Entering into a new technology based B2B business – Part 3

In this, third part of my checklist, for launching a Technology based B2B business – we will look at figuring out how is the customer presently solving the problem. If you are reading my blog for the first time, I would suggest , you read Part 1 of the checklist and Part 2 of the checklist to get a better picture of the process.

That will give you a background to my thinking process and see whether it resonates with your thinking.

Companies find solutions to the problems they are facing. So even though you may have a unique product/service, they may not find it useful, if they are already solving the problem in a different way. It may not be the most elegant, it may not be the most efficient, but nonetheless it is still solving the problem for them.

Knowing this is important because as Perry Marshall says – if its not a “bleeding neck” problem, people will not move to solve it.

In a B2B scenario, this is all the more important, because there is an inherent inertia in the case of B2B. This could be because of the fact that the person responsible does not have the “power” within the organisation, or it could be because she has been given other priorities by her boss and she is trying to close those first or a plethora of hundred other things.

Another issue for the inertia , is the allocation of budgets in B2B. Most companies work on a budget which gets decided at the beginning of the financial year. Generally new things are not incorporated into the budget in the middle of the year, until and unless it’s critical.

So let’s assume that you have understood the “how” the person is solving the problem. You now need to figure out if your solution will give them incremental improvement over the existing solution or will it be dramatic.

If your solution is just incrementally better, the next issue is to figure out the amount of disruption your solution will cause to the existing process and the cost of your solution. If the improvement is incremental and the disruption is large and the cost is also considerable (relatively) then the chances of you being able to sell your solution are very limited because of the lethargy I listed above.

On the other end of the spectrum, if the solution can cause dramatic improvement in the way the problem is getting solved and the disruption to the existing process is also not much, then you may get some early adopters. If you succeed with the initial prospects then you can document the success and take it to others.

There can be many ways to skin a cat, I have shared mine above. Test it in your environment and if you think it suits you, please go ahead and use it. If you succeed, I would be glad to hear about it.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

P.S: If any of you , is however interested in receiving my 12 point checklist right now , to help you plan your marketing strategy for a new launch, just message me with your email id and I will send it out to you.

Entering into a new technology based B2B business – Part 2

Assumptions, B2B, Business, Marketing, Marketing Stamina

In my last post we focussed on identifying the problem from the perspective of the customer, that you intend to solve with your new technology enabled solution. If you would like a refresh, you can read that blog post here

In this post we will look at the second part of my checklist which is identifying if the problem was unique to that one customer or do you see it happening with other people in that industry or in that geography.

Sometimes it is easy to get confused between looking at a tree and assuming that the whole forest will be made of only those type of trees. It used to happen to me very often during my younger days. These days though, I try to ensure that I don’t succumb to this folly.

So while you are interacting with your first customer on the solution, you need to in parallel, check out all the similar type of customers in your area / industry and see if they also face the same problem.

If we were to take the same example of automating the invoice reading process, that we covered in the last blog post, the problem from the customer’s perspective was – the long line of trucks waiting at the gate.

Now you may go to other similar customers and check if they also face the same problem of a long line of trucks standing at the gate to make an entry. When you meet them, or message them, you realise that this problem doesn’t resonate with them. This is the time when you need to figure out if you have defined the “similar” correctly.

It’s quite possible that the first customer, who had this problem, could be having it because they don’t have open land near their factory, so their trucks have to occupy the road. The other customers may have the land and therefore their trucks come inside and wait so they don’t see it as such a big issue.

If that be the case, maybe you will need to decide that your similar set of customers should also have an attribute which mentions the size of the waiting area for incoming trucks. If there aren’t enough such companies, then you will need to reevaluate your hypothesis and market definition and rework all the economics of your market entry.

If you don’t do this, you will end up wasting a lot of time and money trying to break into the market. Both of these resources are scarce, so its a good idea to do this exercise as early as possible.

Next time I will take up the third item in my checklist

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Success is a proportion of Failure(experience)

experiences, Sales

In April my team had planned an event in which we were to get about 20 odd people, into a conference room, showcase some of our products/services and have dinner and cocktails. Suddenly about an hour before the start of the event we started having rain. Typically when it starts raining in Delhi, the traffic almost comes to a standstill. Soon we realised, where we were expecting 20 odd people only 3 came. The event was a big flop show.

Now we could look at this as a failure of my team and the marketing agency we had engaged, for doing the event, because they were supposed to ensure the attendance of people in the event. We were dejected but that is the way life is – you never know when it will “rain on your parade”.

Similarly one of my sales team members had all his sales numbers structured with one customer primarily. Now unfortunately, last year, this customer did not have a very good year for closing of deals for themselves and hence they were not able to outsource business to us. But this year, after all the losses this person had last year, he seems to be on “boom time”

Life is a long game and you have to play it in such a manner. In most cases, in this long game, you will lose more often that you will win. That’s what makes winning pleasurable. The key is to play enough games. Lose them, learn from them – gain experience and move on to the Next game. If you keep brooding on your failures, you will never be able to succeed. Once you learn from the failure, you will keep eliminating all those points which could cause something to fail. That is what experience is all about. Being prepared to ensure that the same points don’t cause a failure again.

Success in my view is a proportion of the total games played and the number of failures (experiences) had. I do feel bad on losing a deal , but I also immediately get ready to look at the next deal to close. If you are leading a sales team, the biggest worry you need to have is the number of deals that you are fighting for – not the deals you have lost.

If the number is large, then there is absolutely no way that you can’t win in the long term. However if you don’t have enough (enough is a subjective term but you should at least have 4 proposals to crack one deal on average) proposals going out on a regular basis (especially if you are in B2B) then you can rest assured there is no magic that will take place to get you to achieve your numbers.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t need to learn and get better, the more you learn from your experiences and the more you take coaching the better you can get so that you can raise the amount (revenue realisation by being able to sale either more quantity or higher value items) of business you get for the same number of proposals given.

So go out, meet prospects, give enough proposals, if things don’t work out, learn from them and. then move on to the Next.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Entering new into a technology based B2B business

B2B, Marketing, new launch, single target market

Even if you have an old business but you are entering into a new market or entering with a completely new product/service it makes sense to identify the Single Target Market that you would like to focus. Most of us in business don’t have the luxury of creating a product from ground up based on market research about a need in the market. More often than not, we are given a product or service and as marketing heads, we are supposed to identify the right market, right audience etc.

I typically follow a checklist of about 12 items which primarily focus on the customer side of the issues that we should be looking for when we decide to take a product or service to the market.

Before anything else that we do, I would like to understand, what is the problem that the customer thinks that we are solving……not what we think, we are solving for the customer. So as an example – using automation, I might help the customer reduce his time for making a data entry of items that are coming into his factory by reading the incoming invoices quickly.

However for the customer, it might mean, that there are less trucks waiting in line on the road, because the entry is happening faster due to the use of automatic invoice readers. In the present situation, without the automatic readers, the line of trucks could be blocking the road and because of which the cops might be paying a visit to them often to get the road cleared. Maybe even levying a fine.

So while you may think you are solving the problem of inputing invoices and saving time, the actual problem you are solving is eliminating the hassle for the factory manager to ensure the roads don’t get blocked by the trucks coming into their factory.

Why is knowing “what is the problem” important – for two reasons – first is the perception issue – the customer may actually not think of a putting up automatic readers because they already have experienced people doing the job today and putting up an investment in a new technology may not be a priority, so your proposal gets pushed back.

However talking about the line of trucks, which are causing a traffic jam, could be a different ball game.

Its the same solution from your perspective – automating the incoming invoices with the trucks – but to the customer it may be a different aspect.

So it’s important to quickly test your ideas with customers with actual interactions to identify the right message that may resonate with customers. If you follow my blogs, you will notice, I lay a lot of emphasis on testing of different messages, strategies etc. Its absolutely critical , if you want to succeed, to quickly test what is working and what is not.

Generally if a message resonates with an audience, the response can be very quick. However if a message is not resonating, then you have to keep tweaking before giving up. A lot of times dropping the product is a much better idea then to be stuck with the “sunk cost bias”

This post focussed on one of the key starting points to help you identify the market you need to focus on and identify the issues from the customer’s perspectives.

In future posts, I will cover other points in my check list.

Till next time then.

Capre Diem!!!

P.S: If any of you , is however interested in receiving my 12 point checklist to help you plan your marketing strategy for a new launch, just message me with your email id and I will send it out to you.