Just Ask ….you never know – Part 4

ego, Fear, Marketing, Product Management, Questions

This topic has, I think been one of the longest, I have pondered on.

Yesterday I wrote about why it was critical for the marketing / product management / sales folks to be asking questions and how it impacts the ability to succeed in the market.

So why don’t most of the sales / marketing / product management folks do it. One of course is vanity / ego….we know all the reasons why someone does not buy, after all we have been doing this for “xxx” years. The other bigger one is fear because most of us are not prepared to listen to the truth, we don’t know how the prospect will react, we may realise we are the actual cause of the problem.

We would rather end up being busy sending emails, doing “busy” work, attend a lot of internal meetings, rather than go out into the market. These are things we know to do so we do them rather than go and check out the unknown.

Ozan Varol in his book – Think Like a Rocket Scientist has a very nice story – and I paraphrasing it here to get the point out – of your boss asking you to get a monkey to stand on a pedestal and recite from Shakespeare. You break down the problem into different stages – building a pedestal, identifying a monkey and making it learn Shakespeare. What would you do first here.

Most people would first think of building the pedestal first – why because that’s the easiest to do and you will be able to show progress to your boss. If you were to first go to identify a monkey which can speak English, you will never be able to show progress to your boss.

Similarly its easier to show that you have done some activity by telling your boss that you sent a mail, than it is to get to identifying why some one is not buying your product.

This is one of the biggest frustrations I face in trying to get my teams to figure out why people are not buying something from us. If you can master this art of just asking – you can’t imagine what all you will learn.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Just Ask …. you never know – Part 3

differentiation, education, ego, Fear, Marketing, Product Management, single target market

Today we will come down to the exact reason, why this idea is critical for anyone in marketing, product management or sales. This quality is absolutely critical to know and understand why someone is not buying from you, or why someone is not referring customers to you etc.

Marketing and product management teams have to ensure that their product / service sells in the market. That there’s a demand for their product or service on a continuous basis.

If the product is not moving then it becomes imperative to check out the prospects on why they aren’t buying from you. Is the category itself not moving or only your product within the category.

A lot of time guys in the field assume it’s price. That’s the first statement you will always hear if your product is not moving with respect to the competition in the same category. It’s very rare that people get out, in the field to ask questions to the prospects.

Like I mentioned in the first two posts , most of the times, it is our ego and our fear , which stops us from asking the questions. Asking the right questions in the market is key to getting your marketing right. If inspite of all the systematic planning you do, with identifying the single target market and identifying the differentiators and also educating your prospects, then its critical that you get down into the market and systematically ask a large cross section of the market, on what is the hinderance in wanting to buy your product.

A lot of times its just the perception, that is causing people to resist what you have to sell. Sometimes its lack of knowledge. But you will not be able to address these things if you don’t ask. Curiosity is not always a bad thing. And curiosity to know why the product that you are selling is not moving is absolutely essential for your business.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Just Ask – you never know….

Affirmative action, Marketing, Product Management, Questions

There are lot of times when we can save a lot of time, effort, energy and eventual success, happiness if we were to Just Ask.

Somehow , we humans have – an ego – which causes us to feel that if the person whom we are asking refuses, then we will lose face or somehow people will make fun of us….etc. Since the human brain was designed to protect us, it ascribes all kinds of meanings to even small things. While I am preaching this, there are a lot of times, when I myself don’t follow this advice and then later wonder, what if I had just checked out.

I will give some real life examples of how by just asking – the persons got what they never thought was possible.

My colleague and I were coming back from Mumbai. Its a 2 hour flight to Delhi. You have to generally arrive at the airport about 3 hours before departure. We were travelling in a full fare airline, so they were providing us with snacks, coffee etc. Since were travelling in economy class however we were only getting a limited set of options in the food and drinks.

Both of us were in aisle seats, in the same row. The stewardess asked me for coffee / tea and I took my coffee. However my colleague did not take anything. After the stewardess had moved away from our row, he asked me if they didn’t serve juice. I was not sure so I told him “why don’t you just ask and you will come to know”. The good thing about this colleague of mine is that he generally takes my advice. So he asked the stewardess when she passed by him again.

And guess what – she said they don’t have it in economy class, but she will check in the first class and come back. In ten minutes my colleague was sipping fruit juice enjoying himself. But he would have not got it if he hadn’t asked.

In another situation my technical team mentioned that they had seen multiple options and the cost of taking licenses of a specific software were close to $14000/- for annual purchase. But we only needed to test our software so spending that kind of money didn’t make sense. So I asked on the minimum duration that would help them if I were to somehow get the licenses – so they said 2 weeks.

I then asked my colleague who handles the relationship with this software partner , to fix a short call with their product leader. Incidentally she had already set up contact with this person earlier and I had noticed that he was a helpful person. Luckily this person was available , he immediately responded back and we met on Zoom and I asked him if he could help.

Once more – we got the license to test our application with their software free of cost for a full month. The key thing about humans – is if you are kind to people and ask them in a pleasing way, most people will like to help.

My mother used to say the two most important phrases in the English language are “thank you sir/ma’am” and “if you can please”. It does not mean that your requests will always be accepted, but if you don’t ask, anyway it will not be accepted. By asking you are giving yourself a chance to play and find out.

We will look at the implications of this for marketing / product management

Till next time then….just ask….and you never know….

carpe Diem!!!

Product Management concepts for a consumer company

B2B, differentiation, ideal customer, Marketing, Product Management, Profitability, Risks, single target market

When you see the large venture capital backed companies burning cash month on month you wonder if the general concepts of Product Management / Marketing are valid, these days, for a consumer facing company.

There is one dynamic to keep in mind – the principles of Product Management / Marketing have not changed, what’s changed is the availability of money at extremely low rates – in most developed countries the interest rates are hovering at or less than 1% on bank deposit . In Japan just a few months back interest rates had actually gone negative.

If you keep this in mind where cost of money is so low, people are looking for ways to get a higher return on their investment so the propensity to take risk is higher. If the cost of money would be say at about 5% on bank deposits, then the propensity to put in risk capital would be different. That’s also one of the key reasons that the stock markets are at a record high even though countries have been facing lockdowns.

Now inspite of this these VC based companies are generally not stupid. The VCs do put in checks and balances to ensure their money does not sink.

So the burning of cash is part of a strategy to acquire customers. This would only succeed if the life time value of a customer is known. This principle is true for any kind of product or service you get into. If you know the life time value of a customer then you can actually buy customers because you know that if they are happy they will buy more often from you and also refer others to you.

The second is the convenience factor / inertia factor. Once you have given some customer a good service and they get used to the convenience of working with you, they will generally end up buying from you because the cost of getting another vendor is quite high. In case of B2B customers the number of processes to complete to get a new vendor empanelled are so large that procurement teams want to limit their vendors. In case of consumer products, its so difficult to understand another new “app” to order items. So you go ahead and order again on an “amazon” just because your card is already loaded and you can buy without hassle.

The other factor is critical volume . In the “app” based consumer companies the network effect plays a big role. So the larger the customers and vendors on a platform they feed into each other to create a positive snowball effect. Due to this in any market you cannot have more than two “amazon” or more than two “uber” kind of companies.

In B2B business also something similar happens with critical volume. If you look at it about 25-30 years back there were at least 5-6 prominent ERP vendors including SAP, Oracle Financials, MFG Pro etc. today there are only 2 primary companies in this arena. This is because based on the number of installations, the number of technical people needed goes up, so do salaries so more people train themselves to avail this opportunity. Slowly the availability of trained manpower becomes one of the key reasons to choose a product.

So in my opinion the principles of product management / marketing don’t change. The methods / platforms for delivering the product / service may change as technology changes. In my next few posts I will cover other principles like Single Target Market, Ideal Customer profile etc.

I would love to know if any of you thinks otherwise.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!