May 22, 2012 | Customers, Sales
For years with my sales consulting hat on I have pushed the notion that when selling a product or service that requires the B2B buyer to exercise some level of consideration, so it excludes the everyday, commodity purchase, there are only three ways to get the sale:
- Demonstrate how your product can assist them to increase their sales
- Demonstrate how your product can assist them to reduce their costs
- Demonstrate how your product can increase their productivity.
This has worked well over a long period, in a wide range of situations, but recently the socilaisation of business driven by the web has added a fourth headline sales driver that to date I have always included in the first:
Assisting a potential or current customer to grab an opportunity.
The world is changing so rapidly that a successful sales operation needs to understand very well the competitive and strategic environment in which their customers compete. In gaining and renewing that understanding, you will see opportunities for your customers that they may not necessarily see themselves. Whilst this is part of helping them increase their sales, the new tools of communication and collaboration that enable the development and leveraging of IP/IC are such that few can stay on top of them all. Therefore being a part of their business development process, by providing valuable insight, and perhaps a view informed by a different perspective, will deliver a stronger relationship, and contribute value to the process that will translate into sales.
May 21, 2012 | Collaboration, Innovation, Strategy
Another paradox surfaced by the emerging business networked models is that of ownership of IP.
In the old days, just a few years ago, ownership of IP was top of mind in many if not most development situations, but then along came digital collaboration.
Linux is now the dominant operating system installed on large servers, a loose collaboration of nerds has significantly outperformed Microsoft, one of the smartest companies of all time, with access to the most and best resources, and a dominant starting position. How can this be?
Nobody owns the Linux IP, it is a common license,
Toyota for years has encouraged, perhaps demanded, innovation from its tier 1 suppliers, often using non quantified descriptions of outcome as a substitute for detailed specifications, and Boeing, in the design and construction of the 787, set out to “co-innovate” with its suppliers, as they recognised the development task was simply too complicated to do alone. Despite huge problems, the exercise has yielded technology advances that Boeing believes will give them a big advantage for many years.
The key in building a network business model is the recognition that IP is no longer the end game, simply a means to an end. Businesses are now prepared to own some, share it, give it away, and have others generate it, just to ensure that the benefit from the knowledge flows through to the product.
I recently completed a business plan for a client which called for a high degree of collaboration with other complementary institutions, all of whom have at their core, a reverence for IP. In considering the drivers of success, and writing a plan to harness them, ownership of IP was always going to be a big stumbling block, it turned out to be a terminal one. However, the plan did get a few people thinking, so perhaps down the track a bit the benefits of a networked model may be seen to outweigh the C20 preoccupation with IP ownership, after all, it is how the IP is leveraged, not who owns it, that counts.
May 18, 2012 | Customers, Marketing, Strategy
Marketing groups usually set about segmenting markets by one of two basic ways:
- By demographics, age, sex, education, income, with/without children, and so on, or,
- By product category, for example meat is usually segmented by breed, cut, pack size, price.
However, there is a third way, one that disregards the traditional segmentations, one that recognises the difference between cause and effect.
You do not buy fillet steak because you are a 35 year old graduate earning 150k +, with no children, you buy filet steak because you like it, or your partners school friend is coming around for a BBQ, you buy it because it is the right product for the job to be done. Nobody buys a Ferrari to get from point A to point B, they buy a Ferrari to make a statement, as a car costing 10% of the Ferrari will offer reliable, relatively comfortable transport.
The marketing of every product can benefit from these simple questions, asked from the point of view of the prospective customer:
- What job do I want done?
- How will this product deliver on the job to be done?
- Which of the acceptable product options offers the best value, however the I define value in the circumstances?
May 17, 2012 | Innovation, Marketing
Years ago I worked for a Marketing Director who took his job seriously. That meant that every pack design, advertisement, poster, publicity shot, research proposal, all the day to day business of a busy marketing function had to be OK’d by him.
Not only did this lead to a huge bottleneck, it virtually stopped anything worthwhile, or a bit different getting through the approval processes.
We had a bad, almost terminal, case of the “Marketing HiPPO’s”, highest paid persons opinion. Its sibling, highest paid persons wife’s opinion (HiPPW’sO) is the only condition affecting marketing management that I can think of that is worse.
The antidote is a dose of marketing by analytics, using data to guide decision making. When dealing with innovation, things that are genuinely new, data can be misleading because assumptions are easily fumbled, but for all other situations, data is king.
Edwards Deeming said years ago that “in God I trust, all others bring data” and that still holds, it is just that we are now able to gather and analyse so much more data, much better, giving us the potential for huge increases in the productivity of marketing investments.
The emergence of A/B testing via the web is in the process of transforming the way marketers approach their markets, by enabling lots of small scale experiments, differentiated offerings tested against a standard whose performance is understood. It is a technique used for years in labs, particularly in applications like optimising manufactured food products that are a mix of flavours, densities and textures, and has become routine in software development in the last decade.
Now with the advent of theflexibility and tools on the web, the potential for use is far wider, and the returns tangible.
May 14, 2012 | Branding, Marketing
Selecting the best branding option is a topic that always attracts debate, in any business I have worked with. What is usually missing in these conversations is a framework for the thinking, boundaries against which to measure the options.
This post from David Aaker offers a framework with considerable merit, and the webinar link in the post expands on the ideas.
Original thinking on marketing is hard to find, Aaker is original.
