Marketing Stamina

B2B, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, persistence

This is a phrase I first heard from Dean Graziosi. I have written about it earlier also . Its a very simple thought process. I have used it in terms of B2B marketing but I would guess it would apply in all kinds of marketing.

The logic is that every market takes time to adapt to a new offering that you bring to the market. It could be because of inertia in B2B setups because of the sheer number of people involved in making decisions as well as the complexity of processes.

If you don’t have the stamina to last through the cycle before the adoption of your offering “crosses the chasm”. This stamina is both in terms of finances and your own abilities to persist.

Today I got a different view of this . You would have read about my philosophy of riding the elephant to get access to markets. We had been riding one very large OEM for a certain set of tools. Between 2014 and 2016 we invested a lot before we got any business. But subsequent to that we got a lot of business which suddenly dried up by 2019 because the OEM decided to take a different direction (I have written about these in the challenges when riding the elephant)

Now however today I got a call from one of the reps of the OEM checking if we still have the team that was created. Generally we prefer to play the long game. So we had kept the team because we had some residue business that we were closing, while we were evaluating our options with other OEMs.

The OEM now wants to utilize the same team to go out in the market with the new products that they are launching.

If we didn’t have the marketing stamina (if we had not planned with a long term view) we would not have been able to today get a jump start.

Think long-term and plan accordingly.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!

Boredom in marketing….cause for distraction

Distractions, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, messaging

One of the main causes when a person gets distracted is because of boredom. The other three being hedonic adaption, negativity bias and rumination. As per Nir Eyal in his book Indistractable, the way to avoid boredom is to get curious. Even very mundane tasks as per him can be made interesting if we are curious about something. Curiosity can kill boredom and can stop you from getting distracted

Marketing is applied psychology. What is valid for the individual in his daily routine is also valid for the person who gets your marketing message.

If your message is boring, the prospect will get distracted from your message and move to something else. So you need to make the prospect get curious about your offerings. That’s the only way she will be interested in interacting with you further.

When do people become curious. In my opinion when the message has something directly to do with THEM. Which means the message should look like it’s ONLY TO them and ABOUT them. If the message anywhere screams marketing, it will automatically get banished.

So the messaging has to look one – on – one (to them) and should target the conversation that could be going on in the mind of a prospect (about them). It cannot be a sermon. It has to be specific because people now have a very short attention span.

Which brings us to the most difficult part. Understanding the conversation in the mind of the prospect, building multiple communication pieces which invoke curiosity in her mind.

And you then need to have staying power to ensure, because people respond when they want to respond. If you don’t have the marketing stamina to last long enough then you won’t be able to win.

Till next time then….we will continue on this

Carpe Diem!!!

Thinking long term

B2B, competition, execution, Marketing Stamina, persistence

One of the key things to be successful is to have the stamina to play for the long term

If you can just be in the game for a long enough period of time, a lot of your competition will just fall by the way side.

The reason for that is that most people on play for the sport term and if they don’t become successful fast enough then they quit. Some others quit because they don’t have the wherewithal to last long enough.

Yesterday I was having a discussion , with my colleagues, about engaging with partners . One of the points that came out was that it takes almost a year before the partners actually start trusting you to talk about opportunities.

This is for a specific case of services where we were looking for partners. But the important point is that if we don’t have a long term plan to stay in the game we will give up this market.

When you plan your business for the long term, then you next figure out the Financials accordingly. Based on that you work on the kind of mediums you can use to do your marketing. You can decide the best possible market for you to focus such that you can play for the long term.

You will win the war if you just have the ability to fight a lot of battles. This is true for a physical war as well as in marketing.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Creating dissonance in the B2B buyer’s mind – Part 2

B2B, Business, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, persistence

In my post of 12th April I had written about how B2B sales are not impulsive in nature. If you’re selling something which is a hot new technology and the buyer is a technology fan then you might be able to sell based on just the technology being new.

On the other hand , most B2B businesses have different levels in a buying process for any kind of product or service, especially if you are looking at a mid to large to extremely large companies. In these kind of companies the inertia itself is very large and the processes complex, so getting a process initiated itself is a task.

So until and unless there is a real challenge with a vendor no one wants to change, even if you have done the perfect segmentation and identified them as your ideal customer.

In the post on 12th April I wrote about how your messaging should keep targeting some areas of dissonance. However you cannot create dissonance with one piece of messaging, it will never stick. The longer a vendor has been providing the services to an organisation the bigger is the chance that the vendor’s issues will be ignored. Also not all issues – using an example from calculus – tend to cross the limit/threshold – where the customer snaps.

So when entering with a regular product or service you need to look at a long term time frame of say 2 years – it could be longer depending on the product or service – airplanes as an example – people may take 5-10 years before deciding on moving from say Boeing to Airbus .

Then you need to keep at sending out a weekly mail/postcard or whatever to be in-front of the buyers so that when the limit / threshold is reached they call you out by default. This persistence in marketing or as Dean Graziosi calls it – Marketing Stamina helps you pick up business in the long term.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!