Persistence is a critical aspect in B2B marketing – 2

B2B, Customers, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, messaging, persistence, Triggers

In yesterday’s post I had mentioned Dean Jackson’s philosophy on 100/1000 leads – where 50% of them will change the incumbent in the next 3 years. The only challenge is that we don’t know which ones will. Its a game of patience int he B2B space.

Changing an incumbent need not be the exact category of what you sell. The “incumbent” in the B2B space is about how the customer presently gets the job done.

If presently someone licks a stamp on their tongue before sticking it on the envelope, then this is the incumbent , if someone is trying to sell a franking machine. Now until the person whose tongue is used to lick the stamp quits for a better job ( a trigger) or someone in the company realises that keeping this person only for the “licking” is an expensive option (another trigger) your messages for the franking product or services will not work.

However whenever a trigger takes place with respect to the incumbent, if you are present in front of the customer, then you become the first person they will call.

So you need to have the persistence and marketing stamina , to ensure that you are in front of the stakeholders on a regular basis. In case of B2B this is one way you build your brand. The other aspect is to make your messages “instigating” the dissonance. Slowly hammering away at possible problem areas.

Tomorrow we will look at another aspect of this persistence story.

Till then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Persistence is a critical aspect in B2B marketing

B2B, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, messaging, persistence

As a marketers we generally like to send out a message and expect to get a response. Very few times you will get some response, but in most cases it takes a long long time.

Earlier I used to hear numbers like 7 to 12 contacts before a contact will respond. So people used to talk about running multi touch campaigns between email, voicemail and cold calling. However especially after Covid struck and a lot of people were working from home, the primary means of connecting has been email or to a certain extent Linkedin.

While I don’t have statistics on how many touch points you need to have before a response is received I got some research done on different geographies for response to emails. On an average its taking more than 20 email messages to be sent (these are cold emails) on different service lines before a given service line attracted a response.

Now this is a critical aspect if you are getting into the B2B space. As I have mentioned multiple times earlier in different posts, B2B buying is not impulsive so even if the message is interesting, you may not get a response. The second aspect to be kept in mind is that identifying the right person in the hierarchy who can act on the message. Designations can be deceptive.

So you need to have marketing stamina to be in the game for the long haul. As Dean Jackson says – look at it as a 3-5 year project. Out of a bunch of 100/1000 leads at least 50% will change their incumbent vendors. You only don’t know which ones will. Tomorrow we will look at another aspect of this.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Prolific versus Perfect – 2

Excellence, Marketing, messaging, persistence

Excellence requires repetition.

Some call it the 10000 hour rule. Int is said that you need to do about 10000 hours of practice at learning something, before you become an expert. Its about ensuring persistence in your endevour.

This issue came up in a discussion today where the people supposedly are passionate about what they are doing but we are not getting the results. They had this argument that they were also getting frustrated when not getting results.

When we tried to analyse the challenges, one of the key challenge was the fact that we did not have enough feedback of how the customers react to our messaging. You have to test a lot of messaging till you are able to actually get to the right piece.

You can refine your messaging or sales pitch only when you interact with enough people, understand the inputs that the prospects give and what the competition is doing. Now if you are a prolific sales person and do 200 calls a days (just for example) and there’s another who’s doing 100 calls a day and both fail 90% of the time, with the first sale person after 20 days of calling you would have got a feedback of 3600 calls, and at the end of a year this would be close to 45000 interactions versus the other person’s 22000 failures.

Within one year the company whose sales people are prolific and are getting 45000 “no” would be way ahead of a company with sales people with just 22000 “no”. They would have refined their product pitch / messaging that many more times to come to near perfection within a year.

To the above argument I get a very standard response, and maybe you also would have it going on in your mind, that after some time statistically the changes would be minor. You are absolutely right about that. But the faster you reach that point, the more sales you pick up till the other company reaches that point.

If I can get my 10000 hours of practice in 3 years versus someone else who will take 5 years then the 2 years window that I have I can exploit to earn so much more , sell so much more or whatever I wish to. While the 10000 hour rule has been around for a long time now, the idea of speed in getting to the 10000 hours was something that I got from hearing Joe Polish in his Ilovemarketing.com podcasts.

The more prolific I am the more I can try new things, the more feedback I will get and the faster I can improve. Now if you have a coach along the way it becomes that much more quicker to climb the curve towards expertise. But you still have to do the hardwork. There’s no easy way out of it.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Persistence trumps Genius

Great People, Habits, History, persistence

I didn’t know what to write today. I was way too exhausted, having had a long day at work.

This word persistence was playing in my mind for a long time today. So I just started writing. As I started writing more and more examples started coming in my mind of whether great people in history were geniuses as we attribute them to be or were they persistent.

Was Michaelangelo persistent or a genius – was David a master piece because Michaelangelo had a vision for David – if he had not kept chipping away at the stone consistently day-in and day-out, he would have not realized his vision.

The Sistine Chapel ceiling would not be so amazing if he had not persisted in doing those paintings.

Look at Edison or Einstein in the scientific arena, they were persistent in their work. No doubt they were brilliant in their own right but that brilliance would not have seen the light of day, if they did not put in the work.

Having said this, identifying the leverage points and then doing the work will anyway give much better results than just doing “donkey”. Persistence does not mean wasting energy in entropy.

If you focus your energy on the key points and then work, chances are you will trump genius any day.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!