Execution – the key to success of any endevour

I am a big picture person. The guy who gets ideas. The guy who can construct a solution by seeing both inside and outside the box. I am the guy who can identify the ideas that need to be executed.

My blindspot is execution. I have to exert immense amount of concentration to identify execution challenges.

However, a big picture is very good to show how the puzzle will look like when made. However someone really needs to put the pieces together to make the picture. The more the pieces of the puzzle the bigger is the challenge from an execution perspective.

When you are in a corporate environment, it is the slippages in execution which cause the biggest problems. And these are not big slippages which can be observed easily. These are small, almost unobservable things which go unnoticed and then you suddenly get a surprise.

Today two such things happened – due to which this topic came on top of my mind. One was that someone was to load money into a prepaid account so that Google Ads would function and the second was because someone was to give feedback on a resume submitted and he didn’t think it was important to give that feedback to the right person, we lost 2-3 days in the process.

On the face of it, these are such small issues. But like the saying goes ‘you waste your life because of the seconds you waste”. Same way when you add up all the misses that happen in a year, the cost is a few months of revenue lost.

Like I said I am a big picture man, so getting down to identify why something missed target, takes an enormous amount of energy and diverts me from my strengths which is marketing. But when I start identifying the causes then I like to really go down and identify the root cause.

Ideally if you are like me, a big picture person, you should ave a team of executioners who complement you and ensure that the big picture is made. They are the guys who site with checklists to ensure that things get done at the end of the day.

And they should monitor the laggards in your team so they perform. If inspite of monitoring the laggards don’t perform, they should be thrown out. There’s no point in carrying dead weight around.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Single Target Market and the Life Time Value

B2B, life time value, Marketing, Product Management, single target market

I came across the concept of the Life Time Value from Jay Abraham while reading his book, Getting All You Want from All You Have. It was a very intriguing book name and I couldn’t end up not buying it. Since then I have read it multiple times to find new ideas and ways of thinking.

The Single Target Market concept, I have learnt primarily from Dean Jackson. The advantage of this concept is that you can get to focus all your energies on just one segment of the market at a time and then Dominate it, before moving forward to the next Market.

Each entrepreneur, product manager, marketing manager has multiple markets, that they can focus on and it is counter intuitive to focus on only one.

The reason I keep coming back to discuss on the single target market time and again is because I use it myself and find new applications for it when analyzing different businesses.

A good way to analyse the relative economic values of each market and then choose the one which is the most lucrative. So if you knew what’s the life time value of a customer and you knew that you had the potential to pick up at least 30% of the market then you could take a call on how you could go about investing.

So let’s take a B2B example where the Life Time Value of a customer is say $100000/- at a Gross Margin of 30%. Now let’s assume that there are a total of 1000 potential customers in the segment you have chosen. The bottom 20% will never buy from you. That leaves about 800 prospects. Out of these 800 some are in pain right now, some will get into the pain stages over the next 5 years.

So your potential market yield could be $80million over 5 years or a gross margin of $24million. If you can earn $24 million what would you be willing to spend to get these customers. If on the other hand the other market segment can only do $80000 LTV per customer at a GM of 25% then the potential yield of this market is $64 million at a GM of $16 million. So how much can you now spend to get the $16 million.

So that is the combination to help you choose which is the most promising market for you to enter.

If you have any queries, please raise them in the comments section. I would love to hear them.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

P.S: If you are interested in getting a free copy of my “7 point checklist for B2B markets”, you can ask for it, by filling in your details below.

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Coaching – for changing the growth trajectory

coaching, problem solving

While I talk about a lot of things related to marketing, I also get stumped quite often on some problems. It’s good to know, what you don’t know or where you need assistance. A lot of times our ego does not allow us to confess that we also have limitations.

I learnt this lesson in college when I was doing my engineering studies. I did not understand the subject of Engineering Drawing and I failed badly. I was about to give up, but my elder brother insisted that I undertake coaching. With the coaching I liked the subject so much and took to the subject like fish to water.

Multiple times I have seen that a coach can change the speed and trajectory of your growth by solving the challenges, much quicker than if you had to solve them yourselves. This is not to say that I have not been headstrong in trying to solve problems myself and wasted a lot of time on it.

In addition sometimes the environment that you live or work in limits your thinking patterns. Sometimes you need to break through those patterns. A coach can help you achieve that because she is seeing things from “outside-in” for the things which you are seeing “inside-out”.

That’s where from time to time, I take coaching and / or also keenly follow the blogs/podcasts/videos of people like Jay Abraham, Joe Polish and Dean Jackson. Each coach has a different style of functioning and you need to see with whose thinking you resonate. This is important because if you try to follow or take coaching from too many people, you will end up completely confused.

While all coaches may be good, you need to find the one who is “Good for You”. Here I am mean both commercially and at your brain level. I need a coach who can explain to me in simple terms what are the possibilities. So someone who may be conceptually strong in solving problems, but can’t explain to me, doesn’t work for me.

Till next time then ….. climb higher with the help of a coach.

Carpe Diem!!!

Follow-ups – how much is good?

B2B, follow-up, Marketing, persistence

One question that I get very often from my team is – “if we send so many follow-up emails, won’t the prospect get offended and unsubscribe”. We deal in B2B customers and therefore the general audience is never large, so they are scared that they may lose one prospect from the small set of prospects.

If your follow-up is – just wanted to check if there’s any update for me – then yes – its irritating and people will get offended and not bother to pick up your calls or unsubscribe from your mails in the future.

But if the mail or call has value then they will look forward to receiving your mails or calls. If on the other hand, if inspite of the fact that you are sending them something of value and they still unsubscribe to your mails or stop taking your calls, then it’s a good sign. They would not have become a good customer for you anyway.

Since our time is extremely valuable, it’s extremely important that we eliminate the people who anyway don’t value our services. You should look forward to delighting people who value your service not to people who don’t value it. That’s a wasted effort.

How do you create value in your communications – you share case studies of how you have helped others. You share challenges, that other customers had, that you helped solve. You could have created some new setups/solutions, found a new way to sanitise the rooms. With B2B prospects, there’s a lot of ways you can create messaging.

If not, you can share industry news that you found, or send them a book. But you have to be persistent in reminding them of your presence because, they shouldn’t miss out on talking to you when they actually have a need.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

P.S: If you are interested in getting a free copy of my 7 point checklist for B2B markets, you can ask for it, by filling in your details below.

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