market

Market forecasts – how I would get them wrong

Assumptions, Learning, Marketing, Product Management

In product management, one of the key things that is expected is building a market forecast and then getting a budget approved.

Being in a services space, our services were centered around some software products. Which meant that if the software products didn’t sell our forecast would be worthless. So the OEM being able to sell the product was critical. As an example if SAP becomes a leader in the ERP space then all the service providers who have capabilities around SAP have a large market to target and their business will grow.

Generally I used to map all the people, at the OEM, who were involved with the specific product. These people would also help lead us into customer requirements.

Now the challenge is that most people who are part of the same team will generally always give the same pieces of data. Therefore there was a bias in the data that was being fed to me. Now since I was also invested heavily into the relationship with the OEM, I was also not willing to see if there were somethings about the data which were not ok.

Just to put things in perspective, this same method had also made me immensely successful as a product manager. The key was that at that time the products were successfully getting sold by the OEM, so that momentum also helped us sell a lot of the services.

As they say , failures give you lessons , to succeed to the next step. I realized I needed to meet people who were not involved with that product within the OEM and outside to see how they were performing. I also started asking questions of why its not a good idea to go with that product.

This helped make my investments into building service capabilities around specific products more rational. It also helped me push the technical team to create more cross functional capabilities.

As a product manager or marketing manager you have to learn to find a way to not fall into the dual traps of group think and confirmation bias.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Don’t blame the message…..check your market first

B2B, campaign, ideal customer, Marketing, messaging, single target market

I recently had two failures on a set of email campaigns that we ran for our B2B audience. As usual the first input I got from he sales team and their managers was “not a single response”. I was tied up in some other activities before I could analyse the issues. So last week I sat down with my team and asked them to come on Zoom so that I could see exactly what’s going on.

Whenever you talk about campaign failures – the first place that I like to check is the database (Also called the audience or in abrader term the market) in case of B2B prospects.

So if you try to sell carpet cleaning, you should be sure that the audience you are talking to has deployed carpets in their homes. Otherwise you can do the best advertising, messaging, offers but you won’t get an enquiry.

in my understanding when you have to do a post mortem of an advertising or email campaign failure, first start with the database because more than 50% of the times, that is the primary cause.

To come back to my story, I started going account by account for one campaign and realised that we were sending mails to the said designations of people, but the size of the companies was way higher than what I had mentioned in the Ideal Customer Profile. Somewhere there was a mis-communication between the manager and the database resource and we had this issue.

In the second case, the broad industry, revenue etc. were all matching. We didn’t have the break down of the sub industries. Before starting the campaigns, I had asked the research guy to give a sub-industry breakup also so that we are sure of the audience to whom we are sending. Since sales guys have their own time pressures, they decided to overrule me and the campaigns were sent out. Again “not a single response”. So during this session I decided to go to each company in the database and I asked the sales guy to show me the company details on Linkedin. Soon it was apparent that the sub-industries in which our service is not applicable were predominant in the database.

Whenever you want to analyse the failure of a campaign start with the Market/database first – you may not need to go any further after that.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!