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The Third B2B Marketing Step

July 27, 2015 //
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In our 15-step B2B Marketing process, we first covered defining what you’re trying to do, before researching your market. In the third step we start to home in on our target audience, over a series of steps.

You’re not going to be targeting the entire market; it’s too big. You should resist the urge to appear to be all things to all people. The third step, therefore, is to define your addressable market. To do this you call out not only the areas you’re going to address, but also the ones you’re not.

Areas you’re not to purse might be defined by region, vertical, size of company, size of deal, attitude to buying your products and services, and so on. Being strong and not going after business you’ve decided not to pursue is as important as is your focus on the areas you are going to pursue, and it’s important you stay true to this and don’t be tempted by stuff you know is either a poor fit or a tough sale.

For example, if you provide outsourced management services to a certain vertical, you might want to discount those companies who have an in-house manager for those services, or those companies who do not have a culture or a practice of outsourcing services, preferring to do it themselves.

Once you have stripped away the chaff from your market and eliminated the areas you’re not going to pursue, you’re left with the wheat – your addressable market. From then, it’s useful to try and calculate the size of your addressable market, so that you can start to think in realistic terms about what market share is achievable for you over the coming periods.

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

The Second B2B Marketing Step

July 24, 2015 //
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In our first B2B marketing step, I discussed how you start by defining what it is you’re trying to do. Once you’ve done that, the homework starts, and lots of it.

The second stage is research. You need to research your market throughly, since you can’t successfully market to it unless you understand it. If you’re taking a focussed approach and targeting a small number of large companies, then you’ll need to find out as much as you can about those specific companies. For now, we’ll confine ourselves to researching the market.

There are many dimensions to this. Here are some to think about:

– What is the industry? Can you define it? How does it operate?

– How many players are in it? How do they group or segment?

– How big is the market? Is it growing, flat-lining or shrinking?

– What legal or regulatory pressures are on the companies in this market?

– What power does this industry have and what pressures and margins is it subject to? Michael Porter’s famous Five Forces Model is a doozy for this.

– Is this a progressive or a traditional industry? What kind of things will it respond to?

– What are companies in this market trying to do? What are their drivers?

– What is stopping them getting there without your help? What are their challenges?

– Who are the typical buyers in these companies?

– What are the buyer ‘personas’? What kind of people are they? How do they like to become aware of stuff and research problems and alternative solutions?

– Do companies typically have budgets put aside for your kind of solution in this market? What other destinations for their budgets are you competing against?

– How do these companies usually make decisions on your stuff? Are they simple and quick or complex and drawn-out?

– What other job roles influence the decision?

– What’s the competitive situation for your solution in this market? Is it well established and saturated with competition, or emerging with few players to rival you?

Phew! Thats’s a long list, and not exhaustive, but the more detailed the picture of your market, the better your marketing in the subsequent steps. A word of caution: a lot of companies don’t bother doing this step…

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

The First B2B Marketing Step

July 22, 2015 //
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I recently introduced the idea of a 15-step B2B marketing process. It sounds like a lot of steps, doesn’t it? That’s because, as your grandma used to say, if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well, or in this case, in 15 well-considered steps.

How to start any process? Well, the best place is the beginning.

The first step is to define what it is you’re trying to do. You can only define what you’re trying to do once you’ve identified either that you have a problem that needs addressing or an opportunity that you want to take advantage of.

The more accurately you can define what you’re trying to do, the easier it is to take the next steps, and the easier to stay focused through all the steps. If your definition is vague, woolly or hedges its bets, the chances are your marketing process will not deliver what you’re looking for, because – let’s face it – you don’t actually know what you’re looking for.

A good definition has the 5 W’s in it – who, what, when, where, why. The process or strategy in the subsequent steps covers the all-important how.

 

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

B2B Marketing is a 15-Step Process

July 20, 2015 //
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Is it possible to come up with a guiding process to cover B2B marketing strategy, one that works every time and can be adapted to each situation?

I think so, which is why I’m starting a series of posts, with each post dedicated to each step in what I have defined as a 15-step process for marketing success.

Sometimes we all find ourselves asking the question: ‘OK, so can we cut through all this? Can you tell me what I need to do, in what order? Have you got a process I can follow, step-by-step?’

Hopefully this series will answer that question.

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

Joined Up Marketing

July 17, 2015 //
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Joined up marketing is what you really want to do in B2B, but it’s actually quite hard to do. It needs a lot of deep thought before you start executing.

The temptation – especially when you have monthly demand generation and pipeline targets to hit – is to take a scattergun approach and puts loads of stuff out there and see what sticks. You can get into a cycle, or perhaps it’s a rut, where you have to get content out there and rather than pause for a week or two and get your strategy tightened down you fire ahead and keep pumping out material.

Notice that I’m not talking about closed loop marketing, though that’s a pretty good approach too.

What I mean by joined up marketing is that your messages appear joined up to your customers. They understand how the messages fit together because you zero in on a certain aspect or message, and then zoom out to show how each aspect fits into the overall picture. You give your customers context, and they understand the buttons they need to push to get the impacts they need to solve the problems you have helped them identify.

To do this right, you have to get your big picture sorted, as well as the component parts that make up your big picture. It’s worth it in the long run though, because with a joined up approach each element reinforces your overall positioning, your stance on the world, the difference that the market acknowledges you make.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Strategy

Why Go To A Consultant

July 15, 2015 //
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Question: Why go to a consultant rather than someone in your company to get something important done?

There are myriad reasons, but the 3 I like and the 3 where I feel people like me can add value are these:

1) Specialised experience. You pay for experience in the field where you need help, because a consultant’s experience allows them to know which corners you can cut to execute quickly and save time.

2) Hard-nosed practicality. Consultants know what works and what doesn’t work. The practical, workable solution gets the job done.

3) Laser-like responsiveness. A good consultant knows that you went with them because they are free from any internal company politics or distractions and because they can deliver.

These 3 reasons are the ones we stand behind at M4 Marketing, which is my consulting practice. Together, they add up to what I think is a compelling offering, namely accelerating a company’s time to market for any important project.

Answer: You should go to a consultant because you want to get something important done.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy, Technology

Empty Promises

July 13, 2015 //
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Empty Promise - No Paper

Empty Promise – No Paper

Don’t make empty promises, promises you know you can’t keep.

Don’t offer things you don’t have. You’ll create a need for something that people now want but that you can’t deliver.

Don’t invite people to use your resource sparingly and then have none of that resource available.

If you run out of something, remove the notice or label it refers to, or amend your stock to say – yes, you’ve guessed it – ‘out of stock’.

These are all easy things you can do.

Remember, you’re looking to establish a relationship with your customer, one based on trust and the mutual expectation that each can deliver their side of the bargain. Don’t blow it by failing to do the easy stuff.

Otherwise, you run the risk of phantom marketing, creating demand which you can’t satisfy. You’ll annoy your audience, turn them off and break whatever bond you had built up. Then you’ll have to work doubly hard to get it back.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Sales

Pulling Up The Plants

July 10, 2015 //
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There used to be a saying from parent to child that got adopted by business:

‘Don’t pull up the plant every 5 minutes to see if the roots have grown.’

The implication was that you needed to give things time to bed down, to settle. Give them a chance, then monitor, measure and adjust if necessary.

That’s really not valid any more. In the digital era you can tell in 5 minutes if something’s working, or not working, especially if you’re in the volume business. You can check the roots as often as you like. You can tweak something, see if it works, and tweak it again, ad infinitum.

You’re in constant tweak mode, like when you’re driving, making many micro-corrections on the straight, large adjustments to overtake or big turns at a bend or junction.

Pull up those plants immediately. Test early and test often.

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Categories Customers, Marketing, Technology

The Rear View Mirror in Demand Generation Plans

July 3, 2015 //
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We’re always encouraged to look forward, to plan for the future. I remember trying to get an interview for a job a long time ago. ‘Do you want a copy of my CV? I asked. ‘No,’ said the guy, I’m more interested in what you’re planning to do, not what you’ve done.’

I admit it’s unusual for a recruiter to say that, and I should temper his comment by saying that it turns out he was head of a multi-level marketing company, but my point is that people take the approach that since you can’t change the past should focus on doing something about the future. Past performance is not a guide to future performance, the financial ads are fond of telling us.

The past can inform, however. That’s why we learn the importance of the rear view mirror when we start driving. Nowhere is this more important than in monthly or quarterly demand generation plans, or in fact any kind of plan. It’s all too tempting to sweep the last indifferent plan under the rug and start again with a fresh- forward-looking plan. If you do that every period, you’re not accountable, because you’re not learning or improving with experience. You have no reference point and you’re simply presenting yourself as a moving target for people whose aim will eventually catch up with you.

So before you build your next demand generation plan, measure and analyse what worked the last time, and what the conversion rates were at each stage, so that you can plan the next period with some knowledge. You should then be able to improve your targeting and forecasting with each subsequent period, having done the closed loop thing on the previous period.

Practice makes permanent if you never look back, but it makes perfect if you look back and learn.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Marketing, Planning

How Long is Your Runway?

July 1, 2015 //
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When you’re executing a project, it helps to think about runway. For example, when you’re looking to generate leads for sales people to follow up on, there is a lead time between starting the project and leads coming in from the project you’ve executed. You need to plan for this runway, or else you’ll be trying to do vertical take off, and unfortunately business operates like an aeroplane rather than a helicopter or a jump jet.

The smaller your project, the smaller the runway you need. The larger the project, the larger the runway. You can get a light aircraft off the ground in 200 metres. You need at least ten times that for a jumbo jet. Same thing with business projects.

Make sure you’ve allowed enough runway, or you won’t get off the ground.

Equally important, the larger the project, the more runway you need to bring it home, complete it and assess its performance.

Make sure you’ve allowed enough runway, or you won’t land to fly another day.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Planning, Sales, Strategy
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