Lead generation challenges for small IT B2B businesses-1

B2B, Marketing, Positioning, segmentation, single target market

One of the big issues that small, B2B technology businesses face is that they try to be everything to everybody. They think that if we were to limit the market then, they may miss opportunities. A lot of technology businesses have mainly engineers driving various functions. They are very good at analysis, but marketing also has to do with a lot of psychology.

My team also has this challenge and I have to keep reigning-in their continuous “want” to try and spread the “net” as wide as possible.

One of the questions which I have to keep answering are typically like:

What if we don’t get a response to our email campaign. If we send it to many more people at least someone will respond

This is a very enticing statement – at least someone will respond. You however don’t know how long it will take before that “someone” will respond, because you don’t know the amount of time it will take to reach that “someone”. Every organisation has limited bandwidth. To be able to reach the whole “universe” of your “someone” it may take years. Everyone will be busy in the organisation, but you won’t get any results and after spending 6 months or 1 year, you will not know what you did right or wrong.

I have written multiple posts about the concept of a “Single Target Market” , at a time, which I took from Dean Jackson. All marketing books talk about segmenting and finding a niche. But when you limit your thinking to a single target market, then you focus your energy only on targeting that “one”market.

When you are segmenting, or finding a niche, depending on the interests of the people doing the segmentation, they may may make it very wide or very narrow. However the phrase “Single Target Market” makes it very clear that you are looking at “unique”, “Only One” , “Single” part of the whole market. Watch my video below to get a better understanding of this.

/One way to figure whether the Single Target Market that you have thought of is the right one one, can be figured with the following process. If you are willing to be paid only after the client gets the result, then you have the confidence that you can successfully execute for that market. If you have doubts, then you need to recalibrate your hypothesis.

Once you have isolated your focused market, you can then go about checking the market potential, first on paper and then testing your hypothesis. If you run tests quickly and your hypothesis doesn’t work out, then you either adapt your offering/messaging/value proposition or you change the market. You learn your lessons fast and you adapt your offering faster.

But by doing it this way, you are quickly testing at a low budget if the market cares about your offering or not. You will live to fight another battle. If however you target a very large market space and can’t figure out where things are going wrong, then before you know, you will run out of money to sustain your operation.

There’s no doubt that it’s sexy to be able to tell people that we can do every thing. Today Amazon, ships almost everything. But Amazon started by just shipping books. As they became better at selling books, they launched other items. Each time they launch a new geography they follow a similar formula. But if you try to become Amazon on day one, you will be grounded very very fast.

Another question then that comes up is “what if” the customer we are targeting in the single target market, doesn’t need what we offer. Then you need to do more homework on your hypothesis before going out in the market. The more well defined your hypothesis, the better your tests will be.

So if you think an offering is good for the auto industry, then you need to think, how are the customers solving the problem right now and why should they listen to what you have to offer. I have a whole series of posts covering these points, which is basically my checklist for launching a new product or service into the market. I would suggest you visit those posts to get a more practical understanding of the process.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

AI impacting the B2B sales process

AI, B2B, education, Sales

Education is still the strongest weapon

When I started my career in sales , we didn’t have mobile phones, email, internet. The receptionist would physically connect cables to get your extension connected to the external phone. We would literally go from one security office to another physically ,to check if the person was available and then meet the folks. For most people this would sound like I belong to the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Earlier the sales person would carry the brochures with them in their briefcases. The information was controlled by the sales persons. The users would inform the challenge they were facing and then the sales person would take the brochure out from there briefcase and point out how their product/solution would solve the customers’s problem.

Since information was with the sales person, the prospects, would be willing to meet the sales person, so that they could get the information. Without the information, they would not be able to make comparisons between different products or solutions. The sales persons therefore got in much earlier in the sales cycle and the good ones were able to educate the customer, get the trust and influence the order.

Then came the internet. With the internet, all the information was available to the customers via the web. They could get whatever brochures, white papers etc. that they wanted, directly from the net, without having to wait or meet the sales person.

In this situation, the customers would gather all the knowledge that they needed to solve the problem before even interacting with the sales person. So getting an appointment became even more difficult. If the prospect had reached a stage where they now needed the information to compare or to get better pricing, only then they gave the appointment and that to, only to the vendors from whom they wanted additional information. So the companies who had not not put out enough information on the “net” , were not considered by the customers and therefore getting appointments became even more difficult for them.

So sales people had value , much later in the selling cycle, compared to earlier, but there still was value in how they would help optimise their solution or how the product would interact with other constituents of the existing setup in the customer environment.

Now with ChatGpt and other generative AI models coming in, even at the B2B level, my guess is that the sales person’ will be needed even later. The generative AI programs can write “code” and do comparisons between options and even suggest complete solutions.

Since customers will do all the activities on their own without the help of the vendors, they will do it as per their schedules. So the access to the customer will get more difficult for the sales persons. Since the customers may actually do the comparisons on their own, they may end up taking longer, since they may not understand all the nuances of a solution.

Having said this, the vendors can also use AI based tools to identify better on the prospects who could be looking for the solutions by using “intent” data. This was not available to sales people earlier. Once you have intent data, you can actually discreetly step-into the customers evaluation process and educate them with options about how other customers are solving the same problem.

Since you are now “educating” the customer again, chances are that they may get influenced by you. This again brings back the concept – that marketing is all about educating the customer. The way and timing of the education may change in this new world order, of AI, but education is still the best method to influence customers.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

The biggest competition for you is Inertia of the customer

B2B, competition, Customers, Decisions, niche, Sales

One of Newton’s laws of Motion is – Law of Inertia – Nothing moves unless a force is applied on it.

As a sales person, for you the biggest competition you will face, is with the customer, not wanting to change the status quo. The customer always has a choice

Buy from you
Buy from your direct competition
Buy something else which can solve the problem – albeit not the same way – but solve it does
Remain with the status quo

It’s very nice when the customer buys from you. All the hardwork put up by you and your team, during the sales cycle, pays off for you and your company. In case of the second situation, where your direct competition is involved, you can take steps to pre-empt the competition, from taking away the sale. But to be fair to them, they may actually be better than you, in some cases. Either their solution is more apt for the customer or the sales person involved understands the customer better or she has a better relationship with the customer.

If the customer solves the problem with a different method, then you could be caught off-track. When I was involved in selling single and dual loop process controllers, a lot of times , after, SCADA systems became more affordable in India, I found, customers thought it better to go in for the complete SCADA system, rather than buying a controller for 2 processes. In other example, a person may prefer to travel by road instead of taking a flight. So the airline company lost the deal while the petrol/gas companies and hotel companies got business. In either of these situations the customer did go for a solution, it may not have been the solution which was being sold by you.

The worse situation is when after putting in months of effort, you realise that the customer is not willing to change. This is more painful in case of high value B2B sales, where multiple teams have to be involved to create a solution for the customer.

In B2B situations, the easiest situation for the customer is to not change anything. If it ain’t broke, why change. Change can mean that the new product/service will not work. If it doesn’t work, the peer level pressure that the manager will face will be enormous. It will be the manager’s failure, which will be highlighted to her forever, until and unless she works in an organisation which likes to try new things to succeed.

Sometimes it is easy to find out if your solution is moving forward or not. At other times you have to question the assumptions at different levels of the company’s hierarchy to identify if there’s any chance that your solution will be held back to maintain status-quo. It sometimes happens that you may have a sponsor at the lower level of the organisation, who wants to adapt your solution, but her manager may disapprove because she is scared of failure.

It may also happen that the benefits that you believe your solution will bring to the customer, is not what the customer believes. In that case it is your responsibility to showcase the benefits. On the other hand if the benefits are only going to “move the needle” marginally, then the customer may not be interested in moving forward and taking the risk.

The best way I have found, though not always successful 100% of the time, is to question the customer(s) on why they want to go in for the solution. What is the benefit they are assuming the solution will bring for them and why is the benefit(s) important to them. And then check this same thing at different levels of the hierarchy. If at any time you notice a dilemma or a “Re Flag”, you need to get cautious and keep digging till you find out.

If you focus on any niche in the market, then this becomes a lot easier to handle, because 80% of the issues that companies have will be similar and you can learn to unearth the issues in advance.

Till next time then ….. identify if your customer has any inertia holding them back.

Carpe Diem!!!

Sometimes losing a sale is good, in B2B

B2B, Customer Delight, Customers, losing, Sales

As a business leader, there are a lot of times when you have to take a decision on pricing which results in losing a deal.

I have had to take many such decisions and the sales persons involved in the deal get really upset since they misses their target because of that decision.

See, its very easy to discount to win a deal, but if after winning the deal you’re not able to execute because it’s way out of budget then you get a terrible name. In B2B, if you fail to deliver or deliver badly, then you can be sure that you will not get business from that company again and if the manager involved in the decision , goes to some other company, she will ensure that you do not get business from there also.

I have had a couple of instances where we lost the order, then the vendor who was awarded, did not deliver and after one year of struggling, the customer called us back and gave the order without any negotiation.

And since we did a good job there, they gave us multiple more cases.

The advantage of B2B is that once you do a good job, then generally, the managers want to keep working with you. The inertia and the political situation in the organizations mean that a manager doesn’t want to try a new vendor if she can.

So even if you have to lose a deal, its okay because you will get many opportunities to win. But if you do a bad job, because you don’t have the money in the deal, then you will lose the client forever.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!