dean jackson

Growing the business in a niche – Part V – Identifying channels

differentiation, Marketing, Positioning, Product Management, Sales

You would have noticed, I have not spoken about advertising as part of product management launch or sustenance. That is because I believe that broad level brand level advertising is a big waste of money. Especially when you are a startup or a small company or a company launching a new product.

It is always better to utilise the funds that you have to keep improving the product based on incremental customer feedback. My agenda would be to operate on a shoe string budget and let your marketing and sales fund your business

This situation could however be different, if you have Venture Capital funding and the agenda is to create awareness even if you lose money on every transaction. Some products which follow the so called “network effect” could definitely make use of this kind of product launch.

Which brings me to todays rant for growing your business in a niche, using different types of channels/partnerships or media to reach out to your customers based on your acceptable cost of acquisition.

Yesterday we identified that if you can sell 10 deals at a gross margin of $10000 per sale you make $100000/- as the first time GM on every first deal with a customer in the first 12 months.

The next piece of arithmetic – after all, all business is arithmetic – you need to be aware of is – to get 10 deals in the first 12 months how many prospects will you need to reach and how many times to be able to get 10 of them to do business with you for the first time.

Which brings us to the next concept of what Dean Jackson calls “invisible” or “visible” prospects. Like the picture above if you know in which forest you will get the tree, the forest is visible, the specific tree has to be found. If you have chosen banks as your prospects to whom you would like to sell your product or service, then they are semi visible. You can identify the banks but within that, the exact person is a little difficult to ascertain. On the other hand if you are selling eggs in a locality, then you know the 2000 houses in the locality (visible prospects), you need to just reach out to them.

On the other hand anyone could be a customer for paintings (invisible) and finding them from within a large population could be very tough.

For visible and semi-visible prospects I would suggest finding partners who are selling to those same customers already and figure out a way to share the margins with them. The number of partners you can and should build will be a function of the number you get from your Life Time value calculations.

One word of caution – partners take a long time to actually start giving you business – so you should see how you can get them business first,.so as part of what Robert Cialdini calls the principle of reciprocity, they feel obliged to start giving you business.

Tomorrow we will look at what other mechanisms you could look at for getting both visible and invisible prospects.

Till next time…

Carpe Diem!!!

Growing the business in a niche – Part III – Life Time Value

differentiation, Marketing, Positioning, Product Management, Sales

In my post yesterday I spoke about how you could go about partnering with inflencers and other merchants / companies who sell to the same niche.

There are 2 decisions to make the above successful.

First is the fact that you will need to hustle and connect with people. No one is going to find you. You have to make yourself found.

The second is the arithmetic behind the number of people you can partner with.

Which brings me to the concept of Life Time Value. This concept is explained very well by Jay Abraham and then Joe Polish and Dean Jackson

Most people, including people working in large companies don’t understand this concept, due to which they take short term decisions in accepting the first order.

Let’s say you have an average deal size of $100,000. In this you have a gross margin of $10000/-. This customer can buy from you the same product or service maybe 2 more times over the next 5 years. Which means over the next 5 years this one customer can give you a gross margin of $30000/-

Now if you have given this customer exceptional service then she may also refer one more customer like herself to you who could also give you another $ 30000/-

Which is a total of $60000/-. However you won’t make this if you don’t get the customer in the first place. The longer you can keep your customers to keep coming back for mere the higher this value becomes. As Joe Polish says, it also helps you to stop thinking in episodic nature and start thinking of very long term relationships with your customers.

Which brings us to the next point, how much are you willing to spend to get the customer first. This could be in terms of giving your partner all the first year margin or giving added value of $10000 to the customer. I am generally not in the favor of giving a discount because it becomes very difficult to raise prices once customers get used to one price point. Like I mentioned in my post yesterday, you could go on the ilovemarketing podcast or the morecheeselesswhiskers podcast and get a lot of examples how businesses of all sizes have used this.

The more you can afford to spend to get a client upfront and the longer you can be at it, the more successful you will be in getting your product or service to take over the market.

Till next time

Carpe Diem!!!

Growing the business in a niche

differentiation, Marketing, Positioning, Product Management, Sales

One of the biggest arguments that I hear against identifying a niche is “How will we grow and adrress the full market”

First trying to address the “full” market is a fallacy. Its not ever feasible….but we will address it in a separate post.

For this post let’s keep our focus on the niche you have and how to grow it.

We will take 2 examples – one from the low value “eggs” that we had touched earlier and another from the IT services segment which is B2B and ultra high value.

This topic will be carried over multiple posts, because any product management process will need to go through multiple steps to make it successful in the market. The logic will hold whether you are selling financial services or consumer products or technology services

The assumption over here is that you have a ” Market in the niche” . If you are reading my blog posts for the first time, I would suggest you look at my previous posts where I give a detailed explanation on this topic.

The second assumption is that you have a very good product or service and you can differentiate it in the market.

The third assumption is that you have analyzed and seen that there’s what Dan Kennedy used to call a “Hungry Crowd” or a market for your product or service.

So if you are trying to sell eggs in a locality which is predominantly populated by vegetarian people , then however good your product is, you will never be able to grow your business because there are not enough people who eat eggs. So there will hardly be anyone willing to eat a “red” egg ( see my previous post on this red egg example)

With the above 3 assumptions in place, it means you have been able to identify your market, identify the niche in the market and size it.

From the next post we will start looking at making an entry into the market and growing it.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!

When you polarize….you monetize

differentiation, Marketing, Positioning, Product Management, Sales

I heard this statement from Dr. Sean Stephenson at the ilovemarketing mastery inaugural course.

The word polarize means to split into such that they seem so different like the north and south pole of the earth. The key terms in this statement are split and different. Like the red pawn and black pawn in the picture.

This is so closely related to what I have been talking about in the last few days on differentiation, perception and choosing a niche.

Apple polarizes is audiences, so does a Lamborghini. You don’t go into a Lamborghini showroom and ask for a discount…. they may tell you there’s a waiting list. They are angle to do that because they own that space in the minds of the customers. Similarly if you don’t value the positioning of Lamborghini you won’t even go into their showrooms

The job of good marketing is to attract your best prospects and repel all others. Once you do a good job there you can really make good profits.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!