Mapping all the steps to acquiring a customer

Depending on the how you have structured your sales and marketing, these could be two independent functions and chances are that they both work independent of each other, often blaming the other for the non-performance.

However a customer does not see this as two functions. She is a seeing every single touch point as the company and you make an impression – good or bad based on that.

However if you can think of the whole journey a customer takes from the first touch point to the way the sales order comes in , you can iron out a lot of glitches.

By mapping this journey, you will also be able to identify the gaps between, how you think a customer should come versus how your systems are working for the customer to actually come.

During one of our marketing launches we covered multiple steps as to how the campaigns will flow, what will be the sequence of mails that the team will send out, how will the follow-up happen, till we get the prospect to come for a presentation. since we did not map the whole process backwards, we failed when a prospect asked us to share some content before coming for a presentation and in another case asked us for a justification document after we had given a demo. Now in both these cases we had not anticipated that a customer could need these because they were looking at a new technology.

If you go to sites like Gartner, they have a very nice item for their conferences, “documents to justify to your management” which are all the reasons why attending any of the conferences would help the company. This way they are helping the manager who wants to attend, get documents easily, instead of expecting him to justify by himself, in which case he could fail to justify properly and therefore not get the approval to attend. Which would be a loss to Gartner. So they have thought through the possible steps which could stop the sale from happening and put the data in place to help.

In B2b sales , where multiple levels of approval and justifications are needed, mapping the complete journey can help iron out the creases in both your marketing and sales plans.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Creating Novelty – fighting boredom

B2B, Marketing, messaging, Product Management

I wrote multiple posts on how boredom gets the brain distracted. When your prospect is distracted, whatever message you’re trying to convey, will get passed over for the next item which takes the prospect’s attention.

The way to fight boredom is to make your message and sometimes your medium interesting. How do you do that?

One way to do that is to create novelty, another could be intrigue /mystery. There could be a lot more. At the end of the day marketing is applied psychology, so human behavior can be checked and incorporated into your marketing.

Novelty can come in various forms – one of the most common ways to attract attention would be to use the word NEW in front of your product and then list out your product attributes which are new and novel.

In the case of mobile phones, they talk of the camera lens or processor generation to showcase novelty. In case of televisions its about the display.

All the above products are commodity products, so people will not pay attention to the messaging / advertising if they don’t see any novelty. In case of consumer products being advertised on television, this is a very big challenge for the product manager, because people change the channel with the remote, the moment they find anything boring.

For the B2B product management or marketing person, especially in the services space, the challenge is a lot tougher in terms of creating novelty. You need to be able to come out with something related to your process or your technology and project it as something unique.

Operating in this space I have had many different experiences with trying to attract attention. Depending on the hierarchy of the B2B people you are trying to attract, the industry that you are targeting everything will make difference to the “novelty ” you are trying to bring out. But that’s what makes product management in the technology space interesting.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Single Target Market – Once Again – Testing

B2B, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, messaging, Product Management, single target market

In my post yesterday I wrote about how deep these three words – Single Target Market -are, for a product or marketing manager when they are launching a new product or service.

Even if you have a checklist based on which you identify a Single Target Market, you still need to test if there’s actually a need for your product / service in that market. “You have identified a niche in the market, but is there a market in the niche” I don’t remember where I first read this quote but its absolutely critical.

Before that you will need to test if the message that you are conveying resonates with the market. You will need to test if the medium you are using, actually takes the message to the market which people notice.

So testing, as I emphasised in my posts multiple times earlier also, is absolutely critical for your success. You may do as much analysis sitting on your desk, its only when the “rubber hits the road” that you realise how good your actual planning isarke.

If you have thought through the Single Target Market really well, then you would have also hypothesised about the conversations going on in the mind of the prospects at different stages in the buying cycle. However whether what you have sent out as a message is resonating or needs to fine tuned can only be figured out as you start playing in the market.

Similarly you may decide to send out pamphlets, to the audience, but the audience prefers to see a message on the social media platforms, that also needs to figured out.

Last but not the least – there’s a lead time – for any market to convert. In the case of B2B the lead time is actually very long – sometimes even upto two years. Reason being most B2B buying happens after a lot of effort where multiple departments are involved. So there’s lots of inertia as well as processes that need to be closed before another vendor is brought in. In addition until and unless the incumbent vendor has really messed up, the companies you target will not like to consider someone new. If you have a new technology which the existing vendors don’t provide, they may still consider you, but the process is still very long.

For this you need to have a lot of marketing stamina to not only test but also for conversion of prospects.

So while the Single Target Market can make your market entry strategy very structured, you still need to prepare for doing testing and tweaking your message or your medium.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Boredom in marketing….cause for distraction – Part 2

B2B, Marketing, messaging, Triggers

In the first part we spoke about how marketing is all about applied psychology. So to ensure that the prospects read and respond to your message they have to get curious about what you send to them.

When you are marketing to consumers, you can have different nuances like comedy, location and other things to make the prospect curious about your offerings. However when you are marketing to B2B customers the messaging has to be a little more formal. The remaining part of the post is focused on B2B messaging and how to make it more interesting for the recipient so that they don’t get bored and move to the next item.

One way, to ensure you are not boring, that I have written about multiple times earlier, is using triggers. These could be related to the industry in general, the company in particular or the person specifically. The more specific the trigger, more the chance of getting a person interested.

In B2B messaging, the concept of triggers, works best when you’re doing one – on – one messaging. A person could have joined new, a person could have got promoted, a person could have moved to a new department within the company. The CEO of the company could have set new priorities. Or the price of oil going up could impact the company positively or negatively. You will need to have people dedicated to working on tracking these triggers for your list of prospects.

You then need to mold your message about your offerings and make it relevant with the triggers. If you’re using FedEx or a similar service you could even deliver an oversized package to draw the attention of your prospect even further. On the other hand if you’re going to use email then the message has to be short and should invoke curiosity.

We will discuss in more detail next time.

Till then….

Carpe Diem!!!