dean jackson

B2B Messaging- Part II

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

Yesterday we spoke about the challenges when sending an email to a prospects.

Unlike consumer products,where you can build a large list of prospects with opt-ins, when you are starting off something new, you also have to buy lists. You have to send them cold emails.

As I have mentioned earlier also its always better to go to existing customers first with your new offerings or you should go to your partners’ customers with your new offerings.

Howevr whe you are working for a company, the pressure for getting more and more prospects into your funnel is very high and therefore sending cold emails becomes imperative.

Mind you, there are other media as well, like Linkedin which you can use. There’s however a price to be paid.

If you are starting out a new company or a new division of a company or starting as the new marketing head, then getting funding can be tough since any Paid advertising or SEO takes time to get you actual leads and a lot of companies may not have that kind of patience for giving you funding

So if you are in that kind of a situation email is the only medium which you can use.

But as we mentioned yesterday, the email has to pass through so many filters before it even reaches the recipient. After it reaches her mailbox, it only has a fraction of a second before she either deletes the mail or just ignores it.

Which means the message has to be so focused, simple and should not in any way even remotely look salesy. So all the fancy home emails are out.

On a mobile where the screen real estate is so small you cannot waste it on showing graphics.

The message has to be pure text and should look like it has been only written for her – the recipient. As Dean Jackson says it should be all cheese (only the customer’s interest) no whiskers (our interest)

Till next time..

Carpe Diem!!!.

B2B messaging

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

I believe marketing is Marketing irrespective of what you sell. I keep telling my team, irrespective of what we are selling, we are selling to people.

Which means the psychology of influencing remains the same, whether you sell chips, or you sell dresses, or you sell technology services.

What I have found a little different is the medium of communication or the method of getting the message across for different markets.

By far the best way and also the most effective method in B2B especially for technology companies is email.

However the challenge is that because it is virtually free, it also gets abused. Therefore companies put filters on their email systems which block any mail which even remotely looks like spam or labels the mail as Marketing Mail if its seen as being sent in bulk.

If your mail passes the spam filter and does not get labeled as a marketing mail, then you only get a fraction of a second to attract attention, when someone sees your mail on their hand-held, before they move to the next mail.

This makes the challenge exciting and frustrating.

As Dean Jackson says, you need to look at the email as a conversation you have while standing in the line at Starbucks. You cannot be in a preaching mode when you write the mail. It has to be for that one person to whom it is addressed.

In future posts I will give examples of major learnings I have had sending hundreds of thousands of emails while prospecting for technology companies.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!

Creating the message for your niche

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

While finding the niche is tough, I have found creating the messaging to make people raise their hand to show interest is the toughest part

This requires immense attention to the nuances of the words being used. You need to keep chiseling on the words such that you use the least amount of words with the highest impact.

But even before you get down to putting words on paper, how do you make out ” what’s going on in the customer’s mind”

The famous Clayton Christensen experiment on the job of the milkshake was directed to exactly figure out what’s going on in the minds of people who buy a milkshake in the morning at McDonald’s.

You will need to test hypothesis and have the patience to continuously iterate and improve on what’s working and dump what’s not.

Somethings which I have found very useful are ideas from Jay Abraham and Dean Jackson. I would highly recommend reading Jay’s book Getting All you want from What you Have and listening to the MoreCheeseLessWhiskers podcast by Dean.

Once you know the usage, which we discussed in the last 2 posts, you can start making some hypothesis by getting into the shoes of the customers.

In the dry cleaning example that I used yesterday…maybe you could think if they are a single parent doing multiple jobs or they could be a family with both parents working….each could have a different challenge

In the case of the Disaster Recovery example which was a B2B case, maybe the customer has their own DR site is now looking for a different kind of a DR…they would think in terms of the different types of technologies available, feasibility etc. While someone who is going for a DR execution for the first time could be more interested in where do I start from.

Like I said earlier, this is one of the toughest jobs because you have to be creative in conceptualizing and building the message but you have to be scientific in measuring and testing your different messages.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Arrogance versus Self Confidence

arrogance, jealousy, mindset

I thought of taking a break from just talking about marketing.

Those of you who follow my blog know that I like to identify the differences between words in English and how they get used. An Oxford dictionary is still among the prized possessions in my library.

I was listening to a talk by Sean Stephenson on the Ilovemarketing mastery program by Joe Polish and Dean Jackson.

He brought out an important point on Arrogance versus Self Confidence.

Which led me to the dictionary again and this is what I got at the meriam-webster site and I have taken it from there and posted below

Definition of arrogance

: an attitude of superiority manifested in an overbearing manner or in presumptuous claims or assumptions

Definition of self-confidence

: confidence in oneself and in one’s powers and abilities

Sean’s take was that people with confidence have a tendency to always want to improve themselves and keep increasing their capabilities which increases confidence further.

On the other hand people who are arrogant are always trying to prove a point to others or to themselves.

What was more interesting was what he mentioned after this. Can people who are confident about themselves come out as arrogant to others.

As per him if someone thinks of your self confidence as arrogance, then it means they are jealous of you. Which is the price for being successful.

Bottom line is if people are jealous of you then you know you are being successful. And if people are not jealous of you then maybe you are not playing a big enough game.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!