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The Fifth B2B Marketing Step

July 31, 2015 //
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In our fourth B2B marketing step we profiled our addressable market. Now we have a detailed picture of the market we’re trying to market and sell to. This is good. If we don’t understand the market and where it needs our help, then we can’t help.

The fifth B2B marketing step is segmenting our addressable market. That’s right, we’re going to further divide our market. Imagine that your market is a pizza and you’re going to slice it up. These slices are market segments, except that the process of deciding how you slice up your market is not that straightforward. It’s also crucial.

Many companies segment their market by the obvious factors like geography, size and so on. They’re perfectly valid, but they may not be the best ways to divide the market into alike groups. You could segment by attitude to risk, openness to your type of solution, cultural bias, stage of maturity, type of business problems, type of buying process for your solution; the list is as long as you want to make it. The trick is to to segment according to what is most compelling for your offering and by extension your marketing.

Imagine that you can only segment your market in 2 ways, and each way is an axis on a graph. The x axis is your first segmentation ‘knife’ , the y axis your second. Then you have to plot the companies or company types on the graph according to where they fall on each axis. Then you have to decide which cluster of companies or company types you are going to target. When you see your market visually laid out like this, according to the segmentation axes you have picked, then you understand how important it is that you segment in the right way.

Get your segmentation right and your next two steps are easier and more accurate.

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

The Fourth B2B Marketing Step

July 29, 2015 //
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In the third step of our B2B marketing process we eliminated the customer groups we weren’t interest in pursuing so that we could concentrate on our addressable market. Now we need to understand more about that market.

The fourth B2B Marketing step is to profile your addressable market. Fortunately for us, we might have done some of this work already when we researched the whole market in our second step.

Now comes more homework. You need to find out and record the important things about the addressable market that can help you shape your offering to it. Here are some of the things it would be good to know:

– the obvious stuff, like location, industry, size, how the market operates

– any legal or regulatory aspects to the market that govern how it works

– pressure and drivers on the market. What are its players trying to do and where do they feel pain?

– the typical buyers in this market. Job roles, personas, other people of influence

– the decision-making process in general. Simple or complex, short or long, few hurdles and people involved or many?

– the cultural aspects to the market. Is it a good cultural fit for you to sell to? Do you think and work similarly to it?

You can find out much of the standard stuff from publications like annual reports and resources like the web or social media, but the more esoteric information can really only be gleaned over time by networking, personal experience and asking around. The better you can profile your addressable market, the better you can segment it and decide where to go first.

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Categories Marketing, Planning, Strategy

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

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

Email: Facebook for B2B – Still

June 12, 2015 //
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I did a survey recently for a customer who was looking to establish how their B2B customers preferred to receive communications.

The demise of email has been touted for as long as social media platforms have been around. Younger generations like millennials are simply not into email any more, we’re told. They’re all about chat and instant communication in its various different guises.

Interesting, then, that the standout preference was for getting stuff via email. Yes, folk get loads of emails and no, they don’t read many of them. They still want them, though, so they can mine them and sort them if they need to refer back to something. Alternatively, they might mark them as unread for a later date. They want well crafted emails so that they can tell instantly whether or not they want to engage. So it’s still about value then. The cream rises to the top and the good stuff gets read and actioned.

Admittedly, my survey was less than 20 one-to-one conversations with a cross section of business owners and ecommerce managers, but the feedback is telling and informative nonetheless, methinks.

Internet-based chat works of course, socially. It’s mimicking what we do in person. C2C and B2C usually lead the way for B2B to follow, and this same trend may eventually sweep up email as well, but probably not before the latest generation is the current generation and the mainstay of our economic growth.

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Categories Communication, Customers, Language

There’s No Prize for Coming Second

October 10, 2014 //
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OK, so there are sometimes prizes for coming second. You might have raised your profile for the next opportunity, or gotten onto the next short-list automatically, or even learnt a lot for the next time, but you won’t be generating money for your organisation from this lost deal, you won’t be making work for your colleagues – in a good way.

Business-to-business sales opportunities are often more complex than we realise and in 99% of them we don’t have all the information – and I mean all the information – that we need to optimise our bid. Here are some things to think about:

– Always get your people (and yourself) to follow the same tried and trusted process for selling. If you’re not all following the same process, you don’t know where you are, you have nothing measurable or objective with which to run your business

– Always analyse and qualify your sales opportunities. Can you win the business? Can you deliver the business? Do you even want the business?

– How best should you compete for the business, and how best will your competitors compete?

– What’s the customer trying to do? What’s stopping them from doing it (something must be, or you wouldn’t have an opportunity)? How will you best help them do it, better than any other competitive option (including doing nothing)?

– What are the politics in your customer organisation? Somebody always wants somebody to win, right? Who is it? Are they important? Who do they want to win? What should you do if it’s you? What should you do if it’s not you?

– How will they decide on the business? What’s the process? What’s important to the customer? What’s important to the individuals inside the customer? How might these different wants and needs play out? How can you take advantage of that?

– What are the steps you need to take, the things you need to do, to progress and win the deal? What should you not do because they don’t progress the deal?

There’s an awful lot to do to win deals, and win them consistently, but it’s an awful lot worth doing.

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Categories Sales, Strategy
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