Working backward from the customer result – B2B scenarios

B2B, Marketing, messaging, Product Management, single target market

I wrote a few posts on how you start with the customer result – what will delight the customer so much that they will become “raving fans”.

Lets now look at how this could possibly work in a B2B scenario where you have a multiple people involved in making the decision.

So if you start with a result that will delight the customer – define that customer in as much detail , with who that customer WILL be and who WILL NOT BE. I keep emphasising on this point in all my product management and marketing posts. It is always more important to define whom you will not like to serve. That portion of the market is always larger than the market which you can serve.

Once you have defined the boundaries of your service or product to delight, then look at how you will reach her and get her attention. In a B2B scenario this is a very big challenge.

Many people are wanting to get attention of our person. These are primarily 3 sets of stakeholders who are vying for her attention. First is her seniors, then her peers and more than anyone her reportees.

Now within all this chaos there are hundreds of messages which are also vying for her attention from all these stakeholders as well as vendors like us. In addition there are the pressures of her personal life which could also be occupying the same attention span.

So who gets priority
Not your message for sure….until and unless it is something that catches her attention.

Till next time then

Carpe Diem!!!

Working backward from the customer result – Part 3

Assumptions, Customer Delight, Customers, Marketing, Product Management

Now from here onwards, things get interesting. We have worked on the Future Reality Tree. We have identified the possible chokes / constraints in the system. We have also exposed the unspoken assumptions in our thought pattern.

So now we realise that the same Product or Service can be used for different use cases. And based on the use case the delivery can be different, the users can be different and therefore the method to reach them to give them your message can be different. This is where the role of product management stands out.usto

Lets take a very mundane example of an everyday product – car engine oil. Every car needs it. There’s not too much differentiation. Now the engine oil can be sold to the OEMs – here its a bulk purchase. It can be sold to the authorised service centres of the car companies – it will still be bulk purchase but the quantity and therefore the negotiations will be different. And you can sell it at gas stations (so you have to talk to multiple gas stations and the quantities are smaller) And you could also sell it via maybe big box retailers.

For each of these different markets your packaging would change, the people you connect to for getting the deal change.

So you identify each segment and how you will reach them, what are the dynamics. A big OEM may not want to add another vendor to their existing suppliers even if you have better product specs, because it can hamper production/roll-out schedules.

On the other hand a gas station may only keep small quantities of small size packages. Since she already has existing suppliers giving the products why should she look at yours.

This is where your true marketing creativity comes out, when you start working backwards from the end result.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Launching a new product or service in B2B

B2B, Customers, Product Management

In this post I will only take one part – which is you already have customers for some other products or services and you are launching something new. In case you are getting totally new then you can read a lot of my older posts to help you achieve that objective.

For purposes of simplicity I will use the products, but the same logic would apply even when you’re launching a new set of services.

If you already have customers then whenever you are launching something new, the obvious thing would be to first take the new product to your existing customers. Nothing new here.

However I will put a little caveat. Start with your biggest customers and then go in descending order. The biggest customers are more invested in you and would like to succeed. Since they are big you will also get scale fast.

If you can also involve them at the 80% completion stage to use the product and advise on the glitches, then you will get real life feedback on the challenges that your product has technically as well in terms of customer experience. Large companies like Microsoft actually create Beta sites just with this objective.

Since these customers are invested in building the product with you , they will also own it more and will be more loyal. You may not get major revenue out of this, maybe even nothing. But if you have your large customers using the product then you can use them for reference purposes. That would be of much more value.

In this way you can reach critical mass faster.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Single Target Market – Who’s not your customer

B2B, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, Product Management, segmentation, single target market

I keep harping about the Single Target Market whenever you want to enter a new market. The Single Target Market helps you define your segmentation or niche very crisply, including the use case. Sometimes though its difficult to identify this easily because you believe your service is good for different people and you don’t want to miss any market.

When I am going no where with this discussion, I change track and ask the people, whom do you not want to do business with. So to use the analogy of the picture above you could start by eliminating the blue and orange soft toys.

So from a B2B perspective, we first identify which is the geography we would like to start with so that we immediately focus our energy on the most efficient geography, then we identify who would be the lousiest industries to work with – this could be because those industries don’t have the need or they don’t pay well or they haven’t reached the level of supporting infra for your product or service to work etc. This way we eliminate more than half of the universe that we could target.

So now we start moving forward. Out of the industries that we are left which are the top 2 in terms of spending in the area that we operate. You fish where the fish are, why make life difficult. With this you eliminate may be the remanning 30-40% of the market. What is left then is about 10-20 % of the market from where you started.

Now between these, which companies can you easily make an entry versus some extremely large companies where the hierarchies are so huge that you will never be able to make an entry. Then you would like to eliminate the companies who may not be able to afford what you have to offer.

So from the whole universe where you could market or sell your product or service you have now come down to less than 5% of the market that you started with.

From here it becomes a choice of selecting the kind of customer you want to do business with. Then you have to be relentless in your focus on these customers and have the marketing stamina for the next 2-3 years if you want to make any meaningful inroads.

This is a counter intuitive way to move forward but if we don’t narrow down our choices we will not be able to dominate the market.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!