Prioritizing the top 3 or 4 – Product Management

Assumptions, B2B, differentiation, Marketing, Marketing Ecosystem, Marketing Stamina, messaging, prioritizing, Product Management, segmentation, single target market

Last week I put up a post in which I highlighted the top issues that we need to focus on when looking at the product management in a technology environment. Product Management being a subset of marketing, some of the core items remain the same. However the focus changes a little. In my opinion, B2B technology buying needs to prioritize as follows:

Understanding the ecosystem for technology adoption
Getting footfalls (incase of a store) or hits on your website or people coming to your webinar
Cost of various media to get you the traffic
Cost of converting the footfall into a buying public

Perry Marshall calls items 2-4 as Traffic, Conversion and Economics. The reason I put the ecosystem first is because there’s a huge dependency on the existing infrastructure for the technology to be adopted. Most technology products that fail are because the ecosystem did not exist for the adoption.

Since 80/20 is fractal within each of these there’s a further 80/20 which exists. So within each database/list, there could be about 20% who would respond 80% of the times or even within the ecosystem there could be a 4% which accounts for the 64% of the ecosystem dependency.

If you are able to identify the few challenges in the ecosystem that you will face which can have a major impact on the success of your product, addressing them will ease your product launch or product entry or penetration dramatically. Its the small hinges which move doors in all areas.

Till next time then

Carpe Diem!!!

Prioritizing top 2 or 3 – challenges -2

differentiation, execution, Marketing, Marketing Ecosystem, Methodologies, prioritizing, Product Management, route to market, segmentation, single target market

Yesterday I wrote about the issues which come up in prioritizing the top 2 or 3 for me, in my day-to-day life. This post will talk about the top 3 things in marketing that you need to address and the challenges which come up in real life situations because of revenue pressures.

In marketing if you summarize the issues with respect to lead generation or getting business then they would be

Getting footfalls (incase of a store) or hits on your website or people coming to your webinar
Cost of various media to get you the traffic
Cost of converting the footfall into a buying public

Perry Marshall calls this the Traffic, Economics, Conversion combination. Within each of these three you can do a prioritization of the next top 3. Like I mentioned earlier 80/20 is fractal, so there’s always an 80/20 within an 80/20 forever, you just need to identify it. That will help you dramatically. I am amazed the amount of leverage I keep getting once I recognize the 80/20 in anything. Like I have been saying – small hinges move large doors.

Now something outside this equation is Reference customers. I would like to put this in category of itself, provided you already have a running business, because this can change the game in your favor dramatically.

Now every marketer would understand the things which I have listed above. But what happens is that there is pressure from sales for leads and while you start testing one item and things are not working out, you start analysing all the issues. In the meanwhile because there’s a pressure on revenue you try something in the short term to boost the revenues and the spiral starts and things go out of control.

During this time someone from delivery comes up with another product and sales being sales, they always want new products to take to the market and suddenly you are being pushed to launch the new product in the market.

The companies who do good in marketing are the ones who ensure that they don’t mess up the prioritization, focus on it to keep things running smoothly and then look at new product launches or sales pressures. Chances are if you have a system than the system will incorporate the failures that can take place and have a place to learn from them.

Master these priorities and you could be way ahead in your marketing.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Creating a message for your niche-Part II

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

As I had mentioned yesterday, creating the messages which could resonate with your market is by far one of the toughest things.

Rest of the things like identifying the demographic, identifying the Influencers, identifying the places where people congregate are all possible through various means. You can buy data, you can buy advertising space etc.

But after that creating multiple messages for that audience to test what will stick is a major effort.

That’s the reason why people who write copy get paid so massively.

One tool I have found useful, and I tell my team to use extensively is to write the autobiography of the person whom we are targeting. What is the day in the life of that person, what are her possible challenges, what are the issues she has to face everyday.

Once you start getting into the shoes of the person, automatically a lot of questions start getting thrown up, which can be modified for the medium you are using to send the message.

Another tool which I found very useful for building the messaging is one of Perry Marshall’s Swiss Army knife techniques. He likes to identify this person as above and wants you to also think in terms of the best friends of this person, the worst enemies and so on. Using this also you can quickly generate ideas, which will then need to again be modified for the respective medium you are using to send the message.

Even today I have to keep trying various options for messaging and then once, one message clicks how to improve it. If you have a creative bent of mind and like to do a lot of research its a good job to do.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!

Compounding & successful organisations

Financial Independence, Uncategorized

Recently Tim Ferris had a podcast with Jill Collins. If you have not heard of Jim Collins, he is the author of a lot of books which study how businesses succeed and fail. One of his most famous books is Good to Great. If you have not read it then its a must read for anyone who is even remotely interested in the corporate world.

If you haven’t heard of Tim Ferris or read any of his books the I highly recommend that you read his book The four hour work week and others. The advantage of the podcasts is that you get to hear real life people and Tim goes into the interviews with a very detailed structure so that you can get maximum benefit

Coming back to the podcast with Jim Collins(if interested you can listen to the podcast here). It’s a fabulous talk spread over about 2 hours but covers a very wide range of topics from “writing’ to Peter Drucker and to the Flywheel concept. Jim had first introduced this concept in the book Good to Great. But there it was more a chapter on how successful companies built systems to ensure each step helped them grow to the next and kept feeding.

However this flywheel concept was not elaborated further for a long time. In the podcast Jim spoke about how he’s done more research on the Flywheel concept and written a monograph. For me a monograph was a new concept. It’s a detailed study of a given topic. It’s less than a book but more than a whitepaper.

Since I was very interested in the flywheel concept from the time I had read the book, I immediately bought to read. The big concept which stands out int he flywheel is the positive feedback loop.

Most of you would know of the negative feedback loop. It helps control a process near a defined setpoint. For example if you put car in cruise control, then if due to a gradient the speed starts going up then automatically the pressure on the acceleration pedal is reduced. Another example of a negative feedback in your everyday life is the temperature control in the water heaters. If the temperature reaches the set-point then the heating is stopped. Negative feedback loops ensure control.

Positive feedback on the other hand is compounding at its core. One good thing leads to another and another. So Jim Collins gives multiple examples of companies like Amazon, Intel, Vanguard have used positive feedback to grow exponentially over a consistent period of time.

Which brings me to another book which looks at this same concept from a different angle. Its a book by Perry Marshall called 80/20 Sales and Marketing. Perry was influenced by Richard Koch who wrote the famous book on 80/20 many many years back. Perry has taken the concept of 80/20 and explained the fractal nature of this law. If you are in anyway related to sales or marketing you will find enormous nuggets for helping you in your sales or marketing career.

When I read “Turning the Flywheel” it reminded me of a similar concept in nature which Perry shows on how the Grand Canyon was formed and how the same positive feedback loops can be used to dominate Google Adwords.

More and more as I come across successes I am convinced of the fact that positive feedback (or compounding) changes everything in nature, businesses and financial life of people.

Would love to hear from you’ll if you’ll have seen any place else the impact of positive feedbacks.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!

Photo by David Ilécio on Pexels.com