Personal Differentiation- Part II

B2B, differentiation, Marketing, Product Management, Sales

I look at marketing and sales being part of the same activity group. While sales is done face to face or via phone, in person, marketing is done without being in person.

That being the case, while there has to be differentiation with respect to your products and services, when marketing, when selling the customer should be able to clearly see a value in interacting with you as a person.

In my last post on this topic I listed some points to make yourself more endearing to customers.

If you can be remarkable in your ability to deliver value to the customer, the customer will remember and refer you also.

But the key is that you need to be very good.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Build your own framework – avoid flash in the pan success

B2B, Frameworks, Methodologies, Product Management

Always strive to have a methodology for getting something to happen. Frameworks, formulas, recipes, methodologies, call them with whatever name, reduce the chance of doing something random each time and then hoping for success.

Luck does play a major role in life, but with a process in place over a period of time you start eliminating things and standardize on things as far as possible. The lesser the number of non-standard items, the lower the possibility of luck.

But when you are starting a new product line or when you are new into the job as a Product Management person, how do you get started. First is the standard marketing books on the subject. But it will be very rare that you will get the exact process for your product.

First understand your product, the exact market niche you want to target, the ecosystem and infrastructure and then go out and start trying to succeed. You are bound to fail in the initial stages in either understanding the market, in identifying the message which will resonate etc.

Once you fail, also identify the causation and not only the co-relation. This failure will be the biggest learning for you to know what you don’t need to do next. And then the biggest thing – document it.

This documentation will be the basis of your own frameworks and methodology, so that when you get success you can keep testing it and seeing what parts caused it the success.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Getting blindsided

B2B, Marketing, Product Management, Technology, Uncategorized

Yesterday I wrote about my experience taking the COVID-19 vaccine.

Well yesterday late night the side effects of taking the vaccine started showing. I had so much weakness that all night and all day today, I was only sleeping.

Why am I telling this. It’s a known fact that there are side effects of taking the vaccine.

What is important though is that I got blindsided by the intensity of the weakness. Due to this I had to cancel all my meetings today.

In the technology market you can get blindsided so very often. A lot of you may have heard of the mobile phone brand Nokia. It was the number one brand and then it got blindsided by Apple with their iPhone. Today you don’t even hear about Nokia mobile phones.

For a product manager in the technology space, where the pace of change is so rapid its very easy to get blindsided and suddenly your product is not needed by your customers.

For today, this is all since I am still having a lot of weakness.

Carpe Diem!!!

B2B Buying Processes in technology -II

B2B, differentiation, Marketing, Product Management, segmentation

While I keep talking consistently about segmenting the market and identifying niches, I also talk about identifying niches by use case rather by demographics and psychographics.

Typically in B2B buying especially when you are selling (I am using this term in a very broad way) to mid to large size companies there’s an hierarchy of positions within departments. In typical sales situations you want to identify a decision maker and then message to them. Unlike an individual or family buying a low value item where decisions are taken on the spot, in case of decisions which require substantial investment in technology buying, there are always multiple layers

In B2B buying there’s a someone who can say yes and a lot of people who can say no. However in most cases the decision maker herself does not evaluate the options. She typically would ask someone or some people in her team or make a cross functional team to evaluate the options and bring them to her and then she takes a decision.

Now this is where it gets tricky for the Product Management person. The decision maker does not evaluate options. The people who evaluate the options in today’s day and age are hidden because they do more than 60-70% of the sorting using the internet and reach out to specific companies whom they have shortlisted. So even if you have the most elaborate technical product, if you didn’t come in front of this team and this team does not evaluate you then you don’t stand a chance.

So how does the Product Management person identify the persona to whom the messaging has to be targeted. That’s what makes the B2B buying process complex for the marketing folks.

When you choose a very small segment of the market to target , the advantage is that you can do iterations in your messaging, you can actually interview prospects who didn’t buy from you and other things to identify what is resonating with your market and incorporate the learnings very fast.

This is not an easy task at all. Once you are able to “crack the code” as Dean Jackson puts it, you can scale in that market very fast.

Even now I have to learn so much in each new product we launch. Its never easy to say that because I launched a security product last year successfully I will be successful for a new AI product I am launching this year. While the frameworks can be in place and evolving, the learning is always new. But that’s what makes it interesting.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!