life time value

Product Management concepts for a consumer company

B2B, differentiation, ideal customer, Marketing, Product Management, Profitability, Risks, single target market

When you see the large venture capital backed companies burning cash month on month you wonder if the general concepts of Product Management / Marketing are valid, these days, for a consumer facing company.

There is one dynamic to keep in mind – the principles of Product Management / Marketing have not changed, what’s changed is the availability of money at extremely low rates – in most developed countries the interest rates are hovering at or less than 1% on bank deposit . In Japan just a few months back interest rates had actually gone negative.

If you keep this in mind where cost of money is so low, people are looking for ways to get a higher return on their investment so the propensity to take risk is higher. If the cost of money would be say at about 5% on bank deposits, then the propensity to put in risk capital would be different. That’s also one of the key reasons that the stock markets are at a record high even though countries have been facing lockdowns.

Now inspite of this these VC based companies are generally not stupid. The VCs do put in checks and balances to ensure their money does not sink.

So the burning of cash is part of a strategy to acquire customers. This would only succeed if the life time value of a customer is known. This principle is true for any kind of product or service you get into. If you know the life time value of a customer then you can actually buy customers because you know that if they are happy they will buy more often from you and also refer others to you.

The second is the convenience factor / inertia factor. Once you have given some customer a good service and they get used to the convenience of working with you, they will generally end up buying from you because the cost of getting another vendor is quite high. In case of B2B customers the number of processes to complete to get a new vendor empanelled are so large that procurement teams want to limit their vendors. In case of consumer products, its so difficult to understand another new “app” to order items. So you go ahead and order again on an “amazon” just because your card is already loaded and you can buy without hassle.

The other factor is critical volume . In the “app” based consumer companies the network effect plays a big role. So the larger the customers and vendors on a platform they feed into each other to create a positive snowball effect. Due to this in any market you cannot have more than two “amazon” or more than two “uber” kind of companies.

In B2B business also something similar happens with critical volume. If you look at it about 25-30 years back there were at least 5-6 prominent ERP vendors including SAP, Oracle Financials, MFG Pro etc. today there are only 2 primary companies in this arena. This is because based on the number of installations, the number of technical people needed goes up, so do salaries so more people train themselves to avail this opportunity. Slowly the availability of trained manpower becomes one of the key reasons to choose a product.

So in my opinion the principles of product management / marketing don’t change. The methods / platforms for delivering the product / service may change as technology changes. In my next few posts I will cover other principles like Single Target Market, Ideal Customer profile etc.

I would love to know if any of you thinks otherwise.

Till next time then.

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!!!