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!!!

Market forecasts – how I would get them wrong – 3

Assumptions, B2B, Marketing, Product Management

So in my last 2 posts I wrote about couple of areas, on how as a product manager, I would get my forecasts wrong.

In this one, we will talk about competition. Whenever there’s a good market, you will have competition come in, sooner rather than later. The more the competition, the more the challenges because you have to estimate in advance how competition would react to your offering.

The advantage of the B2B market is that generally, the competition is defined. Until a rank outsider comes in with a revolutionary product, generally the B2B space is defined and the products/services are also known.

In the market – perception is the reality. So if your competition creates a perception of a superior product/service or a cheaper service or a more flexible service, then all your forecasts can go haywire, if the market believes that your product is inferior in any way / more expensive / less flexible.

When you are working with a specific software tool or you are a partner for only a specific kind of equipment, then your options for differentiation decrease. It limits you to primarily two things – experience that you have and the kind of technical expertise that you have created.

If its your own product/service you can leverage on other things like the kind of packaging that you do, or the software code that you have built.

From a competition perspective the other thing that you need to note is the number of sales people in the market from your competitors versus yourself. If you have 3 sales people while you have competition with 7 sales people each, then its not practical for your team to outrun the competition. Your competition will always have more people covering more accounts. Which means your chance of losing a deal is always higher. Planning without this aspect clearly articulated in your assumptions is a grave mistake.

But marketing – especially in B2 is very interesting because of these factors.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Thinking long term

B2B, competition, execution, Marketing Stamina, persistence

One of the key things to be successful is to have the stamina to play for the long term

If you can just be in the game for a long enough period of time, a lot of your competition will just fall by the way side.

The reason for that is that most people on play for the sport term and if they don’t become successful fast enough then they quit. Some others quit because they don’t have the wherewithal to last long enough.

Yesterday I was having a discussion , with my colleagues, about engaging with partners . One of the points that came out was that it takes almost a year before the partners actually start trusting you to talk about opportunities.

This is for a specific case of services where we were looking for partners. But the important point is that if we don’t have a long term plan to stay in the game we will give up this market.

When you plan your business for the long term, then you next figure out the Financials accordingly. Based on that you work on the kind of mediums you can use to do your marketing. You can decide the best possible market for you to focus such that you can play for the long term.

You will win the war if you just have the ability to fight a lot of battles. This is true for a physical war as well as in marketing.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Understanding your competition-Part 2

B2B, Business, competition

In my first post on this topic, a few days back, I wrote about how you need to understand the competition.

The big challenge with competition, in the technology industry is that, in a lot of cases you don’t recognize where the disruption can come from.

In addition you can’t envisage all the ways your customers’ business is getting impacted. Based on the impact in their environment they may take decisions which can impact you.

I have had many situations over the years where we did not anticipate the customer’s business environment change, whether it was related to government policy or the change with people moving from Capex to Opex. In all these situations the customer’s demands suddenly changed and we had to rethink our strategy, delivery mechanisms etc. Trust me, its not a good position to be in.

The key advantage of doing business in B2B is that if you do a decent job, then you stay with the customer a long long time. There are very few impulsive decisions taken until you really mess up.

On the other hand you need to be aware of how the environment has changed over the last few years for the customer, so that you are not caught unaware.

This is competition for you because now you need to rethink your pricing , your technology and your delivery mechanism. Your customer expects you to provide a solution to fit their new circumstances or they will go somewhere else. And there’s no name to this competition so it’s more dangerous.

Till next time then….keep an eye for competition from different avenues.

Carpe Diem!!!