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If you really have to enter the US market – some do’s and don’ts

A few weeks back I had written a post on entering the US market. It was very gratifying to see the response from so many of you on that post. So following the lead of that article, here is another one. 

In this post I talk about some of the basic things Indian companies can do to improve their probability of success in the US. If these come across as simplistic, its because they are not hard to do, but they are made hard by the cultural programming we come with. To paraphrase Dorothy from Wizard of Oz, companies have to be consciously willing to say – “Toto, we are not in Bangalore any more”. So, without further ado, here goes: 

Lesson #1

– Employee #1 has to be a jack of all trades

– The first person you hire will likely be required to set up office space, put in a phone system, hire new staff, set up payroll, healthcare, the list goes on. If you are thinking of hiring a sales top gun as your first employee, think again. You will need to have the basic HR infrastructure set up for your sales people to not have to worry about the basics. If you don’t do that, you will frustrate new hires and scare away high performers. 

Lesson #2

– 9AM EST does not mean 9AM – 10AM EST –

We Indians are hardworking, committed but we aren’t exactly known for punctuality. In the US, IST (Indian Stretchable Time) jokes abound. All too often, this translates into missed appointments with customers and prospects. Time is valuable. If somebody has given you an hour, respect that.  While showing up on time is important, ending on time is important as well.  If in doubt, ask. Nobody is going to mind if you ask for permission to go over your allotted time. 

Lesson #3

– Don’t talk over people. Its rude.

– Another very Indian trait is our love for intellectual discussion. Coming from a country of over a billion, we are used to shouting over each other to get our point across. Unfortunately it doesn’t work in other parts of the world. All too often we get carried away and talk too much for too long. Other times, we will interrupt a speaker to inject a point or many times simply to agree. I learned this lesson the hard way many years back, when a customer essentially asked me to shut up and listen (they did buy from me).

A much more culturally acceptable norm is to not interrupt a speaker. Let them finish, ask if they are done and then make your point. When making your point, use short sentences and stop often and ask for feedback. It is not natural behavior for us Indians but we need to be conscious of it. 

Lesson #4

–  Learn to say no

– We work hard and we love to please. Sometimes it translates into not being able to set boundaries. In the product or the services business, you have to set boundaries if you want to be profitable. If something can’t be done or will cost more, flag it. Customers expect that. We can’t please everyone but if you don’t set boundaries, you will please no one.

Lesson #5

– Over-communicate

– You have a client. The project has begun and the India-based team is working hard. The India team is telling you everything is on track but the customer keeps sending you emails on how she is not happy with the project. Sounds familiar?

In my experience, this happens most often because the Indian team does not communicate enough with the client. The already jittery client who has bet on an unknown quantity gets even more rattled by not getting any regular updates from India. Make a conscious effort to communicate every day. It could be just an email update summarizing what was achieved that day but it goes a long way in giving peace of mind to the client. 

Lesson #6

– Use your network for initial hires, if using recruiting companies, choose carefully

– Your first few hires are critical. They are best picked through people you know and trust. So, first look to your network. If you do have to go and hire an agency, be picky. Indian recruiters, and I am sure there are some good ones, come with the same set of problems as the rest of us from India. My sample size is small but in my experience (and the experience of many of my associates), they aren’t punctual and don’t call on time and their follow-up is terrible. Rather than getting prospects excited about your company, they end up pissing them off. So, do your due diligence and talk to current clients of the recruiting company you are thinking of employing. It is worth spending time thinking through your hiring strategy. Humans make the company. Don’t forget that. 

Every one of us is shaped by our experiences. My observations are shaped by mine. For what it is worth, my viewpoint has evolved on four continents over a 24 year period. Like everything else though, it changes through new interactions and experiences. These are my thoughts today. Tomorrow might be a different story.

Agree. Disagree. Or have another viewpoint. Would love to hear your thoughts.

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Why will Someone Pay to Buy Your Product?

In this blog post, we discuss ways and means to reach out to prospective clients, position the product, license and price it. However, the question that founders must ask and answer convincingly to themselves is the one posed above. When doing this, they must think like a buyer and question every assumption about the product’s value.

There are actually three parts to the question:

    • Who is that ‘someone’ who may be interested in your product?
    • What is in it for them that they will be willing to pay?
    • How much will they pay?

 

Once this is clear at least at a high level, everything else will begin to fall into place. The answers will become more precise as the business grows, and they may also change with competition and shifting circumstances. That is why you must return to this basic query frequently.

Spider’s Web of Contacts

In early stages, founders do all the selling. They must talk to their target customer base early, with initial intent being to validate the product concept. Reach out through your contacts (past employers, family and friends) to those who can provide useful inputs. They in turn can introduce you to others. Set up meetings with thought leaders, but make sure you have a proper meeting agenda. Attend related conferences and industry meets, which present great opportunities to strike up discussions with people in the same fi eld, ranging from CEOs to sales or technical staff. You get to meet many of them in one go. At these forums, even senior executives have time to talk.

One has to learn how to get introduced to people and make an impact. Anand Deshpande, CEO of Persistent Systems, describes his approach, “Since I travel a lot, I meet many people at airports and on flights. I usually try to initiate some kind of a dialogue, exchange cards and have a short conversation. Airport encounters are not conducive to making fancy power-point presentations, so the positive impression has to be generated through something you said or your personality. The conversation has to be two way, and the person should gain something from you. It could be some information, useful tips, advice or an interesting observation.”

Anand also emphasizes the important of generating interest and then building trust. He notes that, “The biggest challenge for an entrepreneur is in getting people to meet you. That can happen through a reference from a mutual contact or your credentials (the academic and software community is closely knit).

People are more approachable at events like technical conferences because they see you as a colleague. They are also more receptive if you have a really compelling product or service to offer. People give work only when they trust you and if the timing is right. Once you get clients, you must take care not to let them down. Trust eventually goes beyond individuals and becomes a brand for the service or product.”

Take every opportunity to build a ‘web of contacts’. The web is woven from the inside out, expanding as you meet more people. Some of them may become future clients, advisors, partners or maybe even investors. Once you have a satisfied customer, get them to recommend at least two other industry contacts. Since your ‘n’ contacts can potentially refer you to ‘n’ more, this web can grow exponentially (square of n) over time if it is managed well.

Some entrepreneurs are very good at networking and take every opportunity to get introduced to people. They follow up on meetings by sending a discussion summary, or just a thank you note. Key contacts get regular emails with significant updates, like a new website, press coverage, or major client win. This communication should not be too frequent to a point where it becomes a nuisance. Surprisingly, there are many founders who don’t keep time commitments, and are poor at responding to e-mails or maintaining contact. Some respond selectively, only to those whom they think will be of value to them.

It is important to be gracious in business. Someone’s ability to help is often a matter of timing. It may be weeks, months or even years before something materializes from a discussion that you had. If you are in regular touch, your time will come.

A venture is said to be in stealth mode while the product is being conceptualized or developed. In those early days, you should be careful to avoid divulging  information to anyone who can become a potential competitor. If you plan to get into detailed implementation and technical discussions with anyone other than investors and prospects, don’t hesitate to ask them to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA).

Write down and then practice an ‘elevator pitch’ about your product and company. ‘Elevator pitch’ is a US reference to being able to communicate your product concept crisply to a prospect in the same elevator, in the short time between fl oors. There will be many opportunities, where you will have just those few minutes. So, learn how to distil your product objectives and value in a few sentences.

Anchor Customers

The first few customers are hard to get. There is a temptation to sign up anyone willing to pay. However, you must take a long term view and instead focus on signing the right clients. Approach users and companies that best represent your target audience—let’s refer to them as ‘anchor customers’. An ideal anchor is someone whose name will provide confi dence to future prospects, and whose acceptance of your product establishes your technology leadership.

Anchors may sign up because they are risk-takers, or they have a pressing business need, which your solution can address. Remember that they are investing in you by taking the risk of signing on for an untested product from an unknown company. They will spend time and resources on deploying your software and surviving the inevitable teething problems.

You can acknowledge their support by being fl exible on the pricing. At that point, you probably wouldn’t have decided on the price. For instance, offer to waive license fee for the fi rst 6 months. Say that you will quote them the list price that you will charge other customers, and will let the anchor decide their price.

Anchors as Investors

If you get lucky, the anchor may be convinced that your product can deliver real value, and will support you all the way. They may even pay your full fees, but ask for extensive customization. Some anchors may even want to invest in your company. This can happen with large companies who see the potential for significant financial benefi ts from your product, either through internal deployment, or because it fits into their strategic roadmap in some way.

Both are good situations to be in, but you must assess the following:

  • Weigh the benefit of customization for an early client against the potential delay to the main product. 
  • Product and source code ownership must be retained unambiguously by your company. 
  • Any angel investment proposal should be evaluated on its merits. Do not trade equity just because you are getting a major customer. Their investment may limit your market by turning off the anchor’s competitors.
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Catching small fish can pay big.

For sure big fish can get you more meat but there also less number of those in that deep blue sea. Pound for pound, the fisherman still prefers to cast the net with small holes – getting easy food in copious amount. 

Unfortunately the fisherman logic is somewhat lost to a vast majority of the enterprise companies in the world. India is home of a vast and complex array of small business. If you could catch them – the results will be equally copious.  Let’s look closely at the small business owners: 

Bigger businesses have more power. You may be able to get more revenue from them but making real bottom line – the profits will not be easy. Look at the example of telecom operator dealings with Mobile VAS companies. For every rupee received from the customers, mobile operators were able to keep 80 paisa while giving only 20 paisa to the original creators of the product. 

Small businesses are actually big business before they actually became big. You catch them young if you can get them. And they will be loyal to you as they grow because you are so deeply ingrained with them. 

With small business you have access to unpaid product managers. Think about the amount and quality of the feedback directly from CEO and founders of the small business you get. Those feedbacks are incredibly useful and can form the basis of amazing leaps in the value of your product. The best of all – it is all free. 

Now that you happy and all gung-ho on reaching to cast the net, let me also talk about a bit about the stumbling blocks. Like everything in life, the benefits do not come easy. You have be careful about multiple when you are trying to sell to small business: 

Selling to small business is the deal between you and the director of the company. It requires face to face meetings and real conversations. The trust does not come easy. This means, you have to spend your own personal time with the sales. 

Small businesses today are on social media. Social media is very inexpensive way to reach to your target markets. You got to learn how to use it for your advantage. If you are a new age entrepreneur you probably already have mastered the art. If not, find your “Always-on-Twitter-and-Facebook buddy” and get some tips. Be very nimble because your customers are nimble now. For big companies, the sales cycle is typically in months. For small business, the sales cycle is in weeks. You have to match their speed with your own to close the deal.

If you are careful with these, I am sure you will have large diversified and loyal customer base – the best quality customer base any company can desire.

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Top 10 things to look for a digital marketing roadmap.

Today the biggest challenge for any of us as entrepreneurs is not to build kickass products or services but to reach out to the relevant target audience. Many of products fail not because they were not awesome but because of poor marketing strategies. I have myself made terrible mistakes which costed me and my company a lot but it’s just part of a learning experience and entrepreneurial curve. Lot of people think digital marketing or social media marketing is free or easy but I fell it’s the make or break for any company whose customers are online. It needs the same amount of attention and effort you had put in while building your product / services. It needs a lot of thinking, prioritization, knowledge and off course a lot time investment. Today there is so much noise on digital mediums that you need to be remarkable to stand out or youwill be just one out of many. Here are my top 10 learnings from the many digital campaigns I ran.

  1. Map your efforts to the end goal: Most of the time startups do not have a clear end goal in mind and they map the entire campaign to a wrong goal. What is you end goal? Drive traffic? What is your KPI which will make you successful this quarter? Does your organization’s goal is to drive sales or build user base for this quarter. Once you decide on your KPI for this quarter do not change it. Stick to it. Do everything to achieve your goals, tweak strategy to achieve it but not the goals.
  2. Don’t be scared of spending: Most of the digital campaigns are bound to fail. Just that one of your campaigns failed doesn’t mean that platform is not good for you. It just takes a fair amount of money and time to optimize your campaigns and make them successful. I have typically spend around 2Cr. on Facebook platform in last 4 years and still may of my campaigns fail today. If you want fast results hire an expert of the platform.
  3. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket: Diversify your mediums to generate leads or traffic. Typically any medium should not drive more than 20% of your sales. It becomes really lucrative to go deeper and deeper into a medium when we taste success on it. I have learnt this hard way. There was time when Thrillophilia was driving 80% of the traffic through Search engines and then suddenly the website was hacked by Chinese hacker who did lot of artificial link building. We realized this 3 months later when we got penalized by Google and traffic dropped to 1/10. We had a nightmare on sales side and had to diversify in hurry which really isn’t the best approach.
  4. Build smart email lists: Emails are still going to exist for next 10 years so it’s a good idea to invest on them. The more you know your customers, what they want and better segregated your email lists are, the lesser you will spam your consumer and the more leads you will generate. Keep a close eye on subscription/ unsubscribing and see what drives them.
  5. UI is the key: Drive emotions. Lot of impulsive buying happens over internet. People get carried away with emotions, drive them to do what you really wanted them to do. A good visual can be 5 times more powerful than an average one. No other thing can have such an effect on your campaigns. I again say drive emotions. It can be anger, humor, inquisitiveness etc.
  6. Have a short term strategy and a long term strategy: Your short term strategy could be have a good user base to feed your platform or generate leads to feed your sales team. Paid advertising might be really helpful in doing that. Your long term strategy should be to build a sustainable long term engine based on active user base, repeat customers, reviews or organic traffic.
  7. FANS and no fans: When I talk to many startup friends they ask for tips of building fan base seeing that we at Thrillophilia have done a good job in building a 32000+ Fan base on Facebook. It’s just the most false metrics to look at. We have never ever done a single campaign to increase our Fanbase. It’s not going to take you anywhere unless you plan to sell your company to a not so tech guy. A better metrics could be active users on page, virality of posts or traffic on website from Facebook.
  8. Keep a close eye on 24 hour results: It’s very imp to know what the world is thinking about your company at this point of time. I am just addicted to 24 hour results of keyword “Thrillophilia” on Google. A simple way to do it is go to Google and type in your brand name. In Search tools select in “Past 24 hours” This will show you the results of your brand in the last 24 hours over net indexed by Google. It will help you to identify if some is talking negative about your brand or if you just had a fake review from a competitor. Also set you your key Google alerts.
  9. Lessen up the dependency on other platforms: Let’s say today your 80% of the traffic is driven by Google and Facebook. How can you bring it to 50%? Building better email lists, having more repeat traffic, people who love you and are addicted to your website, affiliates etc. You never know if Google of FB will exist after 5 years but I assume you are building a company that probably will.
  10. Build relationships: Nothing works better than this. Start helping people in your ecosystem. If you design T-shirts design it for free for a NGO, a startup or for a big company. If you run a blog, give links to other good websites. Take your vendors for a dinner. Soon your 24 hours result will start getting better. We recently did a camp for Make a Difference, and yesterday they posted a Video on Youtube with our special mention – Let people talk good about you and enjoy the ride. In the end you were here to disrupt something and build something better.
Guest Post by Abhishek, Co-Founder of Thrillophilia.com, the biggest activity travel website of India and comes with 6+ years of digital marketing experience. Before Co-Founding Thrillophilia he has helped national and international companies like Biocon, Flying machine, Discovery Channel to build their digital marketing presence
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Selling to SMEs and Startups

Arrogance is a flaw, and for a marketer or salesperson, this assumes greater significance. Unfortunately, marketers tend to fall prey to the glamour of signing on a big name client, while giving the cold shoulder to a category that shows, in my opinion, greater promise of developing a long-term relationship. Yes, SMEs and start-ups might not have the budget or the inclination to provide you with that juicy deal that’ll set you up for a bonus come end of the year, but handled carefully, can provide great benefits in the long run.

Let’s look at a few of the reasons why SMEs and start-ups deserve the same attention you’d give to a big corporation:

– Your product/service might be just one of the many used by a big corporation. At the same time, an SME or startup might build a large section of their business around your product – giving you a much higher sales potential in the long run. And if the start-up flourishes, you win – big time.

– Bigger businesses, with their deeper wallets, tend to squeeze out every last bit they can while agreeing to a deal. Sure, they might give you the lock-in to a long-term or high-value deal, but it’s not likely to be on your terms. On the other hand, dealing with a startup puts you in the driver’s seat.

– Customer feedback is a vital part of success and with smaller organizations, you get to closely develop your product – in partnership – as the market evolves. A big business, however, can be like a 500-lb gorilla – you do as asked.

Read the complete post here.

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5 Essentials of SaaS Revenue Models for Product Companies!

Enterprise as well as Consumer Software is moving fast towards a Software As A Service (SaaS) model. Who would not like paying a per user, per month charge as opposed to doling out huge amounts of money for licenses upfront and paying 16 to 20% Annual Maintenance Charges year after year! But the short history of SaaS companies is already full of companies that grew too quickly, or chose the wrong pricing or customer acquisition strategies, ran out of money and had to go out of business! The same revenue model for a SaaS product business can also become its Achilles Heel if it is not understood and managed properly!

Understanding SaaS Revenue Models in all their glory is key to building a sane, reliable and successful way to build a product company. There are a few venture capital companies that have had lots of practical experience building successful SaaS companies and can share with you a lot more detail. Like Matrix Partners’ David Skok who has written almost a thesis on SaaS economics – here is a sample –  The Saas Business Model – Drivers and Metrics. David has partnered with HubSpot and NetSuite for all of this exploration and they must know what they are talking about! Other good references are  Doubling SaaS Revenue by Changing the Pricing Model and SaaS Revenue Modeling: Details of the 7 Revenue Streams.

But for a start, here are 5 essentials of SaaS revenue and pricing models a product startup needs to remember for success:

1. Monthly Recurring Revenues Vs. Getting them to pay Annually:  Get your customers to pay annually if you could (depending on the nature of your product – enterprise or consumer facing). It’s a hassle for them and you to process these invoices every month and follow up on late payments, etc. It has a clear effect on the cash flow. Plus you may not have to worry about churn that much since they are not making that decision to pay you month after month where they could pause and decide to churn! If Annual billling does not work, try at least a quarter at a time. It may not be worth all the processing time doing it month after month.

2. Churn and Negative Churn:  Churn is the periodic turnover of your customers. Companies mentioned above have found that about 2.5% to 3% churn is OK. You need to be concerned if it goes beyond that. However with Up-selling and Cross-selling, you can actually make it positive churn too! This is when the marketing funnel that becomes narrow from the top becomes broader again with upselling and cross-selling. Which brings us to discussing more of the shape of the Marketing Funnel when it comes to SaaS Vs. non-SaaS product companies!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. Marketing Funnel Economics: 

The marketing funnel on the left shows a typical one for non-SaaS product companies. The one on the right shows the one for SaaS product companies. The main difference is the top of the funnel is much wider and uses organic traffic, in-bound marketing, search engine marketing and optimization and prospects from other paid sources.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The relative sizes of the tops of the funnels also show the difference between how wide the top of the funnel needs to be for SaaS product companies!

3. Balancing Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) vs. Customer Long Term Value (LTV):  There are only 8 hours in a day for selling. Traditional licensing models offer an initial large amount in a sale and annual maintenance fees of about 16 to 20% every year after that. SaaS models may offer a smaller initial set up fee and uniform cash flow month after month, year after year after that if you keep the customer. So you need to line up more clients in a SaaS model for reaching the same level of sales as when closing traditional licensing sales deals. So you need to necessarily reduce Customer Acquisition Costs (see the widened top of the marketing funnel in the figure above – that’s what that represents).  Some rules of thumb regarding CAC and LTV are that the Long Term Value of the customer needs to be greater than 3 times the Customer Acquisition Cost and the months to recover the Customer Acquisition Cost should be less than 12 months! This also makes a compelling case for designing and developing related products and do some effective cross-selling and up-selling enabling you to realize that Long Term Value even if your CAC is high! Also making sure that you get the Customer Acquisition Cost in less than a year takes care of the problem of churn and if they continue after a year, you have already made your money!

4. Repeatable Sales Model:   SaaS product companies rarely can afford the same direct sales model that non-SaaS models do. This is just given the smaller initial sales numbers even though the revenues are recurring rather than an initial large amount and 20% every year after that in maintenance fees in the non-SaaS traditional model. This makes it imperative that the SaaS sales model is easier, quicker and repeatable.

5. Scaling Pricing with Customer Value:  Many SaaS product companies shortchange themselves by improving their product so much that they provide much more customer value than they are charging them for. Scaling pricing by clustering value adding features together and packaging them and offering them as upgrade packages is key in ensuring that your pricing keeps up with the value your are providing.

These are only some basics. I highly recommend checking out the references I have earlier in this article. There is a treasure trove of experience and knowledge about how to make it work, all online and free!

In sales, a referral is the key to the door of resistance – Bo Bennett. 

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Some Takeaways from the First iSPIRT Playbook Roundtable on Positioning & Messaging for Products

“99% Practice, 1% Theory”. This was the ground rule laid down for the session by the workshop facilitator Shankar Maruwada at the beginning. Sounds very much like the tagline of a popular softdrink brand that’s No Bakwaas! No wonder it came from someone who has loads of experience in the FMCG space, built and sold an analytics company and has more recently given life to what is arguably India’s biggest consumer brand, Aadhar.

Shankar sharing insights at the iSPIRT Playbook RoundTable

The theory lasted just a couple of minutes with Shankar telling a simple, yet a compelling story of how the Indian flag evokes a strong feeling even though it is nothing but a geometrical shape consisting of rectangles and a circle! The point that a compelling visual and a strong emotional connect can touch a strong chord was driven home very clearly. Over the course of the next 3 hours, Shankar orchestrated a highly engaging and interactive session with the participating companies, making them think hard and think deeper to help them think in the right direction. What also helped immensely was that Shankar had gone through the profiles of each of the participating companies and knew the challenges each of them were facing.

The participants were involved in exercises that helped them think beyond the regular product features and benefits. Emphasis was placed on understanding and communicating the whys of the product rather than the hows and on ways of building an emotional connect with the customers that will resonate strongly with them.

The participants were made to think through the different stages of the communication to customers.  For each step, two companies shared their thought process in detail with other participants sharing their inputs for the two companies. The participants found it very helpful to pick the brain of other entrepreneurs and learn from other entrepreneurs. A couple of participating companies probably found their one-line message or the keyword that signifies their product offering by the end of this workshop!

Shankar sharing insights at the iSPIRT Playbook RoundTable

Here are some of the key takeaways from the workshop, based on the stage and the audience to which one is communicating to:

Idea

  • What’s the grand idea that can resonate with everyone? This is beyond the product features, pricing and has a much higher connect. E.g. Education with the reach of television, your own personal secretary..
  • If possible, use connections, metaphors and analogies for better impact. E.g. YouTube of…., Google of…..

Setup

  • What will make your customers sit up and take notice? This is something related to their business that they wouldn’t have thought of or know about and you instigate that thought through your messaging. This should make them care for your product offerings and be interested in exploring more and have them say, let’s talk! E.g. Did you know that you can now teach a million students right from your classroom? Did you know that 30% of devices in your corporate network go undetected and potential sources of malware that can disrupt your network?

Benefits

  • What is it that the customers can actually put to use? What are the tangible benefits that the customers can derive out of your offering? E.g. Deliver courses over low bandwidth and hence reach out to a large number of students even in remote locations, create attractive charts and graphs to derive meaningful and actionable insights out of your data, carry out quick experiments for merchandizing on your e-commerce website with very little involvement from your engineering team

Features

  • These are the features and functionalities built into the product. These would explain how the product works. E.g. Various roles built in for access control and permissions, different interfaces and interactions for different user types, alerts, reports and notifications. 

As you’d observe, the how part becomes more prominent as you move from the Idea stage to the Features stage and the why part becomes more prominent as you move in the reverse direction. Depending on the whom you’re speaking to in the scheme of things at the customer’s end, you can focus on the appropriate stage and communicate accordingly.

iSPIRT Playbook RoundTable

It is said that well begun is half done. Considering that this was the first such roundtable, the response from the product startup community was very encouraging and the participating startups found it to be very relevant and effective. The engagement with the participants will continue even beyond the workshop. The startups will be in regular touch with each other, share their inputs and the learnings derived from the workshop and update on the progress.

Here are some books that Shankar recommended:

There are more such Playbook Roundtables planned in the coming days across various locations and hope the product startup community will make the best use of those and benefit from them.

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So you want to enter the US market

As many of you know, Avinash Raghava is a persuasive individual. So when he approached me first to write for Product Nation, after some hemming and hawing, I agreed. On a recent call, he told me that nice though my writings have been so far, he was hoping I could help our readers with specific issues related to entering the US market.  He is absolutely right and I will start looking to him for guidance on what topics might be of interest to our readers. One of the first things we agreed, I’d write about is how companies should think about entering the US market. So here goes. 

I have been associated with the Indian IT business since 1989 and so I have seen the peaks and the troughs over the years. The IT services business and its offshoots into KPO and BPO have thrived over the years. And even now, if you are an entrepreneur and have a captive client, you can make a 20% return on your top line with some work and a tailwind. It is the product or IP related business that is a different animal.

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to understand the product business during my rather long stint with i-flex (now Oracle Financial Services). I had patient bosses, excellent coaches and the opportunity to understand three very different geographies – North America, Asia Pacific and Latin America. There are a few lessons I learned along the way and I am happy to share them with you. This is not an exhaustive post on the subject by any means, just some thoughts. Here is the first set of lessons learned:

Lesson #1 – Stay away if you can, it may not be worth it – Entering the US market (or any foreign market for that matter) is a big, messy, expensive proposition, if you think you will make money from day one, think again. It will take time and commitment to make it work. For example, in my previous life, it took investment from our company in a full blown sales and marketing organization, PR, analyst coverage, partners etc for close to over two years before we saw anything resembling success in the US. Latin America was a different story, the company did it half heartedly and did not invest in what was needed. Needless to say, we weren’t too successful in that geography. Entering a foreign market is not for the faint-hearted, it will take time and resources AND there is no guarantee of success.

Lesson #2 – Product business is not like the services business – Given the extensive experience that Indian companies have in the outsourcing world, it is no surprise that many startups are founded by folks with a services background. And since they have a services background they bring some of that mindset to the table. The challenge is that the product business is different in just about every way that matters to the services business. The approach to selling, the pitch, the implementation, support, partnerships, the list goes on and on. Unless the management is willing to change its outlook, this will cause you problems.

Lesson #3 – Awards are great, case studies are much better – I often come across promising companies in India that have been recognized for the excellent work they are doing. While awards are great, they are not enough to mitigate buyers’ concerns around vendor risk. Remember, you are an unknown quantity for the buyer, and as the old saying goes – “Nobody gets fired for buying from IBM”.  That is where case studies come in handy. If you have a multinational client, try and enter a foreign market through one of their subsidiaries. I know this works because I have used this strategy before. If you don’t, perhaps you can build case studies around a business reason that will resonate with similar companies in overseas markets.

Lesson #4 –  Get your story straight – One of the biggest challenges I see for Indian companies is around messaging. Most startups are founded by techies.  As a result, the messaging is very tech heavy.  I suspect the current crop of buyers is suffering from an overdose of “Cloud”, “Enablement”, “Web2.0”,  “Enterprise-class”, “Multi-Tier” and “Mobility”. The problem is that when everybody ends up sounding exactly alike, nobody stands out, and the message doesn’t address the problem they are trying to solve directly. A good message should be free of geek speak (to the extent possible) and to the point. Always remember that to the buyer you are relatively unknown, highly risky and you have a short time to grab the buyer’s attention. If you can’t even get them to understand what you do, well, good luck with closing the deal. This is hard and requires skill. There are people (like me) who can help you with this but it is critical that you do it.

Lesson #5 – Have a plan but be willing to change – When you are trying to get a foothold in new market, it is very tempting to get opportunistic. You leverage your contacts and get that first critical deal. That is how you get into a market, but what you do after that depends on whether you have thought about it or not. I encourage my clients to think about going after prospects that make sense in the larger scheme of things. In a significant departure from the services way of thinking, product companies can’t be everything to everyone. You have to think about what you are about and what business problem you are tackling. Based on that, you form a hypothesis and a plan. Then you test it out in the market. If it works, you are golden, if not, you tweak it. The point is, you can’t go after anything that moves: you don’t have the resources for it plus it WILL dilute your brand. Get opportunistic within your framework and you will already be ahead.

These are just some initial thoughts. Remember that like anything else in business, there are no guarantees. What you want to do is to increase the probability of success. Do companies succeed without the points I have listed above? Sometimes. Do companies fail even after they do everything above? Sure.

I can’t promise you success if you follow my advice but you’d be ill advised to ignore it. If you have thoughts, experiences or comments, please do share.

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How and why you should kickstart your Retention Marketing.

I first read the term ‘Retention Marketing’ in an article in a marketing journal at University and dismissed it immediately as one of the new terms we marketers come up with. It was for an assignment and I did not pay it a second more attention than was needed to write a passable term paper.

I heard it next at a meeting in office, about two years later. And was promptly dumbstruck by how important it now seemed.

Munch on this –

1. Repeat customers spend 33% more than new customers.
2. Referrals among repeat customers are 107% greater than non-customers.
3. It costs 6 times more to sell something to a prospect than to sell that same thing to a customer. And of course, the one stat that was drilled into my head so many times during my brief stint in retail.
4. 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers.

If you are among those who rely on instinct and not so much on data, the fact that it will cost much more to find a new customer than to retain an existing one is just common sense.

I experienced this firsthand when after the exhilarating first few months of pulling in new customers, we suddenly had to contend with churn. I realized that even when customers are using your product enthusiastically and find no fault with it, they will still immediately switch when they see something even remotely better as an offering. Of course, my more experienced colleagues knew this; it is the major advantage of the SaaS model.

And this is why as product marketers, we have to keep our brand in the minds of our customers. The recall has to established, the emotional attachment has to be drilled into minds and hearts. Most importantly, no hint of a reason, however far fetched should be given to the users to think about switching.

Here’s a list of five things you can do –

Push your content
Keep reminding your customer about the product he’s using. Send him newsletters, put him on a blog mailing list. Keep popping up in his attention span in a way that is not obtrusive but makes him feel he’s using something made by committed people. Do not let the customer forget you. That’s where the trouble begins.

Reach-out
Call your customers every once in a while; institute a process for the same. Write a case study or a blog post from what they tell you and put it up. This will feed into your content, and give your customer something to show others as well. This is precious – never underestimate the value of making your customer feel good.

Listen to product suggestions
When your customers have sensible suggestions for your product and if the suggestions are feasible, implement them. And once you have, tell him & the world what you did. This has a two pronged effect. Because any suggestion an active customer makes is bound to make sense, it’ll be good for the product. Two is that the customer will also be reassured that there are people listening. This customer will never leave you.

Focus on high risk customers
Look for customers who are suddenly using your product less or aren’t using it at all or have suddenly downgraded from a higher plan. These are the ones who are on the ‘endangered species‘ list; they may soon decide to go extinct. Engage with them, call them up, do something special for them, give them some freebies, anything. Come up with something that makes them start using your product again.

Actively up-sell
This is something a lot of amazing companies can fail at. It is quite a common misconception that ‘good‘ companies don’t up-sell. Some important person once said that if you don’t up sell to your customers, you are cheating them of something. I agree. They could be using your product so much better if you do up-sell, and customers, would never think of leaving. Give your product that advantage.

Keep your customers happy and in doing so, keep them with you.

Source for stats: 
1. http://marketing.about.com/od/relationshipmarketing/a/crmstrategy.htm
2. http://marketing.about.com/cs/customerservice/a/crmstrategy.htm

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The Great Facilitation ballgame of Multi-sided Business Platforms

Let me start with a simple question. What is common among these, as of 2006 (and, for that matter, even as of today)?

– Visa
– Sony Playstation
– Orbitz
– NASDAQ
– Microsoft Windows

All of these are known examples of facilitation based multi-sided business models. These are not just products or businesses; these are platforms, in the true sense of the word. These platforms have, some even in industrial and so called traditional businesses, created value by “facilitating interactions & transactions” among various groups involved. They depend on network effect to kick in, and then thrive big time.

The concept of the two-sided markets is not new. In fact, the newspapers might have been among the first to exploit it, through low-priced subscription subsidized by the sponsors paying for advertisements.

Networking Events and conferences have been a great example of a non-tech two-sided platform, and they are sold on the same direct benefit as well. The sponsors subsidize the participants’ fees, and hence get presumably higher visibility. Participants get to network; sometimes get direct information or sales leads; and pay for it unless in some cases, fully subsidized by the sponsors.

However, these business models, as represented by the examples above, were still very few & far in between until few years back.

The business world, since, has changed. And, drastically so!

Google and Apple have become the most valuable brands in the world. Amazon, that revolutionized the Books & Publishing market through the e-Commerce strategy, has since transformed itself into a Platform company. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and recently Pinterest have become the household names, beyond the tech world. Travel, Hospitality & Commute have become well-integrated platforms driven businesses – driven through online technologies and ground-level operational integration.

HOW SONY FALTERED, AND HOW APPLE & GOOGLE PROPELLED

Let’s take an example of two companies that seem to be very similar on products stack otherwise. Apple and Sony. Sony actually brought upon the concept of music that you could carry, with its revolutionary Walkman. Apple came in very late, with iPod. Sony has had a premium quality tag in computing machines (with Vaio) for a long time, while Apple’s Mac slugged it out in its own creative/designer/geek space. Sony even had the earliest starts with its Reader as long back as in 2006! They even had a great idea of Reader being the platform, and got the leading publications in Japan to take note that time. Sony, a very relevant company even today in tech world with the quality and huge brand image to boot, (interestingly, it has had at least one product in platforms category in Playstation) has fallen to 31-Year lows. They continued selling products in silos on their own standalone benefits. They are a product company, still a great one, but that doesn’t seem to be enough!

On the other hand, Apple had an iPod – as a standalone “take your music with you device”, around 2001-02. With iTunes, it took the first steps into a platform around 2003. However, it has since transformed into a true platform company, with its formidable all-integrated business strategy that brings together computing, entertainment, and business. iTunes is a comprehensive AppStore, and not just a music store. Apple is a multi-dimensional company at its best – it brings multiple beneficiaries together in this multi-facets products business. iOS developers and Applications users. Musicians, music companies and Music lovers. Local or global businesses and their customers and fans. We’ve even started seeing the serious Enterprises making Apple devices the central to their CoIT (Consumerization of IT) and collaboration strategy. iPod, iPhone, iPad, Mac, iCloud – they sell products but they’re a platform! And, in Feb 2012 Apple became the most valuable company in the world!

Google is an obvious name in the multi-sided platforms strategy. They took forward the newspaper ads model and applied it to search beautifully. And now, with the Enterprise businesses as well as their ever-growing list of vehicles – in GMail, Google Apps, Android, Chrome, Maps, Drive, and so on – have established themselves as an formidable Multi-sided platform. At this time, there doesn’t seem to be a limit on what vehicles Google can choose to drive their platform strategy. Microsoft is now fighting it out on its own turf while Google and Apple make inroads into its huge Enterprise foothold. (This also points to another trend that I’m planning to write about – the blurring of lines between Business & Personal Technologies).

SO WHAT?!

This era clearly belongs to the multi-sided Platforms based business. It’s important, however, to not confuse this with the traditional definition of platforms in technology space. The true business platform is the one that is driven by facilitation and network effect, and which actually has multi-sided business model in the sense of heterogeneous set of beneficiaries that are not directly connected to each other. It is also important to note that this disruption has been caused not only by technological evolution, but also the interlinked effect of the other disruptive patterns such as “Long Tail” and “Free”, both terms made popular by the very respectable Chris Anderson. I will touch upon these in the next couple of posts as noted in my cover post on Game-Changer trends.

If you’re in a business – whether technology or not, whether e-commerce or not, whether products or services – don’t ignore this trend. Think about how you can leverage on this model, or be part of this ever-growing multi-cog machine that benefits all its gears. But, if you really think details, it’s not just a marketing gimmick, and it’s not just a tweak in the product. It should become the foundation of how business of your product is conceived, strategized and operationalized.

PS: This post originally appeared on my blog, but I thought it’s worthwhile to post it here. Very relevant, hope you find it too!

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Learnings from the 4th #PNMeetup – Making your product go viral on a low marketing budget

They say lighting does not strike twice, but it definetly did at Kunzum café where the 4th #PNMeetup  was happening. The theme “Making your product go viral on a low marketing budget” got over 40 people to the venue all intent to desipher the Virality dilemma. We had Amit Ranjan from SlideShare’s, Pathik Shah from Hike & Bipin Preet Singh from Mobikwik.

Amit from Slideshare started off first by asking What is Virality? The ability of an object to self replicate.

He took examples why sites like facebook are viral, the basics of virality being- the ease and ability to get referrals from existing users. Increasing the Viral co-efficient – for every additional user how many additional users do you get.  If it is greater than 1 than we get unbounded virality and if it is less than 1 then it grows to a certain level and then stops. The different Channels of Viral Distribution being Newsfeed, Widgets, Notifications, Email and Inviting a friend – any one will get you more additional business. These Viral channels are not the same as features, features essentially keep existing users happy, Viral channels are vectors that grow your business. He stressed that Design, Convenience, Speed of the app or website matter, to create a good user experience which has a impact on the virality of the product.


Pathik from Hike then takes over and talks about how Hike touched 2 Million downloads in two weeks of launch, he goes on to outline some basics for a startup product to go viral. In his view the product needs to truly be a great product addressing a real need thus building a strong core value for the product. Once we have a good product the Desigining and the U&I needs to be of very good quality thereby getting eyeballs to the product. The next stage will be to have a large Distribution channel focusing on Growth and Retention of all new Customers. Smart Marketing will play an important role in being able to get the message across to the user base in a fast and simple manner. This may include offering free talk time, additional storage space on referring etc, anything to spread the message especially through one customer to another. An Innovative business model will ensure that the longevity of the product is maintained.

Pathik then goes about to explain the concept of Growth Hacking –  a new process for acquiring and engaging users combining traditional marketing and analytical skills with product development skills. In the past, marketing and product development departments were often at odds where marketing groups would be spending significant amounts of money to acquire users but couldn’t get any development resources to build something as simple as new custom landing pages. And on the other side, product development teams would often build what they think users want and will attract users without deeply measuring and understanding the impact of their changes. This concept of “growth hacking” is a recognition that when you focus on understanding your users and how they discover and adopt your products, you can build features that help you acquire and retain more users, rather than just spending marketing dollars.

Growth Hacking is one very fast way to get Virality of Sales vis-a-vie the traditional Marketing Channels.

By being able understand the needs of the customers you reach the A-HA point with the customers which is essiantialy the main reason of the product going Viral.

Bipin from Mobikwik then takes over and talks about Virality. He emphasis on the 3 basic things, First Product Innovation is the key for any product. The Product needs to be disruptive to create new positive impacts for the users for them to get hooked to it. Secondly, Cheap Acquistion for a startup is essential. The Aim needs to be able to target a large audience for the product at a low cost. Thirdly, their needs to be high rates of Retention on the client base which has been acquired enabling you to ensure the client base continues to grow.

We then moved onto the session where we featured a new company, this time it was Zest.md. The company offers saas based platform, providing eclinics for medical practioners. The participants shared their product and got feedback from the audience in relation to scaling their businesses.

After a very interactive 3 hr session the time was just right for everybody to interact with the speakers and network with the audience. It was a session which helped people share some interesting conversations and am sure all the people who came gained a good insight .


We eagerly now await the next #PNMeetup in April.

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How educational content and live demos got 7,000 websites using WebEngage in 15 months

I believe one of the best ways to learn marketing and business in general is to learn from other people’s successes. And in a bid to do that, I am going to bring to you interviews of Indian startups that have taken their products to the world. We will talk about how they got the initial buzz going, where they got their first set of customers from, how did they scale that up, what marketing metrics they measured, the mediums they used, the stories they went to press with, the biggest mistakes they made, how they handled criticism and more.

Here I am in conversation with Avlesh Singh, co-founder and CEO of Webklipper, the company behind WebEngage. WebEngage is a powerful customer engagement suite for your website that lets you collect feedback, gather customer insights and ultimately drive sales and conversions. They have gone from nothing to 7,000 customers (both free and paid) in less than 15 months and have done it all with a very lean team. Let’s get started.

What does WebEngage do? How does it help websites engage their visitors better?
Avlesh: WebEngage is an in-site marketing toolkit for online businesses. We help companies improves sales/conversions and help them collect awesome insights from their customers. All in real-time.

Using our Notifications, companies run targeted promotions by offering discounts and value adds to people “most likely” to purchase. Surveys on the other hand help customers collect insights to measure customer satisfaction and do lead generation on their site. And our Feedback product is the world’s simplest customer support tool that gets you up and running with a no-frills support channel on your website in less than a minute.

So who do you pitch your products to in a company? Marketing?
Our primary audience is Marketing and Product Management. They see the most value in this tool.

What’s your pitch to them?
Simple. In this order:

  1. Ever walked into an offline store? How often did the salesmen try to educate you or nudge you into buying something? We let you do something similar; ah, for your online store!
  2. Not sold yet? Okay, your marketers can run in-site campaigns without changing any code on the site; without seeking any developer or IT help. Oh yes. This is true. And these are truly rich messages with dynamic targeting capabilities. Care about user insights on your product or catalog? Care about user feedback?
  3. Not sold yet? Okay, see who uses our products. Also see some live demos on these sites.
  4. Not sold yet? Okay, take a live demo.
  5. Not sold yet? Here’s the website and our blog. Look forward to work with you. Bye.

Let’s back up a bit here. Tell me how you got the initial buzz going for your product? What part of it were you able to convert to real paying customers? Where did you get your first customer (or first set of customers) from?
We were in private beta for 5 months. Forget paying customers, we had a tough time finding the bigger guys to use our product. We focused a lot on education through content on our website and blog, answered direct question on Quora etc. Our live demo feature went viral and a lot of developers came out of curiosity to the site to find out how that thing worked. Here’s a sample of how curious developers got :-)

From free to paid, it was a three month journey. We went live in Oct 2011 and it took as good 2 months to get our first set of paying customers. We reached out to our beta users announcing the paid plans and features that would come along with it. Some tried out but never paid; a few took the big leap of faith and became our first set of paid customers – Art.com, Park-n-Fly, MobileDevelopmentIntelligence, Cleartrip, Justeat, Makemytrip etc to name a few.

75% of our customer base (free and paid) is outside India. That is how it was to begin with, too. With most Indian customers, early on, we had to go for F2F demos and explain the product in-depth for them to take the plunge.

Did the marketing start as you were developing the product or only after it?
It almost went hand-in-hand. So far, we have only done content marketing. And we have been done a fair job. Our plan is to do 100x better with content.

Did you have a marketing plan in place? Did you have numbers, like say, I would be able to get 100 signups if I do this and this and this? How much of that worked out?
No, we never had that. And it’s difficult for our category because customers are not “looking” for a push messaging tool on Google. We are trying to “create” a market and content is the only predictable way to go about it. This is definitely not true for customer support tools as they can direct their marketing spends on Google because too many people look for such tools everyday.

Also I see you have a Powered by WebEngage link in your surveys and feedback? Is that like a major marketing channel for you? What kind of traffic and conversions does it bring in?
It is the biggest source of inbound leads for us. Over 40% of our sign-ups happen from those logos in the three products. It is also a blessing in disguise because over a period of time we have started commanding huge premium from our enterprise customers who would otherwise want to get rid of those logos on their sites. We end up losing a lot of visibility but then get paid well for it too.

What other marketing channels have you used? What has been the most effective for you? How do you go about figuring which marketing channel will work for you?
We tried display ads. We tried paid app directory listings. We tried outsourced sales and marketing arms in the US. None of these worked very well from customer acquisition viewpoint. Content continues to rule our marketing plans. We are spending a lot of time and money now on building great quality content – videos, how-tos, galleries, use-cases etc. In the next month or two, you’ll see a lot of stuff on this front. We plan to do display advertising too, but with some corrections by incorporating learnings from our previous experiences.

As WebEngage grew, how have you scaled up your marketing?
In our case, we focused a lot on support. We used to (and still do) take calls at 2 in the night, pretty much everyday. We have managed to do this with great success. Happy customers are the best marketers. We got a lot of referrals from them. Most of our marketing efforts are around content creation. And so far, we have managed to do it in-house. We haven’t spent too many ad dollars.

How do you measure the success of your marketing? Compare them to historical data, industry benchmarks or…? And by marketing I don’t just mean paid campaigns, even a new website, new onboarding emails or anything on those lines.
We measure it based on conversions. Be it paid marketing or content, we have always believed in creating a workflow to measure and track conversions. Free tier sign-ups through paid marketing don’t work for us. That’s the reason we don’t spend ad-dollars. Content gives us a low cost channel of customer acquisition which we can further up-sell/cross-sell to. That’s one area we are trying to improve upon.

For our website, blog, video etc, we measure the success by amount of time spent on each of these. Customers on an average spend over 7 minutes on the site. It used to be less than a minute 6 months ago. In any SaaS business, customers want to read a lot and be sure that they want to pay before choosing to do so. Content helps in decision-making.

How do you keep a visitor engaged right from the first time he hits your website to him becoming a customer? How does your tool itself help with this?
We eat our own dog food. Spend a minute on our pricing page and you’ll come to know :-) . Take a look here – http://blog.webengage.com/2012/11/24/how-we-eat-our-own-dog-food-at-webengage/
Plus our live demo feature keeps users busy and educates them very well on what we do; it generates a lot of leads for us too.

What are the top 2-3 insights you got using WebEngage that you wouldn’t have got otherwise?
Here, in this order:

  1. The amount of time and effort needed to sell a $100/month product is the same as $1000/month product. I’d rather channelize my efforts into finding high ticket size deals than smaller ones; I used to think otherwise until an year ago.
  2. There is no better marketing tool than a bunch of happy customers. Some of our biggest enterprise deals have been through warm intros by such customers. How did we keep them happy? Beautiful product and proactive support; I undervalued the importance of latter until an year ago.

What are some of the biggest mistakes you have made on the marketing side of things?
We “outsourced” our sales/marketing to a sales-on-demand team in the US. I won’t name them. We spent crazy money in “retainer” fees and had 0 conversions by the end of pilot. Their so called “smart team” had no clue of what we were building, even towards the end of the pilot.

What marketing numbers do you measure? How often?
Money spent. Number of conversions – free and paid. Every month.

Let’s talk pricing. How did you get to the $15-$99/month model you have? Is that the price you started off with as well?
Mostly by talking to customers on how much are they willing to pay. Yes, this is our original pricing. But, we have made a lot of tweaks to the features being offered in each of these plans.

What tools and systems do you use?
Our own for tool for in-site marketing. And Adwords. Nothing major apart from that.

Your new website is a massive improvement over the old one. How has it increased your conversions? What objectives did you have in mind going into the new website?
Oh yes. We had only one objective, have people spend more time on the site and “see” what we do. Everywhere you go to, there are links to see our products in action. That was the only way to educate people on what we do. Take a look at this page – webengage.com/how-it-works

What advice do you have for startups planning to do an overhaul of their website?
Only one – decide what you want from it. Sign-ups, Conversions, Branding, Education … You can’t design a site to do all of the above. That’s the area we generally go wrong. Designing it with one objective always helps.

What kind of community do you have around your products?
None, yet. We want to build one.

What about partnerships and integrations?
We have focused a lot on integrations. Take a look here – webengage.com/integrate-with/your-website. This has worked out very well, because all of a sudden, customers start discovering you on new platforms. They would have otherwise not even known about us. We continue to focus on this. Second, we are building robust API’s with a larger goal of involving developers in building some intriguing applications on top of WebEngage. First cut here – docs.webengage.com

We have just started exploring partnership opportunities. Too early to comment.

What about your personal brand? How have you used that to increase the visibility of your products?
Yes, I am a classified spammer in the virtual and real world who leaves no stone unturned when it comes to promoting my product. Too bad, I know.

What do you think is an ideal marketing team for a tech startup?
I keep saying this – initial selling and marketing has to be done in-house and preferably by the founders themselves. If you, as a founder, cannot sell your product, no sales guy can. It is that simple. But its tough to understand as well, because I see most founders in tech companies get uncomfortable upon hearing this.

With 6700+ customers, you have been very successful in taking your products to the world. What advice do you have for other Indian startups who are looking to take their products to the world at large?
See, how fast things are changing. That number is now 7100+, both free and paid :-)

Here, in this order:

  1. Build a good product. Great brands were not built by advertising or marketing.
  2. Make sure there’s zero human touch in the product. Customers outside India don’t like getting stuck in a workflow that needs human intervention.
  3. Selling and marketing is a D-I-Y job until you reach significant scale.
  4. Network with right people. Don’t shy away from seeking help or intros.
  5. Have a good website. There’s no alternative.

Educational content and live demos definitely go a long way with marketing a product that customers are not looking for. Thanks Avlesh for the great insights.

Dear readers, if you have any follow up questions for Avlesh, please leave them in the comments below. He’s a busy man but I will get him to answer them :)

This article was originally published on Sanket Nadhani’s blog Poke and Bite

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“E” is for empathy

The last three business books I read were seemingly all different. “Wired to Care” by Dev Patnaik, “Nanovation” by Kevin and Jackie Freiberg and “Customer Centric Selling” by Michael Bosworth. The first was how humans are genetically designed to care for others, the second was the story behind how the Tata Nano was launched and the third was a book on more effective selling. But there was a common underlying theme to it all.

The theme was empathy. The Merriam Webster dictionary defines empathy as

“the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner; also : the capacity for this”

All the books in various ways said this and I am paraphrasing here – in order to to create a compelling offering you need to understand your customer’s pain and create a solution for it.

This should be self-evident but unfortunately that is not what we find in reality. What we find too often is a situation where a company creates a product without fully understanding how it will solve a customer’s problem. Even if they have a legitimate product solving legitimate problems, they are so caught up in the gee-whizziness of their product that they stop listening to their customers.

This is a big problem. A company that has a valid solution for a defined problem can last for a while. It might even get some early adopters but it will have a hard time sustaining its momentum and will run out of steam unless it starts a dialog with its customers and is empathetic to their needs. This is because your mainstream customers, the ones that will sustain you, are not early adopters and need to develop trust before they do business with you. One of the surest ways of building trust is to make sure the customer feels that you feel their pain and understand their unique situation.

This is not rocket science. It can be easily instituted in an organization. Designing a consultative sales process around understanding a customer’s needs first is a great start. But the culture of making sure that every touch point with the customer listens more than talks starts at the top.

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Digital Marketing for the B2B Landscape

The B2B buying process has undergone a transformation, and so has the B2B customer. Let’s roll the clock back in time. Information about your company, services, products and solutions was not readily available, or if it was, then not readily accessible. The sales representatives were the first touch points for your customers to gather any information about your services, and for your company to gather information about them and generate leads.

This was a time when salespeople were ‘actively’ trying to sell products and services to potential customers, which is otherwise known as ‘interruption marketing’. Traditional marketing tactics like direct mail, telemarketing, tradeshows, etc. were the means to reach out to prospects. And there was no way to gauge the interest of your target audience in your offerings.

Now let’s come back to the present. Customers are no longer waiting for your salesperson to ring the door bell, figuratively speaking. With the emergence of digital technologies came information abundance, and with it a highly informed B2B buyer. The internet, social media and other digital platforms have overwhelmed the target audience with information with a multitude of options and competitive offerings to consider. While earlier, the objective was to capture your prospects’ attention, the objective now is to focus the attention towards your company. The changing B2B landscape has thus necessitated a change in the tactics for marketers, and this is where digital marketing comes into the picture.

Take a look at the modern B2B customer. According to the Marketing Leadership Council, on average, customers progress 60% of the way through the purchase decision-making process before engaging a sales-rep. 78% of B2B buyers start their research with online search (Eloqua) and 33% of global B2B buyers use social media to engage with their vendors (Social media B2B). These statistics clearly show the upending of the customer’s role in the sales cycle.

The role of digital marketing is to address this shift in the sales process by reaching the target audience in the right stages. The one common thread running through the transformation is building relationships. How well marketers build strong digital relationships with the customer base can impact the success of the marketing objectives. Companies have thus modified their B2B marketing strategies to include the digital channels and platforms like email, social media, content marketing, etc. to improve the relationship-building process, establish a strong brand presence and drive lead generation and nurturing.

Digital Marketing helps marketers meet major marketing objectives that they face in a B2B landscape.

Strong brand presence: By reaching the target audience early on in the sales cycle with a focused and relevant approach, digital marketing helps establish a strong brand presence with the audience. Content marketing creates a strong impact by catering to the information needs of the customers throughout the entire sales process and drives the demand generation for the products and services.

Communication Framework: Gone are the days when marketers struggled to reach and educate your prospects with relevant information. Digital Marketing creates a communication framework through multiple options like email, websites, search engines and social media which expand the reach and at the same time, allow companies to establish communities where potential customers interact among themselves and with the company easily.

Lead Generation and Nurturing: By syndicating content and information across a variety of digital channels and networks, lead generation can be improved. Digital marketing enables implementing highly relevant and focused targeting for the campaigns which ensures that the number of ‘relevant’ leads goes up. Providing interesting educational content for these prospects can build a brand recall and product preference much before the buy stage.

Analytics and ROI:  The challenge with traditional marketing tactics is a lack of, or minimal, scope for analytics and measuring the Return of Investment. Digital Marketing provides actionable, updated insights for marketers on their initiatives which allow them to fine tune and optimize them. It also enables the measurement of ROI for each initiative to evaluate which of them work at any specific time and make the marketing plans more effective.

With more innovations and technologies in the future, more and more companies are adopting digital marketing as a significant part of the marketing blueprint. Digital is indeed the future!

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How Sales and Support can also be ‘Marketed’!

The best marketer of our time was, inarguably, Steve Jobs. And everything Steve Jobs did was aimed at one thing – marketing his products. His presentations were performances, his product demos were carefully directed and choreographed; there was an air of showmanship about everything going on at Apple leading to a launch. Even their support stories became huge news. Walter Isaacson and others dissected this approach later, but at that time, all of us consumers were led to think only one thing – I need that Apple device!

That need wasn’t an accident; that craving was the result of an orchestrated marketing campaign, parts of which would never come under the understood umbrella of ‘marketing’. And that is where they won. 

The lesson in this is very simple – everything is marketing. Every single thing. Even something like customer service. In fact, here’s Forbes terming customer service the new marketing. I couldn’t agree more.

But it’s not just customer service that now falls under marketing’s all encompassing realm. Sales and support can also be ‘marketed’. In fact both sales and support, tied in with customer service, can become integral parts of the marketing machinery, using every customer touchpoint as a marketing channel.

The ‘support is marketing’ line

This is the first point of customer contact and definitely the most important. An indifferent support experience is not going to get a prospective customer to open his wallet. We need to make him pause, make him think, and make him buy. Every support query should be treated as an opportunity to clear roadblocks a customer has in using the product. Anticipating the next question and offering help before the customer even asks is part of this. This is just good support, you might argue, and that is exactly what I’m talking about – great support is great marketing.



The ‘sales as marketing’ story


It was the last week of the month and our sales team was rushing to complete targets. A colleague called up a hot lead and it turned out the lead, the CEO of a small business didn’t know about our occasional agents feature, which would cost him a lot less than actually buying usage for a whole agent. My colleague could have sold the customer the extra agent, but he didn’t. He explained the occasional agent concept, and when the customer purchased our product, he spent less and got more value. 

That customer would now think twice before leaving us, if ever. If that is not spectacular marketing, I don’t know what is.

The Bottom Line
As marketers we are looking for a customer to 1) spend more on our product and/or 2) tell someone else he should be using our product. 

When sales, support and customer service add up to give a customer a smooth and satisfying experience, he’ll have no qualms in spending more on our product or recommending us to others. Our job is done.


And that is why I think we need to take that lesson from Steve Jobs to heart. Everything is, in fact, marketing!