you have followed me up to now , you have segmented your market, then identified an economically viable niche and then isolated that one person who would seek you out

While I have stated all the assumptions in one paragraph, we have complete departments whose only job is to continuously figure this out and keep improving on the definition of the ideal customer.

But if you have done the above work, kept your self interest aside, placed yourself in that ideal person’s life you can list out a lot of things where you can directly touch a cord.

Within that, my experience in B2B has been that if you are selling something to a department which sits on the cost side then it always takes a longer time.

On the other if you sell something which can increase revenues then it moves faster. As Dean Jackson says everyone in an organization is entitled to bring in money but for spending money you have to cross multiple levels of approval.

So see how you can get your offerings to work for the marketing side.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!

B2B Messaging- Part II

differentiation, Marketing, messaging, Positioning, Product Management, Sales, segmentation, Uncategorized

Yesterday we spoke about the challenges when sending an email to a prospects.

Unlike consumer products,where you can build a large list of prospects with opt-ins, when you are starting off something new, you also have to buy lists. You have to send them cold emails.

As I have mentioned earlier also its always better to go to existing customers first with your new offerings or you should go to your partners’ customers with your new offerings.

Howevr whe you are working for a company, the pressure for getting more and more prospects into your funnel is very high and therefore sending cold emails becomes imperative.

Mind you, there are other media as well, like Linkedin which you can use. There’s however a price to be paid.

If you are starting out a new company or a new division of a company or starting as the new marketing head, then getting funding can be tough since any Paid advertising or SEO takes time to get you actual leads and a lot of companies may not have that kind of patience for giving you funding

So if you are in that kind of a situation email is the only medium which you can use.

But as we mentioned yesterday, the email has to pass through so many filters before it even reaches the recipient. After it reaches her mailbox, it only has a fraction of a second before she either deletes the mail or just ignores it.

Which means the message has to be so focused, simple and should not in any way even remotely look salesy. So all the fancy home emails are out.

On a mobile where the screen real estate is so small you cannot waste it on showing graphics.

The message has to be pure text and should look like it has been only written for her – the recipient. As Dean Jackson says it should be all cheese (only the customer’s interest) no whiskers (our interest)

Till next time..

Carpe Diem!!!.

B2B messaging

differentiation, Marketing, messaging, Positioning, Product Management, Sales, segmentation

I believe marketing is Marketing irrespective of what you sell. I keep telling my team, irrespective of what we are selling, we are selling to people.

Which means the psychology of influencing remains the same, whether you sell chips, or you sell dresses, or you sell technology services.

What I have found a little different is the medium of communication or the method of getting the message across for different markets.

By far the best way and also the most effective method in B2B especially for technology companies is email.

However the challenge is that because it is virtually free, it also gets abused. Therefore companies put filters on their email systems which block any mail which even remotely looks like spam or labels the mail as Marketing Mail if its seen as being sent in bulk.

If your mail passes the spam filter and does not get labeled as a marketing mail, then you only get a fraction of a second to attract attention, when someone sees your mail on their hand-held, before they move to the next mail.

This makes the challenge exciting and frustrating.

As Dean Jackson says, you need to look at the email as a conversation you have while standing in the line at Starbucks. You cannot be in a preaching mode when you write the mail. It has to be for that one person to whom it is addressed.

In future posts I will give examples of major learnings I have had sending hundreds of thousands of emails while prospecting for technology companies.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!

Creating a message for your niche-Part II

differentiation, Marketing, messaging, Positioning, Product Management, Sales, segmentation

As I had mentioned yesterday, creating the messages which could resonate with your market is by far one of the toughest things.

Rest of the things like identifying the demographic, identifying the Influencers, identifying the places where people congregate are all possible through various means. You can buy data, you can buy advertising space etc.

But after that creating multiple messages for that audience to test what will stick is a major effort.

That’s the reason why people who write copy get paid so massively.

One tool I have found useful, and I tell my team to use extensively is to write the autobiography of the person whom we are targeting. What is the day in the life of that person, what are her possible challenges, what are the issues she has to face everyday.

Once you start getting into the shoes of the person, automatically a lot of questions start getting thrown up, which can be modified for the medium you are using to send the message.

Another tool which I found very useful for building the messaging is one of Perry Marshall’s Swiss Army knife techniques. He likes to identify this person as above and wants you to also think in terms of the best friends of this person, the worst enemies and so on. Using this also you can quickly generate ideas, which will then need to again be modified for the respective medium you are using to send the message.

Even today I have to keep trying various options for messaging and then once, one message clicks how to improve it. If you have a creative bent of mind and like to do a lot of research its a good job to do.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!