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Managing business is about having the right data at your fingertips

Hindsight, they say, is 20/20.  The advantage of hindsight is that all the data that affects a decision has been revealed and is known.  Unfortunately, real life never works that way.  As an entrepreneur, you have to operate on a combination of one part data, one part intelligent guesses, and, if we are really frank about it, one part luck.

Managing a business, when broken down into its simplest form, is about making a series of decisions. And how those decisions are made can make all the difference.  Most entrepreneurs have a lot of faith in their gut or instincts. And why not? The decision to become an entrepreneur itself is one that is based on passion, the belief that you have a winning product or service idea, and the unquenchable desire to do something on your own. Just look at the words – passion, belief, desire. Not really things you can measure and make data points about. But, combine or guide your gut feeling with the right data at the right time, and it could lead to better business decisions.

The trick, of course, is to have access to the right data at the right time.

The data that you need to make decisions while managing your business, in many cases, is about your business itself.  It is about how much you spend, how much is due to you, what is your inventory situation – seemingly simple things. But if you are able to have this information at your fingertips, accessible whenever you want it, it makes your decisions not just faster, but more sound as well.

The first step to having the right data is to collect it.  Do you have systems and processes that ensure that every important piece of information is captured? It could be your CRM, or your financial management software.  Unless the data is captured and categorized, it cannot be utilized to distil useful information. Because raw data is just that, raw; and what you need is the analysis to make an informed decision.

When you are managing a business, you have to have your eye on the ball at all times. And that means having all your data accessible in a form that makes it easy for you to interpret and make decisions.  For example, if you are able to track overdue payments as soon they become overdue, or are able to see the payment pattern of a specific customer with a bad payment record in just a few clicks, it makes it easier to track and take remedial measures.  Having anywhere, anytime access to the right data empowers you with knowledge, and helps you monitor and manage your business with complete and up-to-the-minute information. The closest you can get to the 20/20 vision that hindsight promises.

Which brings me back to my starting point. I have found that the more relevant data I have, the more intelligent my guesses are. And the more confidence I have in going with my gut feeling.

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Building profitable and sustainable software product company

What common principles underlie success of software product companies such as Newgen, Nucleus, Tally, Polaris, Srishti, Mindmill, Quest informatics, Druvaa, Infrasoft, Zoho etc?. Kim and Maubrogne (1997) in their analysis of high growth companies found that these companies focus on bettering themselves, continuously let unprofitable customers go, and shed commodity resources/skills. Collins (2001) in his widely acclaimed book “good to great” identifies, the value of executive leadership, getting the right people, focus on what a company is good at and creating a culture of discipline, as the core principles of great companies. On the product development side, Reis (2011), Brown and Eisenhardt (1998) have brought out the value of building core (Minimum viable product or MVP) to reduce time to market and patching modules against market opportunity.  In this article, Browne & Mohan consultants synthesize their learning of working with software product companies.

Market selection
While many product companies start off as services companies and later productize-their services, successful ones are those that operate in markets with periodic changes in regulatory requirements, witnessing newer investments to scaling and growth of enterprises in the industry and operational friction exists due to proprietary approaches or tools. Long term sustaining software product companies also look at markets where large MNC products exist, product acquisitions are on raise and MNC’s are unable to address non-behemoth companies in that sector.

Strategic Imitation, not Innovation
While it is fashionable for academics to talk about first-to-market, most successful product companies are strategic imitators. They allow the first-mover to discover the key features, educate early customers, but ride on a me-too quickly to capitalize on the market growth. This helps in lower S&M costs and improved ROCE.

Seek ideas fly from all; focus on what not to do.
Successful product companies seek ideas from multiple sources, beta clients, product demo teams, end users, etc. But build the product looking at where the friction is highest, pain is unbearable and intension to pay is highest.

Design a product for reuse and as platform
Design the product for big picture, but strip down to basic version to design first and market test. Later modules must be used for versioning and bundling. Build modular products and products that could be used in cloud or on-premise environment. Focus should be on minimizing customization, and reduce variety at early stage to benefit from low code, feature and support variety.

Invest in multiplicative Ecosystem.
Successful product companies must learn to exploit the product ecosystem. Whether it is the technology OEM you have an ISV relationship with, analyst relationship, or a sales partner, they are good levers to reduce investments in your set-up (people and other paraphernalia). Align your sales resources to maximize the self-interest of partners. Align with OEM account manager to acquire new customers and “sales focused” no product companies in international markets to expand. Partners and resellers help in market coverage, delivery and post-deployment support. Invest in marketing and vendor management resources, processes including training and certification realised better results. Use every platform provided by technology OEM to brand and reach out to market.  Academic institutes and interns are a good platform to explore open innovations. Ideas for new products, GUI modifications, market research, pricing and competitive intelligence and in fact product development can all be areas where qualified resources can be employed to your company’s gain.

 

Keep sales structure lean and mean
Successful product companies need sales teams where the client opening meetings may happen through marketing events or resources on street, closures can only happen if they have sales team that can inform and influence at senior levels of organizations.  Named account strategy will work if the client organizations can be identified a priori, they are far and few and the sales team has the ability to penetrate those accounts at all levels.

Invest in sales operations
Successful product companies invest in sales operations units, often led by a visibility into last mile was high and the sales teams were mean and lean.

Credible and Consultative Pre-sales
To be a successful product company, invest in pre-sales who enjoy problem solving and consulting. Use various platforms to positions them as solution providers, thinkers, etc. Arm them with couple of certifications, it helps to open many a closed minds in many parts of world. 

Profitable license sales
Many companies do not have the mix of license, support and deployment worked out in detail and with sales pressures may accept clients where the license fee has been abnormally discounted. While winning reference customers is a must, not all clients must be treated as referential. 

Right pricing, adopt versioning
Use versioning or hosted vs. on-premise or CPU vs. instance prices appropriate to the product environment. Create sufficient variants to allow customers to do self-selection and a feeling of control.

Limited budget, Impactful Marketing
You do not have to splurge a lot to be noticed. In fact, many a business papers have paucity of good stories to tell on innovation, India based product or E-governance product. Invest in couple of resources to engage actively with media and also create appropriate noise on social media.

Many successful product companies have HR talking about the culture, what is unique and so on. Brand all aspects of the company. See in what way your unique induction program can become a business case study or women employees returning from maternity or other long breaks can immerse into the organization becomes an impactful article.

Hire for attitude, perseverance and initiative
Successful software product companies do not need hire noble prize winners, but committed people who would embrace common ambition of the firm. They come with openness and curiosity to learn, improvise activities within their control and innovate over time.

While academic degrees and honours may matter initially, what matters is positivism and attitude. Choose employees who are keen to dirty their hands, shoulder a bit of other roles and open to unlearn.  Incentivize employees to attempt, appreciate failures and set them for win.

Rein in service cannibalizing product
Service revenues that come with product installations can be very tempting and wean away the focus away from the product if strongly not reined. Many successful companies find themselves in service cannibalization over time and lose their long term sustainability. Limit your services play and consciously promote partners to support roll out and de-risk yourself.

Risk Management
Product companies that grew and sustained momentum measured the risk and impact of their actions, though mostly subjective.  Senior management insisted on developing an approach to estimate risks, their impact, however rudimentary across organizations. Explicit identification and evaluation of risks helped the companies question their assumptions and prepare for back up plans.

De-risk, invest in R&D
Product companies must de-risk from technologies, products, markets and customer segments. Look out for related product usage areas where the product could fit, refurbish the features appropriate to a specific industry and monetize extension of the product knowledge across different customer segments. 

With inputs from Pratibha Sharma

Bibliography Brown, S.L. and Eisenhardt, K.M. Competing on Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos, HBS Press, Boston, 1998. Collins, J. Good to Great: why some companies make the Leap… and others Don’t, Harper Business Press, New York, 2001. Garud,R. Kumaraswamy, A and R.N. Langlois, Managing in the Modern Age, Blackwell, Oxford, 2003. Hagel, J and Brown, J.S. The only sustainable Edge: why business strategy depends on productive friction and dynamic specialization, HBS Press, Boston, 2005. Johnson, R. and Soenen, L. Indicators of Successful Companies, European Management Journal, 2003, 21(3), 364-369. Kim, W.C and Mauborgne, R. Value innovation: the strategic logic of high growth, Harvard Business Review, 1997, Jan-Feb, 75(1), 1012-112 Kopitov, R and Faingloz, L. Ways of transforming aims into results at Successful companies, Technological and Economic Development of Economy, 2008, 14(3), 312-327. Kotter, J.P, Leading Change, HBS Press, Boston, 2008. Leonard, D. Wellsprings of Knowledge: Building and Sustaining the Sources of Innovation, HBS Press, Boston, 1995. Morgan, M. Levitt, R.E and W. Malek, Executing Strategy: How to break it down and get it done, HBS Press, Boston, 2007. Schnaars, S.P. Managing Imitation Strategies, Free Press, New York, 1994.

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Profit from Price, Always – The Bootstrapped Story of RateGain

This is part of our “Podcast with a Product Entrepreneur” series. Do check out the 30 minute podcast!

His first fling with business was a video game exchange, while at school. Coming from a family of entrepreneurs, the question was never about the “Why”; it was only about the “When”. A computer science and finance graduate, his stint with Deloitte saw him starting up with a technology consulting business that later led him to this technology product idea.

Meet Bhanu Chopra, the Founder and CEO of RateGain – a B2B price comparison SaaS product for the travel industry –  as he talks about starting up, go-to market strategies, the CNBC Award, challenges and some priceless advice for all software product entrepreneurs.

In business, Bhanu has demonstrated tremendous agility by making quick decisions. His initial idea of a price comparison website focused on the US market, quickly morphed into a B2B offering, given the challenge of marketing to US out of India. Then by licensing technology and acquiring a few beta customers, he not only validated the idea, quickly, but also generated revenues for reinvestment.

Bhanu advocates a Go-To market approach built on two parameters:-

  • Power of a Brand built on thought leadership, where Bhanu humbly accepts being “late in the game”
  • Sales Structure customized to the channel and prospective customer personas

 

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/79810846″ params=”color=ff6600&auto_play=false&show_artwork=true” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

 

Straddling across the hospitality value chain with RateGain, Bhanu sees tremendous opportunities for existing products as well as newer products on pricing optimization using Big Data and predictive analytics.

Also an angel investor, Bhanu recognizes the tremendous passion amongst product entrepreneurs but highlights the imperative to persevere and think about the global market. While the team is critical, he concedes that team building would always be a challenge for product companies in India, given the latency of IT services in influencing engineering talent.

We conclude the interview with Bhanu mentioning two of his favorite product companies – Google and ….. – an awesome data visualization company that is just about to IPO on NASDAQ. If you haven’t guessed the name, do listen to the podcast.

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Guerilla Marketing 2.0 for Product Startups!

Jay Conrad Levinson, father of Guerilla Marketing defines it very simply as going after conventional goals with unconventional means! When you are a product startup, trying to build a business on little to zero money, you need plenty of unconventional means. With the rise of social media, viral word-of-mouth options with web and mobile global connectivity, it has never been easier to do guerilla marketing! As you will see in  the rest of this article, social media can be a part of guerilla marketing and that makes it 2.0!

However, guerilla marketing requires lots of time, energy, imagination and information on your part rather than money (in Jay Conrad Levinson’s words again!)

First, it is worth watching him describe guerilla marketing in his own words! It is worthwhile to remember that he invented this way before we had social media but since then they have made what he was trying to do a lot easier!

Time, energy, imagination and information are not easy to muster or master easily when you are short of money, trying to get to the next level of getting angel funding or venture funding or just trying to keep your business afloat! But that’s when guerilla marketing could provide the big breaks you may be looking for in terms of customer adoption!

Here’s a video of the Unidesk CEO talking about how they performed guerilla marketing and the tools they used throughout the lifecycle of their product. Right from inception, when they did not have a product to when they had a product and trying to get repeat customers!  They used different tools, some of them social media, at various stages of the product development lifecycle and for different purposes. For example, their use of SurveyMonkey to survey potential users of their product BEFORE they had a product is remarkable. Unidesk is in the business of desktop virtualization. All they had to do was ask potential users what they needed using a survey and seems like they got MORE than what they needed by way of inputs on what was needed in their product. This ties in with the Lean Startup movement where you get out of the office and talk to potential prospects before implementing anything.

Very interesting to see the variety of tools used during different stages of the lifecycle of their product (inception to repeat customers). Most importantly, their use of measurement of everything is key in seeing what works and changing tools or approaches quickly! After all, time, energy, imagination and information is not easy to come by, and cannot be wasted even if you can do many things for free these days!

Here’s another YouTube video about understanding the Chain of Conversion. Software product founders may also know this as the Funnel. This video makes a very important point about understanding the way your own funnel works, pinpointing the weaknesses in your funnel, working backwards from any point in the funnel, and fixing these weaknesses systematically. This is where you may need to employ different guerilla marketing approaches depending upon what is suitable at the different stages of the funnel.

Finally, here’s a stunning YouTube video. I don’t want to say anything more since that anything would be a spoiler!  Watch it for yourself! All I want to say is that this one has 43 million views as of this writing! Rest assured that this Guerilla Marketing effort was highly successful!

Many users on twitter, facebook and instagram believe they are the star of their very own reality show when they are stalked by a mellow mushroom! – Entrepreneur Magazine talking about Mellow Mushroom’s (restaurant) guerilla marketing effort.

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Customer support lessons from the Yellow Tire Company

It’s quite a matter of pride for the Dabbawalas of Mumbai to be counted right up there in the performance toppers chart. With efficiency metrics that any manager would die for, I got the urge to look at another parallel hallmark which has been able to achieve customer delight in a quintessentially Indian way – thriving on chaos yet with a quiet air of dependability. 

There would hardly be a person who has not noticed ads of the Yellow Tire Company. It’s those innocuous looking yellow rings hanging on a tree promising help to the stranded motorist with a flat tyre! I may be forgiven for calling them the YT Company but that’s only because they have taken customer service to levels which most companies strive to beat. They’re omnipresent and so willing to help we’ve almost taken them for granted. I like to think of those yellow rings as smiley faces, always available to pump a little joy into your tyres, no matter what the time. The symbol of this promise of ‘odd-hours’ service is their mobile number painted in bold colors, saying “don’t hesitate to call me”! 

Support is always one of those thorny bushes that grows in all directions and becomes difficult for a Startup to tame. We’ve often seen support teams either bending backwards to please, or being so stiff they earn themselves an agitated customer. With the predisposition to meet SLAs and ill-designed performance indices, there’s little inclination to think of preventive actions. So the quest for support excellence is sacrificed at the altar of daily efficiency. 

Even when a Startup is relentlessly driving towards product launch and go to market strategies, its not too hard to get started with smart strategies that insure high levels of customer satisfaction. In our company we introduced ticketing systems, support policies and standard operating procedures even before we had our 10th customer. Yet, customers (and our support team) kept preferring email and phone conversations to quickly resolve issues. To top this, the customers who got used to phone and email support were the most reluctant to adopt systems when we introduced them. 

Here are a few observations from our journey may be of some use in yours: 

  • Introduce the primary support conversation tool as a part of your product, not as an afterthought.
  • Cajole, convince, convert users to a support platform and monitor it regularly. Once a week is good for a startup founder to make it stay the course.
  • Lead by example – your team will treat customers as well as they see you doing. This is perhaps more effective then ‘telling’ them do’s and don’ts.
  • You have your fair share of early adopters whom you’ve personally given support at some time. Convince them that they’d get better and more consistent support if they use the Helpdesk instead of calling you. I can promise you this works!
  • Create pre-cooked solutions that address common problems. Smart cooks keep the ingredients ready and are better prepared to meet their diner’s expectations.
  • Don’t just pre-cook – actively encourage consumption by guiding users actively to seek out the solutions knowledge base. You can do this by including random guide tips in your Helpdesk email footers with a link to the knowledge base, linking it prominently from your website, your application menu and so on.
  • Integrate customer guidebooks into the product so they have help at hand when they need it the most.
  • Solicit customer feedback through periodic surveys. Customers want to feel their opinions are valued and will forgive a lot of mistakes if we just listen. And when listening, its good to take their suggestions as constructive criticism. It’s free advice, and valuable.
  • And lastly, coming back to the Yellow Tire Company strategy… tell them they can get after hours support for any super-critical problem. They’ll love you for it and the effort to deliver this is far less than the value of the accolades that follow. If you’re in B2B like us, remember that your customer’s business ops depend on your software and 10pm is no excuse to not talk to them. 

You’ll grow eventually into a larger team, provide 24×7 support and have managers in every function to analyze and improve. Customers are and always remain your most valuable asset and for a Startup the leverage on this asset is even greater. Give them the Yellow Tire treatment and they’ll watch out for you! 

What have been your experiences in staffing your customer support as a startup ? Would love to hear about your challenges and victories. 

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Content Generation – The 10 commandments

Content Marketing is increasingly becoming a key strategy for product marketers. With prospects and customers ceasing to be passive and, on the contrary, actively gathering information, comparing product offerings and alternatives, product marketers are now turning to content marketing as a key strategy for their communication operations.

The purpose of Content Marketing is to create a scenario where your customers and prospects interact, react, engage and market on their own. Instead of publishing self-proclaiming ads, the focus has now shifted to providing content that the target audience finds relevant and resourceful.

The key question then is how to ensure you publish relevant and resourceful content for your target audience. The basis for any content marketing strategy is the content itself, and how you shape and mould your content can define your success. The following 10 Commandments of Content Generation will serve as an effective roadmap for your content marketing success

YOUR CONTENT SHALL NOT BE PROMOTIONAL
Your prospects don’t want to read self-promotional messages all the time. The key to winning your target audience over is building credibility and creating content that matters to readers.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE ORIGINAL
It does not matter how perfect you think your content is. The success lies in the appeal. The key to building brands and winning fans in the long term is creating content that is original, which is unique.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE RELEVANT
The content you create should be based on what your prospects are interested in and what is the most relevant in their space. Identify industry-relevant subject matter and popular topics before you create content. 

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE STRUCTURED
Your content needs a blueprint.  Structure your message first and then create the content. Your prospects demand more than a bunch of loosely related words from you.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE DIVERSIFIED
Your prospects consume content in various forms – text, pictures, videos, etc. Your content must not be restricted to a single type. Instead, diversify your content to keep the interest high.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL CARRY A THEME
What message are you trying to push to your audience? Your content should carry an underlying theme that is aligned to your end objectives and goals.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL ADDRESS NEEDS
Most of your prospects and customers want to read things that benefit them. Your display of a deep understanding of the challenges they face can elevate your target audience from being interested readers to a highly engaged audience.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE EASY TO UNDERSTAND
The content, when it reaches your prospects and customers, must be easy to understand. If your target audience is forced to make an effort, there’s very little chance that they’ll go through your content till the end.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE ENGAGING
The aim of your content generation is to attract and sustain the interest of your customers and prospects. Rather than making it one-directional, make your content engaging by including calls-to-action in your content – comment, subscribe, share, register, etc. Customer communication management should be a priority.

YOUR CONTENT SHALL BE BACKED BY PROOF
In today’s world, information is just a step away to be found and verified. Publishing content without enough proof can backfire as you may end up losing the credibility you built. You should use information, stats, reports and trends to back your content.

 

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Building for the world? Then take it to the world.

[This post is written for Indian startups. If you are not one, you will not find much value in it. But don’t take my word for it. Read through the post to know for yourself.]

I have been noticing an interesting trend in the Indian startup landscape over the last 12-15 months. Or something like that. Indians are building good solid products that they intend to take to the world, only to end up becoming world-famous in India. Indulge me, will you?

The Indian startup community has been shaping up pretty well over the last couple of years, and these folks are well connected to each other. Startup events, emails, Twitter, all of them put together keep the spirit going. Now when a startup gets to work on its next big idea, they go to this community for feedback and nice people that they are, they send in a lot of it. The team soaks in the best ideas, puts together a solid product and gets ready to launch to the world.

They send in a note to PluggdIn and YourStory who do a nice roundup on them, and ask the startup community to go spread the word for them. They are promised a t-shirt. And of course, these folks are happy to see the feedback they sent implemented in the product, so they go tell their first-degree LinkedIn connections about this new world-changing product.

The team sees a lot of “buzz” around the product and some customers start trickling in. These are early days, and it can only grow from there. Happy with the results, they go back to writing code. They have a whole list of features that people had asked for.

They implement one feature, two features, 17 features, and blog about all the awesome new stuff they have added in the product. They engage in conversations about their product philosophies with the startup community on Twitter who commend them for their passion.

Good things will happen soon.

But six months down the line, the trickle of customer continues to be a trickle. The “virality” the initial buzz promised is nowhere to be seen. The sales cycles for whatever customers are coming in is much longer than they expected.

They go back to the startup community to bounce off ideas. Over a beer, they conclude that customers are to be blamed. Companies want to be at the bleeding edge of technology but feel buying from a startup is risky. They still want their software to come from monstrous enterprises. So it’s a problem with the buyer’s mindset, not with the product itself. But soon they will realize that the enterprises are unable to keep up with the rapid strides in technology, and they will come knock startup doors.

It’s only a matter of months, they all agree.

Drawing comfort from the collective grief and the solution in sight, they go back to work on the killer social integration feature they have been planning for long.

Social integration done, 47 other features done but 12 months down the line, the customer story is still the same. A trickle. They write a big long rant about how the world has to become accepting of startups because it is the small companies that move the human race forward. They elaborate on their point with blasts from the past and heart-touching anecdotes. They see a lot of buzz around this post. 92 likes, 45 tweets, 23 comments.

Ego massaged, they go back to…you see the cycle? And then there comes a point in time when the startup finally asks — how is it that I am able to create all this buzz but the customer graph refuses to budge?

Time for my rant.

You made a product for the whole wide world, and you took it to the whole wide….country. Your early people were all from India. And so were the people they spread the word to. The coverage you got and the rants you wrote reached the same set of people, again. So essentially all buzz you thought you created reached a small set of startup folks in India.

So what’s the solution? Go out, get covered in the TechCrunchs and Mashables of the world? If you have a good product in a sexy market, why not?

But not every product is meant to be TechCrunch’d, and not every product has to be. First, there are other sites like The Next Web, GigaOm and PandoDaily that people keep forgetting about. Second, getting your product covered is not the only way to make two-hour Internet glory. Guest posts are an awesome way to get the word out as well. A lot of these sites look for guest posts during the weekend, when news is going slow and their staff is taking it easy. So put in some more work on the wonderful industry pieces you have been writing and reaching a total of 235 people, and pitch it to these guys instead.

Or what about the lessons you learnt from your entrepreneurship journey that you talk about on your blog? The mistakes you made, the lessons you learnt, the things you did differently, the rants. Why not pitch that to an entrepreneurship-focused blog like OnStartups or A Smart Bear?

How about the core philosophies you built your product on? Why not bring them out on A List Apart, SixRevisions or Sitepoint?

Get yourself invited on a webinar in your niche that isn’t geographically challenged.

Get into one of those Twitter conversations that you usually have with heavy-hitters from the Valley instead. Mark Suster, Dave McClure, the list is endless.

Get into a heated exchange with one of your American competitors.

And if you don’t have time for any of these, just go buy some ads. PPC ads, newsletter sponsorships, display ad units.

If you are building a product for the world, take it to the world.
This article was originally published on Sanket Nadhani’s blog Poke and Bite

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Lean way of sales

“Not meeting desired sales target?” is perhaps the most important question in any of senior management meetings.  But how do most companies react? Answer: “Re”setting the targets,“Re”structuring marketing campaigns and finally “Re”placing sales team (starting from executives ending up replacing sales director) and what will happen by doing several “Re’s” together…absolutely nothing. On the contrary such measures can damage team morale.

It is time to change, to replace traditional methodologies, to innovate and to spark. Time to analyse the mistakes.

Let’s rethink

What is a sale?  Act of selling a product or service in return for money or other compensation

Whats makes a sale?

  • Make the relevant presentation – Yes.. its necessary
  • Create connection between product/service and prospects. .. – Yes.. its necessary
  • Get to the point – Yes…its essential
  • Be animated … OK
  • Use showmanship… Ok ok
  • Use physical demonstration … Yes It’s necessary.
  • Believe on your product and Services… Aaahhhhhh….Its impossible….I have never seen it never utilized it ..how can i.. yes but I have capability to convenience customer though I haven’t  Utilized it …” True Salesmanship J”

And How much % this “making of a sale” will individually or contributed generate sales ?…Can’t Say. May be our sales guys are not proper… (In reality, sales guys are the most smartest guys in any of the organization).

It’s time for thinking…and changing. Let’s  make it the Lean Way…change “Re’s with Do’s

  • Do we are really addressing customer problems, completely?
  • Have we minimized cost of consumption (Price+ Time+Hassle)?
  • Do we provide exactly what customer wants?
  • Do we deliver value where customer wants?
  • Do we supply value where customer wants?

Remember, first sale to a customer could be important but it is the second sale that matters the most. Second sale will happen only if customer the is satisfied. Maximum value and minimized organizational waste is key to customer satisfaction. These are the only things that make a sale, make a customer buy, make it a competitive.

Guest Post Contributed by Meghshyam Gholap, Lean Sales Specialist

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How to come up with a great company or product name? – A few YouTube videos can teach you that!

Who said YouTube is a waste of time? It can even teach you on how to come up with a great company or product name!

Naming a company or a product is so crucial in a product start-up. You can call your services company – “The Great Maharashtra IT Services and Systems Company”  and your clients may not care too much! Product startups, especially in the consumer space, need to think a lot before naming their company or their product. This is only because it needs to be simple to  pronounce and spell, may not mean something bad in another language, and most importantly, domain names need to be available and make for good branding and trademark protection!

Rather than me making this a lecture, I thought this time around I will have YouTube videos tell you the story of why Company and Product naming is important and more importantly, how to go about doing it in a systematic way. And how not to do it!

Here is a five minute video that gives you a quick overview of why names are important and a systematic way of going about it! This company’s own name CatchWord is a great name for a consulting company that specializes in providing naming services! They seem to have come up with that name following their own process.

The main takeaway from the video above is that it is an involved process and worth taking the time to do it carefully and painstakingly!

If you think that some very successful companies have not made mistakes in their own names, watch this clip from the movie The Social Network. Facebook was once The Facebook until Sean Parker, Co-Founder of Napster advises Mark Zuckerberg to take the “the” out!

 

If you are wondering where the name Apple came from, here’s a video that explains that! The Macintosh was almost called The Bicycle and the iMac was about to be called MacMan! And those were Steve Jobs’ ideas!

If you want to be rolling on the floor laughing, here’s a presentation of failed product names! Good lesson in checking what your company or product name means in other languages and your own!

 

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet – William Shakespeare.

Well…..May be Not!!

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Learnings from the 2nd #PNMeetup – Selling your product Gangnam Style

#PNMeetup on Selling your product Gangnam Style was the topic at the recently concluded Meetup(Podcast link). We had over 45-50 people across products and the services who came out to gain an insight into the Enigma of Gangnam Style Sales, with their eyes wide open and all ears the speakers Mr. Sanjay Agarwala MD of Eastern Software, Ketan Kapoor Co-Founder and CEO  of Mettl and Vishal Jain Chief Product Officer of RateGain gave an eagles eye clarity of how one could reach the summit of the Gangnam Style Sales.

Sanjay set the tone of the session by sharing his experiences of Eastern Software system which he started in 1991 and where he saw an opportunity in the product space in 1997 and ventured therein. The company dived headlong into ERP where there was a huge demand in the small and midcap segment. The larger players were serviced by prominent players. They clearer pegged themselves below these big players. The positioning was very clear to all parties concerned form the beginning. Because of their positing they got Pvt Equity Investments which enabled them to concentrate on Product development and Market Development which helped them scale to 100 customers in 2 years and 800 customers by 2001-2002.

They looked for newer markets outside and concentrated on newer markets. Africa was a huge virgin market, every body was skeptical but it was an immense market waiting to be tapped. They tweaked their sales model from a direct Sales(applicable in India) to partnering with the local companies(In Africa), they believe when you partner with anyone the relationship has to be a win-win. The partners should benefit first and then you. That builds trust which is further solidified when you match your own money with the amount the partner spent, sending clear signals to all. Since the partner operates in the market and is now highly motivated he is able to better understand the changing environment and this helps in better customer deliver.

 Sanjay’s  Gangnam style  for Eastern Software

1) Positing of product to be very clear – To Market, To Employees and To Self

2) Concentrate on Product Development

3) Build the Market.

3) Focus on New regions and localize regularly

4) Most importantly Build Trust and Partner well.

5) Customer Deliver the Key

6) Understand Markets well.

Listen to the Podcast here.

The baton now passed from to Sanjay to Ketan CEO Mettl. Ketan gives a very good insight into Mettl and sets the stage.

Ketan believes that business is like a marathon but one must run it like a sprint. Therefore must Start selling Early- even before the product comes out enabling you to get the information to all. Prioritize – Initially launch the product on what you feel–then tweak it to evolve the actual needs. Use Analytics to identify differentiators and then set benchmarks. Focus on Closures but budget for long sales cycles – have enough gas in the fuel tank. Always treat your feedback seriously this helps you to better customer delivery.


Build your brand well – Build Trust – Hire the Best – Hire slow. Clearly specify the product mix therefore maintain the Brand.

Interestingly Ketan remarked that Introverts can be better sellers than extroverts- Why? Well the key is to establish strong personal connects, be clear and not over-commit. Qualities where Introverts can be better sellers.

Ketan’s  Gangnam style  for Mettl.

1) Start Selling Early

2) Prioritize and Launch Fast

3) Build Differentiators

4) Course correction based on Feedback

5) Have the Bear Fat to sustain theWinter.

6) Most importantly Build Trust.

Listen to the audio podcast here of Ketan’s talk.

Ketan gave a wonderful insight of his company and then Vishal of Rategain share his story.

Vishal says that before they launched their products they started writing articles on the subject/space of their product and this helped them to get the first order by engaging their customers and peaking their interest. This helped them to partner with their biggest competitor and thus tap their(competitor’s) home market – Spain first. Vishal believes the speed to market is very essential to launch your products fast. When you sometimes target the weakness of your competition new opportunities open up. They were able to get 300 hotels to sign up in a just a matter of 3 month. This helped them to partner the competition to market their products. This also had a problem, the local hotels did not know RateGain but knew their competitor. Team Rate Gain then made a real effort to delink themselves and market the product directly this ensured that their Brand was known. They invested in it to Build the Brand.

Since they have operated in various developed markets some things which work for them are Webinar sales – where they invite their prospective clients to join in and make their own mind. From Customers becoming advocates for them on Linkedin to localizing their business to peer marketing, all have worked to create huge amount of word of mouth and Brand Awareness which have all helped in Sales.


Vishal’s Gangnam style for RateGain

1) Write articles on the Space of the product

2) Partner with Locals or Competition

3) Prioritize and Launch Fast

4) Build the Brand

5) Focus on New regions and localize regularly

6) Use Linkedin, Twitter and Webinars to reach out

7) Partner Well

8) All Chain Stakeholders need to be targeted.

Listen to the Podcast here.

The Various inputs helped in gaining a wonderful insight into how a company could go Gangnam. Hope I have been able to capture every bit of information hear, an hope if you have attended the sessions you will be able to add your takeaways too.

The Wonderful insight shared will certainly help all the entrepreneurs out there and for this Avinash deserves huge credit in ensuring that latest trends are captured. Also Rajat for very aptly naming the theme Gangnam style.

Listen to the Podcast here.

Look forward to seeing you all at the next edition in Feb….

Guest post by Nakul Saxena, NITEE

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Growth = Engagement: A product design principle you can’t ignore

Newly launched startups love to see their traffic and sign-up stats grow. Growth, after all, is opium for a startup fresh out of the door, and frequent refreshes of the sign-up logs are the happiest pastime for entrepreneurs.

Startups often tend to think of growth and engagement as two unrelated divorced concepts. In reality, nothing could be farther from the truth.

Startups that focus on growth, completely divorced of engagement, are often the invite-spam startups. With number of signed up users as the only metric for success, these startups pursue growth single-mindedly, get their k-factor and viral cycle time in order and hit the desired user numbers.

However, they often fail to focus adequately on engagement and in an age where there is no dearth of choice, lose all (or most of) the users that they acquired in the first place.

A PLATFORM THINKING APPROACH TO GROWTH

In the age of social products, every engaged user is a potential distributor of the product.

Growth and engagement feed each other. Startups that focus on engagement, invariably, realize that good engagement leads to good growth.

Every time a user engages with your platform, she is offering to be an evangelist for it. The onus is on the startup to leverage the user’s engagement on the platform for its growth needs.

In this context, I’ve written earlier about how producers/creators drive organic growth for user-contribution platforms. I’ve also written about how users are your new SEO team.

A SIMPLE HACK AS AN EXAMPLE A.K.A. GROWTH = ENGAGEMENT (Tweet This)

Here’s a screenshot of the answer creation box on Quora. Notice anything interesting?

In case you didn’t, the one after it offers another clue, a much easier one this time around.

It’s a screenshot from Quibb, an invite-only social network.

 

Well, here’s the thing, and the Quibb screenshot demonstrates this well. Every time a user clicks on Save, she creates something and that potentially starts off an engagement loop on the product.

But if the user also checks the ‘Tweet’ box, she’s potentially starting a growth loop as well.

If you just post, you’re feeding engagement. If you click that box, you’re entering the growth loop as well.

There, that was simple enough! Growth can, in many ways, be just one click away from engagement.

The power of platform thinking is in the fact that users are now the new product marketers. The more you engage them, the more growth opportunities they present you with.The more you con them into sending out ‘frictionless’ invites, the less likely are they to bring you any sustainable growth.

DESIGN PRINCIPLES FOR GROWTH = ENGAGEMENT

(Tweet This)

Here’s a quick and dirty framework to think through growth in the context of building engagement.

1. FOR EVERY USER ACTION, IS THERE A MOTIVATION TO SPREAD THE WORD ON EXTERNAL NETWORKS?

In the case of Quora and Quibb above, the user is likely to want a broader audience (and especially her immediate network) for the content she created. Motivation is key here. Motivation works especially well for self-promotion platforms like KickStarter and Change.Org. But even platforms that are not solely for self-promotion can play on a user’s interest in getting the word out.

2. HOW CAN WE PROVIDE USERS WITH THE TOOLS TO MAKE THIS A ONE-CLICK EXPERIENCE?

One-click is key here. The engagement to growth transition should be as seamless as possible. The user should be required to invest minimum effort. This is exactly the reason I showcase the examples above. The user doesn’t have to go through a new follow, it is not an afterthought to the content creation, there is no additional pitch to the user to get the word out. It is all incorporated seamlessly in one action. One-click is a very powerful design principle in general.

3. HOW CAN WE ENCOURAGE SUCH BEHAVIOR FOR USERS?

For all the motivation that users may have, they may not start doing this right away. It is unto the platform owner to encourage the user to start doing this. Quibb ‘encourages’ users by often retweeting the tweets that users send from Quibb and giving them a bigger audience. Slideshare actually ties the success of your uploaded presentation to your ability to have it be shared on different networks.

4. IF GROWTH IS A PRIORITY, REMOVE THE CLUTTER!

This is where Quibb, in the screenshot above, does a better job than Quora. The interface on Quora is too cluttered and one is likely to miss the checkboxes in the middle of everything else. On Quibb, it’s fairly simple: You can feed engagement, but we also give you the option of feeding growth! Up and center!

Engagement is the most sustainable growth strategy. Creating real engagement and creating opportunities for engaged users to get the word out is the best way to sustainable growth.

This blog was first published at Plaformed.info

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5 questions for every product marketing team

When Girish Mathrubootham, CEO, Freshdesk) hired yours truly, a complete novice straight out of B-School, I was Freshdesk’s employee no. 8, and we operated out of a nondescript location deep in south Chennai, from two small rooms behind a quaint Catholic church. Painted in our company’s signature teal color and equipped with an internet connection that had a mind of its own, our old office was for me the ultimate symbol of the true entrepreneur – spare, utilitarian and with a contagious energy that infected everyone.It was then that G, as we call the boss, told me to put my Kotler away and learn by doing, rather than falling into the trap MBAs usually fall into, of analyzing everything but failing to execute even a single one.I tried to do that, and learned a lot from a world class team of marketers along the way. Our marketing has received some praise, and though we’re light years away from where we want to be, I’d love to share a few things with the product community.Here are five questions for product marketers like me –

Are you telling a great story?

The answer should be a resounding yes. If not, well, you should be. A technology product’s website is its showroom, and like showroom space is gold for the retailer, so is our website. And this is where we need to get our story across. 
We humans understand and assimilate stories much more easily than we do disparate facts. It’s just how we are. And that is why, to make it easy for the customer to understand our product offering, to digest it, there needs to be a story, told in a simple way, as clearly as possible, with a definite call to action. For tips and techniques you can use, here’s a post from Jonah Sachs, author of ‘The Storytelling Wars’. The book itself is quite good, and I highly recommend it.

 

Is the language perfect, the communication flawless?

You should be saying yes even before you read the question completely. As product marketers, more often than not, our target market is international, and there can be no compromise on grammar and language. The writing needs to be top drawer. Full stop. In fact, this was the reason I got the chance to become a product marketer in the first place. G did not hire me because of my MBA degree, G hired me because he judged me to be a good writer and because I was able to get a point across. 
When we at Freshdesk write copy for our site and content for our blog, there is great emphasis on grammatical accuracy and narrative tone. None of us is Shakespeare of course, but selling to respected companies abroad, we can’t afford to drop the ball on this – the very brand is at stake.

 

Is more time being spent on perfecting things than on getting stuff out?

This question is specifically for content marketers like me. The desirable answer is of course no, but if your answer is yes, then rejoice. You now have a chance to simplify your content delivery stream and it’s going to give you great results. 
What you need to do is this – don’t keep reviewing and perfecting the content you write or the infographics you make or the SEO pages you craft. Just get them out. Nothing is going to be absolutely perfect. Even Beethoven thought his symphonies were flawed. After a point, the difference between good enough and perfect is so negligible you’ll need a microscope to find out. Something ‘good enough’ that’s out there and garnering eyeballs always, always, trumps that ‘perfect’ thing which will take another week. 
Don’t ‘review’ over and over again. Just get it out.

 

Are there clear strategies for social, content & customer service?

Yes, you need them. Just so every employee knows what’s going on and what the organization’s outlook is. At Freshdesk, being a customer support company ourselves, our service is our brand. Every single customer of ours is treated with respect and the questions our support and sales teams ask them, boil down to roughly this – what problem of yours can we solve today? 
This is ingrained in the way we do things and it’s now in our very DNA. Our customer service strategy is clear – whatever we can do for him/her, we will. This clarity is very important. Because when different teams talk to customers and prospects, this consistency will become your brand, and then reinforce itself. This is exactly how a brand is built. Same with your content and social strategy. The key word is consistency. Just remember that with every piece of content and tweet and Facebook post you put out there, your brand is being constructed, bit by bit.

 

Are new things being tried out, and are the results being recorded?

Yes, yes and yes. If A/B testing is not (at least) a weekly activity, you are doing something wrong. You should be constantly trying out new avenues for growth and new platforms for attracting customers. A few will work, many will not. Don’t worry. This isn’t sunk cost, not at all. Write down the results and move on. This way after a point of time, you know which channels to invest in and which channels to avoid. The data you collect during all this will give you the answers you need to the channel-ROI question.
And in the age of newer platforms and channels almost every month, if you continuously try new things – you might actually be the first movers into Klondike! Give yourself that chance.

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A Platform Thinking Approach to Problem Solving

Business is about solving customer problems. It’s been claimed that business is primarily about beating the competition or about maximizing shareholder returns but if the successes (and failures) of the past decade are anything to go by, the primary goal of business is solving customer problems. If you think about the approach that businesses take to solving these problems, three broad patterns emerge.

THE ‘STUFF’ APPROACH

The approach of the industrial age to solving customer problems has been to create more stuff. If there’s a customer problem out there, you set up factories and build some stuff. And once consumers have got their needs satisfied but you’ve still got all this excess production capacity, you put in some marketing and convince consumers that they want more stuff. The default model for solving business problems has been the ‘stuff’ approach. If you’re dealing with goods, you’re churning out more goods while if you’re a services-based company, you’re putting more people on the job. The approach to scaling a solution has been creating more.

Most problems do not need to be solved by throwing stuff at them. Most problems are, actually, information problems. In reality, most problems are currently solved inefficiently because of a lack of information needed to make a decision. We’ve been solving problems by creating more stuff largely because we didn’t optimize distribution and access to the stuff that already existed.

THE ‘OPTIMIZATION’ APPROACH

Enter algorithms. You have stuff out there which is sub-optimally distributed. Here’s a two-step approach to solving the problem:

1. Aggregate all the information on the stuff out there

2. Leverage algorithms to optimally match the right stuff with a consumer’s desire

Google built one of the fastest growing companies of all time applying the optimization approach to the world’s information problem. Most internet businesses create value through optimization. Computer science, as a field of study, is itself based on solving optimization problems.

THE ‘PLATFORM’ APPROACH

Platform Thinking adds one more step to the optimization approach. Instead of merely aggregating information on stuff out there (Step 1 above), it enables creation of more inventory without creating more stuff. That sounds paradoxical but that is exactly what Twitter does to news. The media industry has a limited number of journalists. Twitter enables anyone out there to become a source of news without having to become a journalist. YouTube increases the inventory of content without setting up new media houses. eLance allows companies to get work done without having to hire people to do the job.

The ‘stuff’ approach creates supply, the ‘platform’ approach uncovers new sources of supply. The goal in this case is not only to optimize but also to redefine the input (inventory) that you are optimizing.

IN ESSENCE…

Every consumer problem out there can be solved in one of three ways:

The ‘stuff’ approach: How can we create more stuff whenever the problem crops up?

The ‘optimization’ approach: How can we better distribute the stuff already created to minimize waste?

The ‘platform’ approach: How can we redefine ‘stuff’ and find new ways of solving the same problem?

THE ACCOMMODATION PROBLEM

Problem: I’m traveling to city X and I need to end myself some accommodation.

The ‘stuff’ approach (Sheraton): Create more stuff. Build more hotels, set up more BnBs. If there are fewer rooms than tourists, buy some land, put up a  hotel and create more rooms.

The ‘optimization’ approach (Kayak): There are a lot of hotels out there but travelers do not necessarily have all the information to make the choice they want to. Let’s aggregate this inventory and create a reliable search engine. Let’s build review sites to help make the right decision.

The ‘platform’ approach (AirBnB): How can we redefine travelers’ accommodation? How about enabling anyone with a spare room and mattress to run their own BnB?

THE TRANSPORTATION PROBLEM

Problem: I need to figure out a reliable and safe way of getting from point A to point B whenever I want to.

The ‘stuff’ approach (GM, Toyota): Create more cars. The greater the number of people with this problem, the more cars you need to create.

The ‘optimization’ approach (Avis, Cab Aggregators): There are many taxi operators but consumers aren’t aware of all the choices. Let’s create a search engine and help them figure the best route to their destination and the modes of public transport that will take them there.

The ‘platform’ approach (Lyft, ZipCar, ZipRide): Let’s redefine the problem space. What if we drastically expand the number of cars available to choose from for commuting from point A to point B?

Interesting aside: Avis is acquiring ZipCar, announced a few minutes back.

THE COMPUTING PROBLEM

Problem: I need a mobile phone with all the bells and whistles but every mobile phone has a different feature set and I can’t figure the best one for myself.

The ‘stuff’ approach (Nokia): Create more phones and more models. Conduct your market research, figure out what consumers want, bucket them into groups and design new models for these groups.

The ‘optimization’ approach (Comparison shopping): There are a lot of phones out there. Why don’t you enter your parameters and we will spew out the best phone models that satisfy your needs.

The ‘platform’ approach (Apple): Let’s rethink the phone. We can’t build everything. What if we just built out the tools that others could use to build apps that consumers could then use to extend the functionality of their phone?

THE NEWS PROBLEM

Problem: I need to know about what’s happening around the world.

The ‘stuff’ approach (NY Times): Put more journalists on the job, churn out more content and get the news out to more channels.

The ‘optimization’ approach (Google News): Rank news stories and serve readers with the matches closest to what they’re looking for.

The ‘platform’ approach (Twitter): Redefine the journalist. Everyone can create and distribute news now.

CHALLENGES

The platform approach is new. Much of this problem solving has come up only in the last five years and few solutions have demonstrated the kind of success that the ‘stuff’ approach and the ‘optimization’ approach have. Hence, one might be tempted to dismiss this as a fad.

While execution challenges continue to exist, they are, by all means, solvable.

Inventory: When you redefine inventory as AirBnB or oDesk does, you need to ensure you have a clear strategy for encouraging users to create the inventory. This often leads to a chicken and egg problem as producers won’t create inventory unless there’s a ready market of consumers and consumers won’t participate without inventory to consume. I’ve written a lot about how to solve this problem in earlier posts.

Quality: When an entirely new set of producers gets created, quality control can be a problem. Platforms need to have robust quality control mechanisms to separate the good from the bad.

External forces: We need new regulations for these new models. Über has already had problems with regulations. We need to solve for trust in the virtual world. Airbnb has already come under the scanner on this count.

Platforms, though, are here to stay and redefine the way business is conducted.

Wish you all a successful 2013! More power to you and your business as you leverage the power of platforms to change the world!

This blog was first published at Plaformed.info

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BrightPod makes collaboration for digital marketers simpler and faster, much faster

Synage Software, more popularly known as the DeskAway guys, are on to their next thing and they are calling it BrightPod. Sticking to their expertise of developing collaboration software, BrightPod is a collaboration tool built specifically for digital marketers. I got an early peek into it and while the the product and the segment they are going after hold promise, it needs work on the interface and a big push on the adoption side.

Just like any other collaboration tool, you create a new pod (a fancier term for project) to get started. But that’s where the similarity ends. Now instead of adding individual tasks to it, you choose a workflow from the existing ones or you create your own (coming soon).

Most common marketing projects like an email marketing campaign, a Google Adwords campaign and a social media campaign are covered. Select the email marketing workflow and all the tasks that it needs are automatically added to the pod. Just assign a client, set deadlines, add team members and you are good to go. Digital agencies, who run the same kind of campaigns (at least structurally) for different clients will find this a huge time saver.

I tried two of the workflows – Google Adwords and email marketing. While the Google Adwords workflow was well defined, email marketing had me lost. The team would do well to reduce the number of tasks or mark the ones that not everyone bothers about as optional. Another challenge going ahead with the workflow would be that a large company works very differently from a startup, who would overlook a lot of the tasks to push the campaign out of the door as quickly as possible.

Moving on, BrightPod has another two more very interesting features. Focus and Round Up. Focus, as the name suggests, helps you focus only on key tasks and drown out the others. Temporarily from your mind, I mean. Marketing, unlike other functions in a company, is typically about a lot of small things coming together to form the complete piece. Star a task that is important, and it will appear in your Focus tab to allow you to, well, focus, on the task.

Before we get to Round Up, you need to get this. BrightPod is meant for marketers, with workflows and terminologies that marketers feel at home with. But marketing never functions in isolation. You have design involved, you have the web team involved, you might have other agencies involved and if you are an agency yourself, you need to get the client in on the project. This is where Round Up comes in. Just throw in the email address of the person you want involved in the conversation and they are in. They don’t have to get on to yet another app, they can just reply to that email and it will get added to the pod.

So far, so good. Now the things that BrightPod needs to improve. Simplicity is one of the main principles BrightPod is built on and while it delivers on certain counts, it doesn’t have the same kind of simplicity that Asana (something I have used extensively) or Trello (something that I have seen in use around) have.

The BrightPod dashboard, the first thing you will see each time you log in, has an activity stream of all the active pods. Every task added, every comment added, every milestone added, every task completed. For me, that was plain overwhelming, given how each workflow adds 20-30 tasks straightaway. When you log into your collaboration tool first thing in the morning, you want to see a list of the tasks that are due, the overall state of different projects and the important tasks for the day. While tasks due are presented in the dashboard, they are on this section on the right that doesn’t catch your eye first thing.

Also when you click on a pod to make additions and modifications, the navigation is different from that of the main screen, again leaving you a little lost. While these are small things that a user can get used to in a week of working with the app, these are things that typically come in the way of getting the buy-in of the whole team to move to a new application, or even earlier during the evaluation phase.

The biggest challenge BrightPod will face with adoption is getting companies used to the idea of having a specialized collaboration tool for marketers. Organizations like to have the same tool for everyone in the organization, so it would be interesting to see how the company solves this challenge.

All said and done, the product is still in alpha phase, so a lot of these things will get better with time. If you are digital marketer, go ahead, sign up for a BrightPod invite and let us (and the BrightPod team) know what you think.

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Who is your customer?

Get this right and you have taken the first step towards success in your software product venture, whether on the web or on-premise.
As a corollary, if this is not clear, then no matter how sophisticated your product is, it will always be a struggle.

As many entrepreneurs are aware, the success of a product depends on the product itself, the pricing, the promotion and the physical distribution as defined by the 4 P’s.

Even in this era where pricing is irrelevant given the Free or Freemium business models, one needs to spend money to get signups or visitors and that will be wasted if the target customer profile is not defined properly.

In a software product business, getting the customer profile right is the key even to start because the specifications would depend on the type of customer.  The design and the development would follow.

Let me illustrate this with an example.
A friend of mine asked me to help market his POS Retail Software Product that he had already developed.  To better understand his product and strategy, I asked him a single question “Who is your customer?”  He looked at me as if I was an alien and said “Obviously a retail business!!”

Undeterred by his tone, I asked a follow-up question, “What kind of retail?” and by this time he was convinced that talking to me was useless.  Just to humour me, he said “Any kind of retail shop will benefit from my software”. And there started the “Spanish inquisition”.

Me: “So the neighbourhood grocery store as well as big bazaar can use it? A shop selling Bengal sweets as well as Bata? All of them fall under the category of Retail”

And then he saw the point and the implications of lack of clarity on:  

The Product itself:

  • The scope:  The small grocery shop may need at best just the billing and the receivables whereas the chain might want to network it’s branches and would like to know the traffic pattern to have the right number of staff to meet the demand.
  • Hardware requirements: A small shop may do with an assembled PC and a strip printer whereas the big ones may want POS Terminals with scanners.
  • Security: Just a simple login would suffice for a small shop while elaborate security levels need to be defined for a large outfit with clearly defined responsibilities

The Price:

  • The shop owner might be willing to spend a small amount for the PC, printer and the software and he may not give too much credence to the software.  You cannot charge him a few lakhs for the software alone.
  • In the case of a large chain, the price point must be much higher given the need for metrics, security, deployment at different locations, training, hand-holding etc.

The Promotion

  • If it is for the small shops then one case use mailers or approach a set of similar shops in an area to generate interest.  One can also use local newspapers to create some awareness.
  • To catch the eye of the chains, one must advertise in industry journals, magazines and perhaps take stalls at industry events

Physical Distribution

  • For the retail shop, a one-one approach using the salesperson may perhaps work best.
  • For the large chains, one has to go with the hardware vendors or system integrators or retail IT consultants (I hope such a specialty exists given the explosion of retail in our country)

I know that this distinction is very simplistic but I have chosen it to give an idea. Having seen the importance of defining the target customer, we will look at some parameters to do it effectively, in the next post