dean jackson

Larger the choices – lesser the chance of success -II

differentiation, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, Product Management, segmentation

I have consistently been ranting about choosing only one market whenever you are starting. This need not only be about when you are starting a new business. For a product manager who has been given a new product to take to the market, the logic remains the same.

See whenever you try to look at multiple choices, you have an opportunity cost involved. With multi[le options you have to spend energy between those options. Everyone has limited amounts of energy.

You could keep focused on one market and understand the conversation going on in the head of the people you are targeting. It takes an enormous amount of iterations to understand the conversations in the minds of the customers in one market. Its never feasible to get the marketing right in the “first go”. You have to keep testing and figuring out the right message which would resonate with the market you have chosen. Only once you understand those conversations, can you tailor your messaging and “Go-TO-Market” strategy to dominate a market.

Sometimes the first market you choose may not have the need you first thought it would have because the underlying “infrastructure” is still weak. The SaaS solution you have designed for a specific market doesn’t take off because the internet speed in that market is poor. So you have to rethink your “Go-To-Market” .

The moment you try to look at multiple markets you end up compromising on the depth of your engagement. This opportunity cost is very high. Since you are trying to take multiple positions simultaneously in different segments of the market you end up weak in all of them and you don’t get the opportunity to dominate any one of them.

There’s nothing stopping you from dominating one market and moving to the other but if you try to dominate all segments simultaneously you will not succeed.

For all Product Managers in the making or already there keep this fundamental at the top of your mind always – Only Market to Start – Always

Till next time then

Carpe Diem!!!

Marketing Stamina

Marketing, Marketing Stamina, messaging, persistence, Positioning, Product Management

I had heard this word for the first time about 2 years back in one of Dean Graziosi’s books or training seminars. I heard this again today while I was doing the Breakthrough DNA training, from Dean Jackson.

I have pre-dominantly come from the technology background where typical deal cycles are around 3-6 months. Being B2B, these are not impulsive purchases where people are not bothered about the risk with low value items.

In this scenario it takes months and months of messaging, following through, which results in leads getting generated.

Even after the leads come through its not going to result in an order.

Its your persistence to keep following up with the leads on a regular basis because sometimes it could take months for these customers to decide. This persistence is what both these gentlemen call as Marketing Stamina.

To ensure Marketing Stamina you need content to keep adding value to your prospect. But you also need to have cash flow to ensure you survive while this process is going on.

This is where the economics of lead generation and lead nurturing come in. You need to be clear how much money has to be spent to get a lead to come into your funnel and how much time the lead stays in the funnel before they buy (not necessarily from you). During this time you have to keep nurturing these leads.

This is different from the concept of Life Time Value. Life time value is about long term profits from a customer and the referrals. However the economics of lead gen and lead nurturing are more related to cash flow today.

So based on your economics and what you can afford to spend you choose the media for running the message to your prospects for both lead generation as well as for lead nurturing. You can’t run out of money or stamina because that is how you will build a long term business.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!

B2B Messaging – sequences

Marketing, messaging, Positioning, Product Management, Sales, segmentation

The job of a cold email is to get a response to validate the quality of the database. That’s it. As I have been ranting, over the last few posts, therefore these mails have to be extremely short and to the point.

Once someone responds, you can start a sequence of mails. Dean Jackson has a very interesting term called “offering cookies” to educate and motivate propsects.

However one key thing I have noticed in B2B marketing is whenever you are launching or marketing a new product, there is a lot of resistance/inertia in the mind of the prospects to change.

The reason for this is the amount of sanctions and approvals, people have to take, from multiple stake holders to get a new thing in place. So people don’t like to bother about software or solutions or technologies which will, at best, offer some incremental change. This is even more true if its for an internal process. So one basic thing to keep in mind is to see how your product or service can dot he job differently and therefore give a dramatic improvement of an internal process.

If its for a customer facing item they may still be open to things which are incremental, if they think, that it will help in better customer acquisition of customer retention. Therefore in these situations, more than the technology part, you should look at the impact on business in your communication.

To work through this inertia or resistance you will need to keep sending a sequence of mails to increase the awareness of the product/service, to drive in a wedge of dissonance with the existing setup that they have and to share case studies on how other adopters have used your product or service.

I have seen cases where we have targeted prospects for more than year – which means at least 18-20 touches, before they even thought of talking to us.

There was a time when people would offer whitepapers as magnets to pull prospects to see their level of interest. Today in the technology/IT arena everyone is offering so much content via YouTube and other social media channels that putting “gates” to see the level of interest can be worthless. This is however my opinion.

As I tell my team, I am also telling you – the market is the final judge. Pls test and see what works in your market. If offering whitepapers via “gates” helps gauge the level of interest of a prospect in your market, by all means go ahead and do it.

However doing a sequence of touch points /messaging is absolutely imperative in B2B marketing. So don’t get disheartened if even after sending out 4-5 mails you don’t get a response.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!

B2B Messaging – Part III

differentiation, Marketing, messaging, Positioning, Product Management, Sales

Continuing from where I left yesterday you only have a fraction of a second before the person presses the delete button on your mail- assuming it even reached her.

To be able to do this, you have to be a wordsmith so you can continuously reduce the unwanted words and reorganize them so that the right nuance is brought out in your mail .

But even before that you have to think completely in terms of that person’s interests and keep your interests aside.

Assuming you have followed me up to now , you have segmented your market, then identified an economically viable niche and then isolated that one person who would seek you out

While I have stated all the assumptions in one paragraph, we have complete departments whose only job is to continuously figure this out and keep improving on the definition of the ideal customer.

But if you have done the above work, kept your self interest aside, placed yourself in that ideal person’s life you can list out a lot of things where you can directly touch a cord.

Within that, my experience in B2B has been that if you are selling something to a department which sits on the cost side then it always takes a longer time.

On the other if you sell something which can increase revenues then it moves faster. As Dean Jackson says everyone in an organization is entitled to bring in money but for spending money you have to cross multiple levels of approval.

So see how you can get your offerings to work for the marketing side.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!