Attention – the biggest enemy for marketers

I have written multiple posts on how the mind plays games with us. But the same mind, is also a problem when we are trying to sell/market our product to customers.

We are living in such a hyper connected world and our smart phones, smart watches, smart “xxx” make it more difficult for US to sell, because even before our message can flow through and register with the person, she gets another alert/call/email which makes her move away from our message onto that alert and so on.

A lot of these things, were supposed to be tools to help improve our productivity, but in my opinion, they have only helped make our life more complex. With so many alerts coming from so many directions, our brain is always “ON” waiting for the next alert. Today I find myself looking at my iPhone every 30 minutes or so, in case I don’t get a “ping” of some sort. I get anxious and end-up looking at the phone to just ensure that I did not miss anything.

So why is this a problem for the marketer. It makes our life a lot more harder. Since our message may be seen and may be lost in a jiffy or may just be plain ignored. Customers ignore messages of things they don’t need. Now even if they think they need something that you offer, but before they can comprehend your full message and the phone rings or they get an email from their boss, or someone walks into their cabin or a million other things and your message is lost forever.

With a lot of people still working from home, this is an even bigger challenge because there are even more issues to distract a person, other than the regular office issues.

So not only has your message to be hyper targeted, it also needs to be so simple and short that the person who is seeing it gets it immediately before the person’s attention is diverted into another item.

Depending on the medium that you choose, the simple and quick can be relative. For a medium which reaches out to multiple senses, like a television advertisement, you could pack a lot of punch into one small 10s time frame. On the other hand if it’s a medium like email, which can only be read, then you need to think of how much you can pack before someone can lose attention. If its a medium like Twitter then your challenges are determined by the 140 characters.

But not thinking about the psychology of your users, can impact the response to your messaging. My guess is that the attention spans will actually be the currency that you are soon going to be exchanging, by giving something, to ensure that they give you the attention.

What’s your view? Do you also think this issue is impacting the response rates for your messaging? Do let me know in the comments below.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

The Pain of a Loss is much higher than the Pleasure of a Gain

Fear, messaging, pricing

In March last year I had written a post on “Pain & Gain” . At that point in time I had written it more from an experiential perspective of what I had experienced in the market and how the messaging should revolve. It was more about people giving attention to fear/loss based messaging compared to positive/gain messaging.

I was recently reading a book on pricing – “Confessions of the pricing man” by Hermann Simon. Herman Simon is considered to be the “guru” on how companies should do the pricing of their products/services. Its a fascinating book on the kind of mistakes that people do when they do the pricing and how a small change in pricing – negative or positive – can have a major impact on the volumes that the company has to sell and the profitability the company. He has shown various examples of low cost leaders who make a lot of money (Ikea as an example) and how luxury brands can mess up their brand if they try to go mass market. Its a book worth reading especially if you are involved with doing pricing for your products or services.

Now coming back to the pain & gain story with which I started this post. In the book Hermann show cases the prospect theory work done by M/s Kahneman & Tversky. This is the first time I have come across the utility curve for both positive and negative utility.

In our economics class I did study the concept of marginal utility and how it decreases as the amount of the product or service that you use goes up. So the first time you travel economy class in an aircraft, you will feel “awed” by the sheer experience. If you travel regularly, you will slowly start losing the “awe” feeling and after sometime you will find the experience just “okay”. Then its human nature that people will start ten wanting to move to the next higher level. That’s how people move to the business class and some even to the First Class. This how also premium and luxury product companies keep selling even more expensive things.

Human beings are always craving for the next bigger/more luxurious/more exciting thing. Not all may be able to afford it and move higher up the ladder, but there are enough people who do. That’s why companies who want to grow their profit, keep trying to come out with more and more premium brands.

As per Herman if you use the prospect theory, the “Marginal Harm” gets smaller as the overall size of the loss increases. However the bigger issue as per this theory is that compared to the pleasure we feel from the same quantum of “gain” the amount of pain we feel is much much higher. So in absolute terms if there is a $100 gain then the Pleasure is (1.5), but for the same $100 loss the Pain is (-3). This is the theoretical explanation of what we notice in the market on a regular basis. Until I read this book, I did not have a clue behind the phenomenon.

It gives immense pleasure when you find that what you see/experience in the market, also has a theoretical background. It then proves that the experience you have not seen is not limited to only your environment/geography or industry. It is a phenomenon which is observed globally and people have gone through the process multiple times to check its validity, before it is written out in books and presented in conferences.

While Herman has explained the how pricing can get impacted because of this prospect theory, would think it has a role to play even when you are trying to get the attention of the prospect. They will respond more to the possibility of avoiding the loss than to the possibility of gain that you can show them.

If you have also experienced this phenomenon, pls put it in the comments below. Would love to hear from you.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Selling in B2B versus consumer sales

B2B, Business, client management, Sales, Trust

Most books in sales that you get int he market are written by people who have sold houses, or FMCG products with cater to the psychology of the end consumer. So they have tricks to handle objections and ways to close the sale. The advantage for the consumer sales person is that the market is generally huge. So if you can find a pattern with a few sales, then you are on to big commissions. The other side of the coin is that the consumer market is grossly populated with so many brands already, that it takes an enormous amount of energy to break into the market.

On the other hand the B2B customer is difficult to enter because companies have massive processes to enrol a new vendor and there is a huge amount of inertia to go through the process to get a new vendor. Since I have been involved in doing B2B sales for all my career, I have had so many situations, where, inspite of spending multiple years on trying to break into an account, we were not able to enter the customer. This is especially true for large companies. With SMB, it is relatively easier but still a process.

The key reason for this inertia is the fact that no one wants to have a “failed project” with a new vendor. There’s a lot of peer pressure in an organisation and people are looking at opportunities to ‘showcase a failure’.

It’s also very rare that you have a product or service which is very unique and you are the only provider of that service. Actually if you are the only person in the market, then chances are that there is No Market for your product or service, otherwise someone would have found it. I have also gone into market with a unique technology and failed because customers weren’t willing to take the risk with a unique technology.

Geoffrey Moore had written a wonderful book and come out with a unique idea on “Crossing the chasm”. As per this it takes enormous amount of energy to propel a new technology from the “risk takers” to mass adopters. It’s similar to a rocket needing tremendous energy to get out of earth’s orbit and again needing enormous energy to enter the orbit of another planet. Most unique technology products fail because they don’t have the energy to cross the chasm.

But having said that, once you enter into a B2B customer and you successfully execute the first couple of orders, then it will be very difficult to dislodge you. It’s the same logic that I had mentioned earlier, now being used to your advantage. Since managers don’t want a failure and you have successfully showcased that you can be relied upon and trusted, they will want to keep working with you.

You may have some hiccups with some new managers coming in or the organisation getting resized or re-engineered, but if you have built relationships across different functions, then these things can generally be managed more easily.

The other advantage in B2B is that most of your competitors are known and you figure out how they will react to what situation. This allows you to choose your sweet spot in the market and then just stick to it.

If you have any queries on B2B sales/marketing – do drop in your question and I would love to se if I can be of help.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Reporting back

Uncategorized

It’s been a few months since I last posted anything. I had been tied up with closing some old, family issues with banks and local authorities and then my back problem erupted again so I was on bed for a few months. All-in-all a pretty eventful period.

A few learnings along the way – some things got re-iterated and some are new .

Persistent follow-up – I am usually not every good with doing follow-ups – but with government officials and with your employees, its a very good idea to ensure you are following up regularly on commitments, pending items etc. And a good mechanism for follow-ups is having a checklist on which you keep striking-off things which are cleared out.

Delegating – I have always been a very strong advocate for delegating tasks – but by delegating to the right person, you can actually improve your productivity tremendously, while the other person gets an opportunity to improve her skills. Over the last few months we did a lot of hiring. Hiring is a time consuming job, but if you can get to only interview shortlisted candidates, then it makes life easy. There is off-course a downside. if you were involved in the shortlisting yourself, you may have hit upon a raw diamond which you can cut and polish. But mining diamonds is a costly and time consuming activity so you might as well depend on someone else to handle the job of scouting through the dust.

Most people in the world are good folks – this is a belief I have carried all through my life till now – during these follow-ups with bank officials and agreement signing etc. I found in most places, people are generally cooperative and helpful. If you tell them the constraints that you face, they actually suggest possible solutions as well. If you actually ask someone for help, people go out of the way to figure out ways to help.

Life is short – Live it – Enjoy it now – This realisation actually started from the onset of the pandemic and the multiple waves that it got. I used to love going to different places with the family. But over the last 3+ years I have actually got scared of travelling to new places because of the uncertainty of the different variants of Covid which keep popping-up and also the medical facilities available in the country that I go to. Due to this, so many places, that were on my bucket list, to visit, I have to hold. Due to that there is a feeling of regret. I don’t like having regrets. If I had travelled earlier, I may have covered a lot of the places on my bucket list. I am hoping to get out of my fear for Covid and restart travelling – let’s see.

Identifying the right elephant to ride – this has been one of my pet theories for getting into the market. I am even more convinced about this theory today. Not all elephants are friendly and agreeing to take you along, on the ride, to where they are going. If you can identify the right elephant, you can rapidly cover a long distance. The assumption of course is that you want to go in the same direction as the elephant.

I would love to hear back from you and hope to post regularly again

Till then.

Carpe Diem!!!