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!!!

Becoming a vending machine for your customer…..Part-II

Marketing Ecosystem, Product Management

Taking the analogy of a vending machine – where you put in the money and choose the item you want and it is delivered to you. If you were to offer all the things which are needed – before, during and after your product or service is deployed – by your customer , then you could become the center of the universe for the technology product or service that you are marketing.

I was thinking of taking this analogy a little further.

Suppose you were to think in terms of who else would be selling to the same customer to whom I am wanting to sell my product or service. I have written about how you can use this method to get a quicker access into the market.

Now however I am going reverse.

Lets say you are in city A and you have a customer in city A for your products or services. You want to get into city B. You have identified a company who has customers to whom you want to sell. You want to partner with this company.

Now in the spirit of giving first that I keep ranting about, you could bring this company to sell its services to your customers in city A. This way you become a reliable supplier to your existing customers.

You now emphasize the same logic to this partner for city B where she takes you to their customers. You could take this further jointly into other cities.

There are so many possibilities to take this vending machine concept and grow your business rapidly. As a matter of fact all the biggest IT OEMs like IBM, Oracle etc. have the concept of eco-systems precisely for this reason so that they get quicker access to the markets as well as to the latest technologies.

While we do partnerships in our company, I think this concept of a vending machine is something which I have to work deeper.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!

B2B buying processes – technology products & services

B2B, Product Management

For the product management person its not only necessary to understand the product that they have, the narrow market niche that they are focusing on , the benefits the client will get and other issues.

In the B2B buying process there are the technical people involved – like the CIO and his team or the CTO and her team or the Manufacturing head and the team. Now all the these teams have their own set of gate-keepers and number crunchers. I have earlier spoken about how the existing “infrastructure” needs to be in place for your your solution to get in place.

In addition to the “infrastructure” the financial people need to figure out the implications to their “cashflow” or “profits” with the new solution and then there are the procurement guys who like to get every vendor on the same level so that they can negotiate and get the lowest possible price.

In addition to all this if the CIO is not “powerful” in the political dynamics of the organization then she won’t be able to push your solution through the management committee. In the buying decision, people today do their research more than 60% of the way before they even interact with a sales person of the selling organisation. Which means as a product management person you should create content which can help the CIO move the technology proposal through the management committee in advance.

Similarly today technology is getting more and more pervasive. So even customer service and marketing are getting things like AI involved. So its no longer about just the CIO/CTO. You now have to prepare content which can be consumed by these folks also.

Unlike a product manager of a consumer goods company, for a B2B company, the role becomes more complex because decision making is more collective in nature and therefore you should be able to cover all the personas involved.

Till next time then

Carpe Diem!!!

Become a vending machine for your customer & own the ecosystem

Marketing, Marketing Ecosystem, Positioning, Product Management

Today I was taking the Breakthrough DNA training for Profit Activator number 5&6. This is a training run by Dean Jackson. I have written about Dean multiple times earlier also and highly recommend his podcast “morecheeselesswhiskers “.

Dean has systematized the marketing process into a 8 step process called Breakthrough DNA.

While doing the training I had an epiphany on how a technology services company could utilize the concepts being taught in the training .

I have been talking about the”infrastructure” that needs to be available to make any technology useful. So if you don’t have telecom bandwidth then SaaS based solutions cannot be successful.

But if you look at it another way, if you could become a vending machine (another idea from Dean Jackson and Joe Polish) for your customer .

If you identify what comes before, what comes after and what comes during the usage of your service and you become the supplier of that service through your partners, then not only will you be able to grow your business more rapidly, you will also reduce the resistance points for the customer.

Even if your product or service is not the center of the universe in your ecosystem, by following this strategy you can move the ecosystem in your direction.

Let’s say you sell “backup” software. You could sell the tape drives and tape libraries. You could provide multi layer backup via cloud and sell the customer the cloud service and so on. This way your business grows rapidly and the customer has the comfort that since you are putting everything in place, it will work.

I will definitely think on this aspect more for my own areas, suggest you also think.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!