Launching a new product or service in B2B

In this post I will only take one part – which is you already have customers for some other products or services and you are launching something new. In case you are getting totally new then you can read a lot of my older posts to help you achieve that objective.

For purposes of simplicity I will use the products, but the same logic would apply even when you’re launching a new set of services.

If you already have customers then whenever you are launching something new, the obvious thing would be to first take the new product to your existing customers. Nothing new here.

However I will put a little caveat. Start with your biggest customers and then go in descending order. The biggest customers are more invested in you and would like to succeed. Since they are big you will also get scale fast.

If you can also involve them at the 80% completion stage to use the product and advise on the glitches, then you will get real life feedback on the challenges that your product has technically as well in terms of customer experience. Large companies like Microsoft actually create Beta sites just with this objective.

Since these customers are invested in building the product with you , they will also own it more and will be more loyal. You may not get major revenue out of this, maybe even nothing. But if you have your large customers using the product then you can use them for reference purposes. That would be of much more value.

In this way you can reach critical mass faster.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Losing hurts more than the joy of winning – Product and Brand Management – 2

B2B, ego, Fear, Human Brain, life time value, losing, Marketing, Product Management, winning

In yesterday’s post I spoke about how the human brain’s resistance to lose, makes the job tougher for a product management person to get a new product into the market. Nobody wants to be seen as a fool in case something goes wrong. The hurt of losing is very acute.

On the other hand there’s a positive side for the marketing person to utilise. Since marketing is applied psychology, you need to use this same concept to your advantage. That’s how brands are built. They are the trust / the promise that a user feels, when buying something from a known name (brand) versus buying an unknown name.

In the B2B space, therefore once you have entered into an account and done an excellent job, you need to spread your tentacles and try to do as many things as possible. Since the customer trusts you, they will prefer to first come to you to check out before going out into the market to find a new vendor.

So while getting into a B2B customer is tough, once there and if you have done an excellent job, the possibility of doing long term business is very high. So when looking at a B2B customer, you need to look at the lifetime value of a customer before taking any decision of refusing an order. Especially if it is at the time of entry into the account, you have to keep this dynamic in mind. Even if you have to make loss on a one time deal, for the first time, you should pick up the deal, provided you are clear that they do a lot of buying where they will involve you. You can then make up for the money you lose, by getting a logo to brag about in your brand building as well as the long term revenue possibilities.

You will also sometimes come across customers who will always want you to lose. For those types of customers, you should be ready to leave them at the earliest.

But coming back, the same feature of the brain which causes us hurt can also be used to increase revenues by ensuring that the customer realises why they trust you versus trying a new vendor.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Losing hurts more than the joy of winning- Product and Brand Management

B2B, ego, Human Brain, losing, Marketing, Product Management, winning

I had written two posts on my practical experience the other day on how not getting one packet out of the two I had ordered….made me feel bad while getting a complementary gift from the company which was roughly 8 times more in terms of value did not cause me as much joy.

This has a lot of implications for us marketing folks, whether you’re in product management or brand management etc.

Once people have experienced your product or service, then they would not like to try another brand. This is especially true for high value items. Since most B2B procurement tends to be high value, there’s an even bigger inertia to change. No one wants to feel or be seen as a fool who took a wrong decision.

Since our brain feels the loss more acutely, if something goes wrong with a decision to take a new vendor, the manager who took the decision will lose face. They may have taken a lot of right decisions but one wrong decision will keep haunting them. So they would rather go with the tried and tested vendor even if the technology they have is old or product is not as good as yours.

As a product manager , you need to figure out how you will find those companies who have a management which is willing to take risks with your new offerings, if you are coming for the first time in the market. On the other hand if you already have customers, you should always take your new offerings to them to try out. Since they know you they might be willing to experiment with your new offerings.

We will continue on this topic further in tomorrow’s post.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Root Cause Analysis – in product management

Assumptions, Marketing, Product Management, Sales

Most engineers and technical folks would understand Root Cause Analysis, RCA in short. People use various tools like the fish bone diagram that the Japanese developed or the 5 Whys to figure out the root cause

The root cause analysis as the name suggests, helps you get to the key constraint, the main reason , instead of just monitoring the effects.

How that helps, is that once you rectify that specific cause, the problems which are related to that cause would not surface again. It does not mean that no other problems will show up. It just means that you will then need to work on the next root cause and so on. In effect over a period of time your whole system will become better and better.

In operations, manufacturing, production, there’s a lot of numeric data which keeps coming in, which can be useful in running analytics and analyzing the causes.

In product management the analysis of root cause becomes a little more difficult. First, you generally end up doing RCA only when something has failed. Which means there are already emotions running high with everyone from finance to sales to production looking to find the scape goat.

Second, marketing has a lot to do with markets, which means people – the buyers – are involved. When you have people involved the psychological aspects are also important.

So when doing the root cause analysis of why a product did not make it in the market, you need to ensure that even trivial things related to inputs of people are not missed.

These small subjective things can change your analysis to help you identify the key reasons why your product didn’t do as well as expected. Sometimes you will come across multiple causes which all seem to be equally important. Generally this means somewhere in the analysis there are assumptions which have not been substantiated clearly.

Once you have called out the assumptions then generally you will end up with only one or two causes.

Once you handle those, chances are you will recover your sales again.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!