Asking the right questions in the market -3

B2B, Business, ideal customer, Marketing, Questions, Technology

I have had a lot of situations where we thought we had an amazing product / service but we were not getting a response from the market.

We tried various scenarios, tested various markets but the response was just not there.

In B2B technology services, you may have a wonderful product or service, which is well differentiated but the market does not respond to your service. This inspite of the fact that you are looking at a very small niche, you have identified your Ideal Customer (the person / role) and talking about the pain points that they may have.

The reason for this as I have explained in my earlier posts is that technology companies follow an “infrastructure” or “ecosystem” model. Which means if your product / service does not easily fit into the existing infrastructure then the adoption will be very low.

In this situation instead of asking questions like is this the right market to focus or does this market have the ability to pay. The questions that need to asked could be more oriented towards what could be preventing the audience from responding to your messaging.

Is it that you don’t explain how you fit into the “infrastructure” or is it that they feel it will be too much of an effort to even think about your product / service. To be able to analyse this you need to sit quietly and brainstorm all the possible reasons which could prevent them from interacting with you.

Once you list all the items then quickly start testing to eliminate each of the issues and see which ones have the most impact.

Most often I have found, the reason for not getting to the right answer has been the fact that I had not reached the right question. Once I had asked the right set of questions, things were generally a cake walk.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Who’s not your customer – Part 2

B2B, Business, ideal customer, Marketing, Positioning, Product Management, segmentation, single target market, Technology

Yesterday I spoke about why having a “Whos’s not your customer” can help put a check from you getting de-focussed from your Ideal Customer / segment / niche.

Who’s not your customer can be seen from different angles – lets explore that in a little more detail.

If you are in the technology space in B2B then it could be – all customers who still use physical IVRs cannot be my customers or all customers where the CIO reports into the CFO cannot be my customers or all customers who don’t use “cloud” cannot be my customer.

Inspite of being in the technology domain you could have non-technology disqualifiers as well – like the CIO reporting to the CFO or if the customer does not have a specialised program for diversity companies. Another disqualifier could be all companies who ask for a credit period of more than 30 days. Depending on the kind of business you are in you can choose the people you don’t want to work with.

Depending on the business you are in these , these disqualifiers help you fine tune your company’s ICP even more. So suppose you are a small company in IT services. As part of the the ICP you realise that you would like to work with multi billion dollar enterprises. However these companies might have payment terms which are 90 days credit. Now even if you were able to get this kind of a customer you may realise that you cannot sustain that kind of credit terms and your business suffers.

In this case it would be a better idea to identify multi billion dollar companies who have payment terms of less than 30 days only as your ideal customer. This way you don’t waste your energy.

As I mentioned yesterday – sometimes when looking at just the positive side of the ICP can defocus you. By identifying the people whom you cannot do business with, whether based on technical or non-technical criteria can dramatically improve your chances of success.

I would like to see your comments if this idea helps you as well.

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!!!

Competition is a good thing

competition, Marketing, Positioning, scaling, Technology

In marketing if someone tells you they don’t have competition – then either there is no market or our person does not know where to play.

In the technology field you may have a window of opportunity of say a few months or maybe a year with your new product, but if you don’t see competition even on the horizon then you could be in the wrong market and that’s the scariest piece for a product management person in the technology field.

Most technology products or services are not born out of a specific need in the market. Most of the times companies keep tinkering and integrating various sub-modules to create a new product which the Product Management people are supposed to take to the market and convince their sales people to sell.

When you compete, a few things happen

It means that there’s a definable market. You can choose a niche within that market where you may have less competition or where you define the niche. Your positioning improves because someone has already taken one slot in the market.
It also means that you can aspire to pick up a larger piece of the market at a later date, so its not a FAD which will disappear as it came
Competition also helps you fine tune your product or service better. Since you see the challenges the competition is facing in providing the same product or service, you can account for it already
When you fight against a better competition you also hone your skills

I always get scared when I don’t see competition, even if its coming from a technology which is “n-1” from what we have, because then we know that there’s a market for the “n-1” at least. We just need to find enough people who have got disillusioned with it.

On the other hand I always admire how big companies like say P&G, Unilever or IBM etc. like to look at picking up a bigger piece of the market. They have such systematised methods to scale. I get to learn so much when they are in competition or when we join hands with one large company and compete against another large company. Its the best place to see how manager’s react , how decisions get made.

As they say, when you play a game against a better competitor you come out the winner either way – if you win, you win, but even when you lose you learn of the multiple things that you didn’t know off.

So always welcome competition.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!