10 Questions to ask your customers

1. Why did you buy from us? Would you do this again today?
2. Who do you think is our biggest competition and why?
3. How do you define your core problem around what we offer? Describe this in your words
4. Which functions cares about this problem? Why? What still keeps you/these people up at night?
5. Has something fundamentally changed in your world view (regulations, competition, customer, policies, budgets) that we should be on top of?
6. What are the most important benefits (revenue enhancement, time, cost, risk mitigation) you ultimately care about as a firm?
7. What is your internal process for buying? Is this typical across the industry?  How is the web changing this?
8. Who/What is ultimately driving the need for change? Where has it evolved to today including how it is budgeted?
9. Where did you go for information? How does it differ based on where you are in  your buying cycle?
10. Where do you typically find vendors failing you in your buying cycle? What kinds of information, in what form and to whom should we be providing?

I hope this list adds some umph to your overall sales effectiveness!

While it is common that firms have asked this at some point in time of writing their market plans, asking this each year and ensuring continued relevancy will go a long way and avoid requiring a series of tactical course corrections that together may still not put you on target. It will lead to a better use of your marketing dollar spend!

During the course of my work in 2010, I found that some of the biggest differences ultimately resulted from my clients taking the time to ensure they refine/strengthen how they position themselves to provide credible, useful and unique set of solutions in the eyes of their customers. The effort ultimately withstood changes in the wind requiring far less tweaking and better defensibility. I offer some these questions for your consideration for the year ahead.

5 Positioning Tune-up Areas

1. Market Segment-Are you targeting the same market segment as before? Is it getting bigger? Does what you do and how people talk about you still jive? Has your competition remained the same? Did you move up the ranks to gain a more dominant position? What is the disrupter?

2. Target Customer -Does your definition of the “ideal customer” need modification? Have you thought through any changes in demographics & psychographics? Do you still continue to address a core need of this target? Are there new titles emerging? Do your existing customers continue to find you relevant?

3. Product/Services Categorization- Do you customers/partners think about you and your solutions in the same way today as before? How do market influencers categorize you? Has your list of competition in deals changed and if so how? Do you talk about yourself in the way customers now speak about the problem?

4. Solutions- Are you still seen by customers a “must have”? Are you the safe choice? How can you continue to remain differentiated and defend ways to uniquely provide value to your target market’s challenges? Who/What is and will be your biggest threat and why?

5. Benefits-What are you doing to improve easy of adoption (workflow), ease of use, improving top line and/or bottom line, lowering cost, time, risk, waste and being more green? Have you explicitly thought about how you lower both corporate and personal risk for the buyer? How is your competition now talking about its value proposition? Ultimately why do still people still buy your products/services?

I hope this list offers a useful start towards a fabulous New Year!

What is interesting is that if one studies how billion dollar firms are built, one of the central tenets is how they build a platform for identifying and growing marquee customers. I chose to refer to  Blueprint to a Billion by David Thomson, who has studied successful companies that crossed a billion dollars in revenues. He starts by focusing on the need to identify and spend time with desirable segments, a lesson that is not lost on most of us in the business of Marketing and Business Development. He then spends a whole chapter on a Marquee Customer. Defines them as someone that is willing to test & deploy one’s product [Service], shapes the value proposition through co-development and willingness to serve as a “lighthouse,” which is defined as being a reference and willing to sell to their peers. He goes on to talk about asking the right questions that identifies the unmet needs of such customers, and developing solutions to meet this unmet need, and implement a customer-centric vision which then aligns employees and customer co-development.  He then goes on to talk about a “Cross the chasm” type concept in terms of the 4 types of marquee customers: First Mover, Fast Follower, Mainstream and Utilitarian. Bottom-line is there is more method in such a selection, so that you pick those who can set their industry moving. He show cases Motorola & Boeing as examples for Cisco, and Schwab for Siebel (Oracle). Finally, Thomson quotes Mark Mitten and Eric Arnson of Originate Consulting to talk about a benefits ladder (Figure 1). I find this framework quite useful and worthy of thought and emulation by emerging and midsized firms.

To build upon this, I now offer two models which systematize Marketing’s leadership role in not only selecting the right customers, but focusing on this existing  customer for referenceability, demand generation and ultimately, both new customer count and revenue growth.

1. A metaphor of an eagle inspired a conversation with Ram Gupta, a Persistent Systems Board Member and former senior Peoplesoft (Oracle) marketing executive  (Figure 2). I chose to extend this metaphor given the eagle as a surveyor of terrain can have limitations as my colleague Andy Sayare rightly points out. Typically an eagle is all about seeing and capturing its prey. Solo. Here I extend this eagle to one that looks for trends, conditions, competition, and is social in that s/he returns to share insights or influence markets. The eagle thereby enables Marketing’s important function about discovery, validation, translation, and ultimately, direction, for companies and markets. The eagle thereby enables identification of the marquee customers and sets the ball rolling for the woodpecker role to take on and build.
2. I use a woodpecker as the corresponding sales enabling role of marketing one which then creates this customer programs to grow the platform Figure 1 talks about. I offer a map that could start framing this to systematically drive the increase of top line and bottom line growth leveraging existing customers and their ecosystem. (Figure 3).

In a following blog post, I will address some of the “hows” of how I have accomplished this with a few customers.

I was introduced to People Maps in October 2009 via a Tech Crunch article and have been playing with it and increasingly finding it useful to navigate new terrain and augment my countless hours on LinkedIn and building an Outlook contact base.  It is brought to market by 7-Degrees.com under Tim Sheehan who ran Yahoo Finance & Paul Stevens who came over from Cogito which created the powerful graph engine that powers PeopleMaps. There is a free trial version on the website as well as paid enterprise version for use in a team context as in Sales/BD/Marketing teams doing prospecting or account penetration recruiters looking to find better candidates or VCs getting deeper to understand the ecosystem around their target firm. I am sure there are more applications but I will focus the rest of this blog on what I know best – Demand Generation & Business Devt.

Here’s the skinny-you sign on, spend <5 minutes uploading your key contacts from Outlook, webmail, LinkedIn and Facebook. You choose from a 2X2 Matrix:  CONNECTIONPATH TO a person/company and/or a PEOPLE MAP ABOUT a person or company. The former is about your access to see how you reach someone. The latter is about understanding the target’s ecosystem based on their relationships. You are off to the races equipped with a pictorial, dynamically changing bubble chart that reconfigures information based on what and where you click having various views of the terrain.  I find that practice finding that Starbucks on the Google Maps is definitely good cross training.

7-Degrees does a bunch of work in the back besides using your uploaded data. They are analyzing data from the Internet and their subscription to numerous databases that update information re people including contact details, and the results show-up on the map.  The map has several interesting characteristics that many others have written about in detail and a more detailed description is on PeopleMaps website.  So I will stick with my own experience in how I use this tool and the five reasons I believe this adds additional horsepower to my ability to access and open new opportunities and markets.

1. If LinkedIn provides the depth of information, PeopleMaps provides the breadth and quality by analyzing all of the possible pathways and then showing you the best paths (the ones where you have the strongest relationships) on one page. All of the info about the terrain is served up on the screen with weights for how warm those links are and importantly HOW these people know one another (Company, capacity like Board, investor, school, etc). Example, I randomly picked Jerry Yang (Yahoo) and plotted both a Connection Path (Fig 1 below ) and People Maps (Fig 3 below)

Fig. 1: The Connection Path above shows that while I have nearly a dozen ways to connect to Jerry Yang, actually through numerous colleagues and even my own dad! These paths can be selected, modified and right clicking allows more drill down on contact info. /updates. The different suitcases show different companies and there is additional text to show type of relationship eg BOD=Board of Director.

Fig. 2 shows the list of controls available through clicking the arrows in the side bar. You can change the # of connections and choices of kinds of links you want to use. Mouse-overs give you more info on each bubble and arrow.Fig. 3 shows the People Map the numerous links to people with different colored icons for each organization and with symbols like BOD for Board Director etc. as indexed in Fig. 2 left side. Note for example there are many links with Cisco executives given Jerry is a Cisco Board member.

2. Mapping the terrain before you get deeper enables a few important things

a. You understand context and history of the person you are targeting and the nature of the relationship.

b. You get to see links that were NOT obvious, the hidden gems. People you may not have associated with a given firm but those who know well. It may be a personal connect between you to the destination that ultimately wins. The power of serendipity which to me if often of significant value as it opens up new avenues that you had not thought about

c. You get a deeper 360 degree view around the final target itself and their other relationships/ecosystem. You can anticipate a bunch of things based on their alma mater, their affiliations, the boards they may sit on and the maximum # of connects they have based on a drill-down people map on the person concerned

d. Based on the scoring of relationships, you can now prioritize who all you approach in what order and with whose help and possibly who from your team making the contact. The scoring is provided in the form of #s 1-10 (strongest) on the arrows connecting people while telling you the nature of that relationship (personal, colleagues, college, etc). I find this very useful.

e. The quality of your introduction and the texture you bring to the conversation is also grossly different. Example: I actually used their own technology to call the CEO of 7-Degrees.com last week after these few months of giving product suggestions. I had looked our connection up before I called. Here’s what I saw and actually talked about

i. Connects with two of my business acquaintances at LeadForce1 who also worked with Tim in a prior engagement at Yodlee

ii. My college roommate and friend who to my surprise was a strong connect to Tim and they had worked together on a financial, mobile transaction project

iii. There were more but I chose to talk about these two for starters and the conversation warmed up right-away.

iv. What we all forget in all of this is the PERSON RECEIVING THE CALL. What you bring actually makes it easier for the receiving party to contextualize the info and situate how they place you or even validate your query before talking.

Figure 4: My Connection Path to 7-Degrees CEO and how I used this info

3. Power in numbers: PeopleMaps Professional edition allows you and your fellow Sales/BD/other colleagues to share your respective network without compromising individual details.  It integrates with Salesforce.com via Appexchange. This means you get to see a geometrically high # of connects based on a shared network. And as we know the power of the network is geometric. You can do the math. PeopleMaps literally allows you to feel Metcalf’s Law at work.

4. Weighing with Power of relationships. Sales force automation allow prioritization by stages of cycle and marketing automation by customer web behavior. PeopleMaps adds to this mix by being able to weigh deals based on relationships. And if indeed we are moving into a market where people are tired of being overcalled and trust someone they know first as a filter,, then this measure becomes all the more interesting especially if it can quantitatively score and evaluate the pipeline as such.

5. Plotting a value network: As we go beyond traditional Sales and Marketing into Strategy, I see People Maps contributing to map value networks around people/companies. A value network incidentally is a concept that was introduced by Clayton Christensen and Fjeldstad and Stabell as an alternative to Michael Porter’s value chain. By drawing the people map around an entity, one gets to see who the person/firm is actively connected with and often starts providing an inkling of other players closely connected in their value chain. Fig. 5 below shows Jerry Yang’s PeopleMap along with two additional relationships (Wim Elfrink Cisco and Arun Sarin Vodafone), taking a deeper dive at their ecosystem. The different colors on the bubbles point to different organizes and the shaped tell you the nature of relationship (BOD, Investor, Alumni, etc).

PeopleMaps in Action with Other tools:  Now let us bring all of this together. I start with Connection Paths followed by PeopleMaps to get the lay of the land and map multiple paths into an account or person. I augment this with LinkedIn and get deeper. I use Facebook to augment in some instances and Twitter if the target is active to get more context. In a Sales/BD team context I envision combining forces with others to see more via the CRM system though am yet to do this. Today, I marry all of this with additional information gleaned from an marketing automation system re Web behavior as I approach the target. I thereby start with a relatively strong composite picture of the target which informs  a better entry and importantly a more textured conversation.

Couple of observations: This tool is not restricted to just tech or U.S. firms. I found that PeopleMaps did a pretty good job plotting People Maps around several Indian firms including one I am currently working with and all its subsidiaries as shown by the choices in Fig. 6.

As stated earlier, I see its use also goes beyond Sales & Marketing- for recruiters as well fund raisers and for that matter anyone who wants to access more people quickly and systematically to engage in better conversations.  As 7-Degrees connects up with more sales and marketing automation firms (Marketo, Leadforce1, et al), this only stands to get stronger and more integrated.  I have also found 7-Degrees to be extremely responsive to the user feedback and feature suggestions I have provided over the months and look forward to stronger releases that address improvement areas. There are improvements coming on how you can view the drill-down data, export information, etc in upcoming releases.

To conclude, I hope you have fun exploring this very versatile tool that builds on top of much of the activity around people and companies accelerated by social-media. Look forward to your comments.

Disclosure: Based on the above experience, I have become quite interested in this technology and have proactively reached-out to 7-Degrees to explore ways in which I can contribute to their growth.

1. Make it easy for customers to do business with you every step of the way: Don’t just talk about it but actually formalize it as a process. Break up the customer experience (note the change of frame from interaction to experience) to logical stages. For example a simple one could be on-boarding, duration of time spent under contract and post exit/ alumni relations. Then move to make these seamless. This will have a direct impact on customers recall, referrals and repeat business. Above all earn the reputation of being easy to do business with which is the underlying idea behind cognitive fluency as covered in a recent Boston Globe article- what’s easy is seen as true and is also preferred
2. Isolate key aspects customers and focus to make it superior: Go look at best practices and adapt what applies. Talk to your customers and find out. Know where customers spend most of their time and understand what matters to them. For example it appeared that Emirates had thought through the fact that people sit for 10-15 hours on an international flights and if the airline makes the seats comfortable, offer solid entertainment and communication programs that easy to navigate (hardware) and offer really good programming based on demographics of the fliers (software), it goes a long way. Now if you wrap this with good service and food you get to high levels of satisfaction.  If firms look at this from People, Process and Technology viewpoint and make it so customers walk away thinking the period under contract was really well spent, they got more than their money’s worth and felt special, you are over the hump.  Important is how you end things as people exit. This is particularly relevant given recent findings by Daniel Kahneman, a behavioral economist.  Daniel as he spoke at TED explains the difference between satisfying the “remembering self” (behind state of satisfaction or happiness) and the “experiencing self” (behind state of well being) is extremely material here. Smart marketers cater to ensuring the “remembering self” which recalls salient aspects of an experience, how time was spent and especially last impressions, goes home happy. What this also means that smart firms go out of their way to make the customer exit is made EXTRA SPECIAL since that is what gets remembered, as do good cooks/restaurants with awesome dessert menus. How often do firms make customers leaving them feel special?
3. Treat your employees in a way that their enthusiasm communicates to customers: What happens inside the four walls of a firm gets communicated out, often explicitly and most definitely implicitly. If you are cheap with your employees, then that gets communicated and often customers are feeling nickel and dimed, often resulting in penny-wise pound foolish outcomes. If you reward customer centricism, that gets translated to creating superior experience created in one interaction after another. Here’s where Emirates actually led me to conclude they treat their really international crew well since person after person really had the smile and wanted to be of help. That’s hard to fake. Ultimately and most importantly, if your employees feel proud about being contributing members, they will behave the same way towards your customers. The results are self explanatory.

To make this actionable, I took item #1 and created a table based on the 3 stages described (Rows) and addressed what the possible People, Process and Technology implications (Columns) could be for a services business. The table below presents two views-Emirates[E] and  IT services[IT].

New Megamarts opening up everywhere

1. There’s hunger for doing business: People are not standing by. They are reaching forward to learn, acquire and do.  People in companies I visit are seeking new markets, wanting to learn how to expand, learn new business models and open up to social media which is yet to take off beyond pockets.

2. Changes happening at a rapid pace. The hawkers coming at stop lights have been replaced by ladies placing removable car windows shades for you to experience right there and buy. Kids are selling everything from books to calendars to washing windows as are religiously clad people providing incensed air to remove “evil eye” first thing in the morning. High-tech goods are in. People are consuming from low-end to ultra-high end services. In parallel,  web-related transactions, mobile-banking, booking things online have also taken off.

Even fresh coconut vendors carry cell phones

3. Mobile technology has a very significant impact: Almost everyone has a cell and is texting.  People are reachable. Things are moving faster and people are able to accommodate change in plans. The vegetable vendor cell phones you in advance to tell you what he is carrying today. I wouldn’t be surprised if he starts Tweeting shortly.

4. The ad industry is having a field day-Ads are progressive showing a range of lifestyles and applicability of their products. You are seeing not just mass adoption but some amount of customization for each market segment. The upwardly mobile have money and are spending.

Beauty business is big

The job market is hot again. The typical clichés of sportsmen and sex sell, is alive and healthy.

5.  The educated are using the web to build knowledge capital-The gap between the know and know-nots is even wider here than the U.S. TED India has clearly had an impact on the web-savvy as innovation is a favorite topic of discussion.  There are a sizeable group of retirees with their sons and daughters in the U.S. learning  Skype to stay in touch with grandkids for “free”.  Skype music lessons back to U.S. are not uncommon. Social media has taken off in pockets and it is just a matter of time that it grows more broadly outside the tech-savvy. Many India professionals I know in IT sector already heavily use LinkedIn. Other sectors do lag behind as is the case back in the U.S. as well.

6.  Systems thinking is still absent: Whether it is a B2B or B2c I still see there are snapshot views of process and pockets of focus. For example while India’s leading service firms are now known for process innovation, at an individual and group level, I found this kind of thinking somewhat absent beyond tier 1 firms. There is a piecemeal approach to things. Lots of activity but often the master plan is less clearly known and in several instance I think it is somewhat by design. I also do not see work flow kind of approach to streamline customer experiences. So while the service levels overall are rather good they typically lack a holistic view of how to give and get more from customers.

7. There’s an accelerated growing sense of “Me”: From a capitalistic point one would argue this is good but when you put this together with point #6 it often seems to result in lots of congestion and suboptimization. Take walking or driving down the street for example. Each person is clearly after maximizing their local interest and often are at cross purposes. Waiting for someone to come through the door or allowing a U-Turn are daily challenges. Honking incessantly to have one’s way is rampant. It does not help that there are a billion people and the urban density is very large. It does not help that there has been a mindset of limited resources and s/he who fights for it gets it. Darwinian forces appear to be alive and working each day especially with more toys, more cars, and more people to contend within a constrained infrastructure.  So naturally leisure industry promoting the opportunity to get away from it all appears to be heard as is the international vacationing taken by the upper-middle and wealthy class of people.

8. Doing business face2face still dominates-Even with all the growth in email and the rise of the IT corridor, ultimately people just want to meet you. The interpersonal warmth is very much there as I recall, from people you don’t know helping make minor adjustments to your cell phone for free to senior executives in corporate board rooms who invite you in.

9. The less tech-savvy, especially the aged are getting left behind-I see a few versions of “two different Indias”- the haves and have-nots, the urban and rural, and the young, upwardly mobile and the retired, non-tech savvy. Those who have been able to keep up with technology appear to be more in tune with what’s happening. High-speed internet is available that can be accessed by the middle-class. Tech is their gateway to news, changes that’s happening and in some cases launching new careers as I found to my surprise, my mom’s questions about setting up her blog. Others who are cut off from the web and smart phones, are slowly feeling things slip away. There appear to be services creeping up to serve this group but with 10+% inflation (17% food inflation) the retired have to make choices. Time will tell on what happens to this divide.  A similar growing gaps exists between the other groups mentioned above.

10.The parallel economy thrives-the lack of systems thinking results in complex web of systems getting created and the parallel economy feeds those who are underpaid. If you want to get a government authorization, there are consultants who help to speed it up. There are more complex web of relationships in the private sector. Politicians are involved in large transfers of wealth. As one auto driver asked me “Hey why don’t’ you give me a few more rupees when people higher up are taking in lakhs [hundreds of thousand] of rupees?”. Most locals believe politicians are too busy becoming “crorepathis [multimillionaires]”. As I board my flight I think, then again, how different is it from what is happening back in our Beltway in Washington DC?

11. There’s not enough “Why”-Be it business meetings or family discussions, there is plenty of “What” and “How do we get there” but not enough on “Should we even do this” or “Why”?  But then again, there’s no time as people are interested in availing the next opportunity. There is money to be made in the very short-term and there’s competition!

Variety of brands-old and new

12. Lots of money at play: The real-estate market is hot again and there are many deals happening including several where families are breaking apart with a brother or sister has short-changed the rest of the family.  Lawyers are beginning new opportunities and those sitting in the U.S. reconsidering their local representation.

Stores near a mosque get into Green & White color

13. Real diversity that appears to coexist and mostly collaborate: Yes the news carries the religious strife in this country with more than 25 states and 29 official regional languages ( 100s of dialects). But as you walk, you see the Muslim side-by-side with the Hindu, marketing targeted with 10 heads of  the mythic figure Ravana as a means of promoting Helmet wearing saying “You have only one head”. Or the road where my family lives has a mosque, numerous small Hindu temples, and a large Adventist church with local ads and businesses supporting these institutions. For example pharmacies or restaurants re-brand using appropriate religious names to leverage the subsegment of people who visit the religions place concerned.  For example as shown in the picture, I observed local businesses adorning color schemes and fonts of nearby religious symbols including a pharmacy near a mosque taking on the proverbial Islamic green and white. At least from the surface, there appears to be real racial, age and gender diversity with each marching forward for the most part in harmony, doing their thing with relative ease and freedom of being who they are with the freedom to speaking their mind. The word pluralism and democracy comes to mind and in that sense somewhat like the U.S. (at least once you discount the extreme/fringe  right).

14. Yet to recognize the importance of “Last impressions” : The finishing touches on retail experience, interpersonal exchanges, meetings, how one hangs up the phone or for that matter the exit lounge in Chennai airport all say the same thing-there is work to be done in how one closes transactions with customers.  There is room for smoothness, continuity and creating more memorable impressions. The departure gates at Chennai airport sure could use some help and that would pay off as it is the last thing one sees leaving India.

15. The future looks bright for Incredible India-All said and done, there is real energy and desire to succeed at a personal, company and national level. Neighbors like Saudi are beginning to look at India beyond cheap labor. There is healthy competition with China as are Mandrin books translated into English available in corner stores. Indian businesses are continuing to look to expand in all directions. The IT outsourcing industry is set to grow at double digits. Well, this is what made my trip possible in the first place.  Amidst the chaos there always appears a new wave of emerging order. The marketer who coined the term “Incredible India” got it right.

It is in this rich canvas that a marketing person starts thinking about what brushes to pick, shades of color before they start paining. The shades of colors possible (aka microsegmented) are numerous as are the opportunities to try new ideas. Entrepreneurs and their creative ideas are welcome here. There’s business to be transacted. There are numerous marketing and business development opportunities working with companies coming in and Indian companies going abroad.  It is time to fasten-your-seat belts.

Market Segmentation & Sizing

1. How do you define your target market: who, how big, segmentation (two useful drill-downs 1 or 2) , # of firms, their distribution, geographic location, average revenues, profitability, and prevalent culture if that’s generalizeable
2. How does your target segment define itself-product/service, traditional/new etc?
3. What portion of this market do you want to capture? How quickly? How does this segment serve as a “bowling-pin” (Geoffrey Moore’s discussion on Bowling Alley in Inside the Tornado) to open the next segment?
4. Who are the players in the value chain? Who has the power?
5. What are emerging trends and their potential impact? Are there discontinuities or tectonic shifts past/anticipated?
6. What are barriers to entry? What are barriers to exit? Why?
7. What are externalities-regulations, environmental considerations, nationalism, other policy driven issues etc.

Needs Assessment

1. What are your target segment’s top 3 challenges? Who are they key internal stakeholders and why do they care so much?
2. How is your target framing these challenges-competitiveness, obsolescence, pricing, product performance, changes in buyer preferences, new market entrants, market disruptions ? What are their underlying assumptions?
3. Why would they buy from you? Why now? (Seth Godin’s has a very good blog entry on this topic)
4. Who ultimately writes the check/pays for what you offer? What is their pain?

Needs & Solutions

1. What options have they considered and why? What are the related tradeoffs?
2. How do you address these challenges? What is the value you bring? Where will your offer exactly help your target: Revenue, Margin, Brand, Time to Market, Customer relations, Risk?
3. Who uses the Product/Service? What are their key considerations? Is there a last mile problem regarding use/capability?

Key Success Factors

1. Who has succeeded and failed before you in this market?
2. How will you have to change your firm or offering’s position to meet this market?
3. Will you build/buy/partner for this capability?
4. Are you a first mover, second or late-entrant? What are the implications?
5. What portion of the go-to-market will be direct vs indirect and is it justified by cost of sales?
6. What resources will it take to succeed? How will you scale?

I welcome your thoughts on particular questions or methods you have used with success.

We dug up a bit of history, found an insightful blog entry, a self-analysis written by the CEOs of the trailblazing firm LucidEra -successful, seasoned entrepreneurs, happy customers, “white” space, offering an attractive business proposition and offering flexibility in business model to make it work. But ultimately they just did not get enough customers off the ground. So what went wrong?

Key insights: 1) Total benefit provided is after including the costs & disruption introduced by your solution and 2) The way your target customer frames their problem and the way their core skill set enables the actual use of your solution may ultimately drive whether you succeed. There could be a hidden “last mile problem” that goes beyond technology or know-how.

5 Key Pre-Market Launch Questions

1. Is this central to your target’s business operations/revenues/profits? Yes. Business Intelligence is central to banking executives who with their analysts run their business by numbers. They produce volumes of reports on a weekly/monthly basis for decision making.
2. Will you be addressing a real business pain and will the benefits accrued outweigh the added costs, risks and disruption introduced by your solution? This is only a borderline “Yes” for LucidEra. Yes the solution addressed tasks that were repeated, that directly impacted business results. Yes,  it would also impact efficiency through automation and introduce collaboration, less rework and integration to other pieces of data existing in other systems.   But it is NOT clear that the benefits outweighed the added cost, deployment risk and business upheaval, ongoing support costs and dependence on a 3^rd party. This is an important check that is often missed.
3. Is there an entrenched solution that is not Excel? No. Only relatively ad hoc, home-grown automation, islands of internally-grown ways of doing things, and most using Excel.
4. Does your target frame the problem as you do? When customers respond saying “I don’t see value” to what you see as a high-powered solution you know there is an issue. It usually a level deeper than feature-function fit. It may be because the customer sees the underlying problem differently. Business Intelligence is NOT equivalent to Data Analysis which is not equivalent to Information and Insights. Yes, your solutions may improve access, availability and presentation of data but this may still leave a gap in the buyer’s mind especially if they are leaping from Excel. Tweaking business model changes, like say, “freemium” to get to premium over-time or providing free self-diagnostics like LucidEra did, do not typically fill this gap. Asking what is the end-game enabled by your solution and how do you help the target traverse the gap helps get back on track.
5. Does your target’s core skill set enable use of your solution? Is there a “last mile” problem? I see this as the central and most important question here. Amidst the flurry of market analysis, not forgetting to ask the following questions can  make a difference
   1. What is the profile of the target buyer?
   2. How is the target user different?
   3. What are the users’ core skills?
   4. How do they sub-divide issues into recurring and one-offs?
   5. How would our target see value from what we our offer?
   6. What are human-factor issues that are coming in the way?
   7. Are there fallacies of how people thinking about this problem in the first place? (For a very interesting, right-brain foray on this topic see Senthil Mullainathan’s insightful speech on TED)

These questions ultimately help configure the solution to increase the likelihood of adoption. Example, segregating routine vs. one-off issues may allow focusing your offering on the recurring issues and outsourcing the one-offs to a third party/partner using a services-centric model.

In conclusion, ultimately it comes down to going deep on this one question regarding your target market- “WIFT-What’s In it For Them?”

Do you postmortem? What have you learned?

In his example, Seth provides an alternate model for a lemonade stand where the child selling lemonade is spending time actually squeezing fresh lemonade and engages the passersby in a conversation about the process. The process takes a little while and the time taken is explained as part of the process (Zen like I would add). Pretty soon more adults stop by as each person is dialoguing with the child and engaged collectively. The lemonade is offered free but a jar stands marked as “Tips”. The child rakes in a much higher take per drink than what s/he typically would in a traditional lemonade stand.

I see 5 useful lessons from this seemingly simple but not simplistic example . I choose to apply them as relevant to the sales of outsourcing services, one that I am familiar with given my past.  I think the lessons are actually broader and more generalizable. I want to thank HemantRamnani, my friend and former colleague at Persistent Systems for being a sounding board to help refine some of my thoughts.

The 5 Lessons

1. Engage your customers-The vendor here is inviting and is show casing the experience as s/he sells. As many of you know, whether it is your website or in-person meeting, the typical data dump in the form of 25 PowerPoint slides (even if you practice Presentation Zen) is giving way to conversation. It is about creating a dialogue around an experience or point of view which warrants the discussion. To carry the metaphor further, the purchase experience itself becomes important as one uses it to transfer knowledge to the buyer. In outsourcing, it could be the opportunity to jointly developed ideas that the buyer ultimately finds tailored and useful to his/her situation. The experience is designed to increase the relative sophistication and conviction of the buyer. Done well it embodies elements of a well executed consultative sale.
2. Have a point of view that buyers find informative/valuable (Content)-In the example, the child is engaging with a smile & a point of view about why it is important to take the time to make lemonade and how it powers someone’s day. Similarly, the outsourcing sales person engages in a very sophisticated dialogue that moves beyond just being a vendor who takes orders from the VP Engineering. The sales person is able to use their knowledge of best practices from his/her experience to articulate a viewpoint on what is right for the customer situation- technology/platform (Java, .NET, Open source),  delivery mechanism (Cloud, Saas, etc), market implications (time, risk) and business models (fixed or variable price to ways to revenue share).  The frame of the value proposition is expanded and one can begin to address the needs of a broader set of stakeholders.
3. Recognize the importance of social media & community-In the example the presence of adults standing around the lemonade stand garners more attention and more traffic. It is akin to what happens in a good tradeshow booth where something interesting is going on. The dialogue takes a life of its own as do comment threads following press announcements these days.  Similarly, in the services business, creating strong Customer Reference Programs gets customers talking and creates positive storms.  Social media tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn extend this dialogue and consolidate these relationships. There is much written about it today in various blogs referred to in my sidebar as well as on an excellent site Mashable.com.
4. Create perceived value and get paid for it-While the example of free services is challenging, the example can be extended to include “giving to get” by offering up free knowledge and ways of thinking about services instead of it necessarily being “free” services. In outsourcing it could mean throwing in some marketing insight or introducing other partners from your ecosystem or introducing domain experts to sweeten the pot and multi-threaded relationship.  While recognizing there are short-term pressures to close, it could be about leaving room for some grey. This could allow you to jointly surface new ways to recognize value move beyond typical cost savings by looking at additional value measures– revenue or margin enhancement and/or risk mitigation. The combined value could mean a lot more to the buyer if quantified appropriately. Combined with scenario analysis, it can show how further value is created and can justify additional spend for minimizing roadmap variance. The dialogue could also involve other stakeholders such as the CFO who may be willing to pay more for certainty around product shipment. The very act of engaging in the conversation in the first place creates the room for exploring one or more of these possibilities.
5. Execute it right with discipline-Going slowly and patiently as described by Seth is as non-trivial for a child at the lemonade stand as it is for the outsourcing salesperson. The latter requires sophisticated orchestration between various team members, customer considerations, objections and requirements leading to knowing how to balance deal closing speed with leaving money on the table and increasing the depth of the customer relationship upfront. It means the right things have to be anticipated and brought into the story at the right time. It goes beyond just presenting good technology. It requires presenting a good business plan putting oneself in the shoes of ultimately owning the P&L of the product concerned. It means directing the conversation to create the conviction for someone to pull your services. And they do so because you become so relevant to their situation, shape their perspectives, add the power of their peer group and while ensuring the buying process remains exemplary.

I hope this blog post triggers a few thoughts that take you to consider additional ways to engage. At the least I hope it gives new meaning to “Turning lemons to lemonade” in a services context.

Tell me how you have applied this in your sales cycle?

This decade will present even more challenges for discovering new white space and opportunities, require us to turn accepted assumptions upside down and redefine what it means to survive and innovate as businesses. This will mean going beyond traditional boundaries and definitions of what is an organization; its culture. The same goes for customers and suppliers. Central to the questions is “Courage.” Courage to ask challenging questions, which on hindsight, may be defined as “out of the box” thinking. I choose to map the 30 Questions to a handful of categories, but these are by no means authoritative or exhaustive. My hope is that one or more jog your mind to think further and as a set, contribute to your thinking broadly and non-traditionally about your business.

MOTIVATION & POSITIONING

• Why will be doing what we are doing 5 years from now? What will be the new WIIFM, WIIF the Company, WIIF the customer, WIIF the Industry….?
• What kind of business will we be? How will people describe us?
• What would be our secret sauce? How do we build this IP now?

TRENDS, DISRUPTION & PLATFORMS

• If we fast forward the current trends, where will they take us? Can we stomach it?
• Where and when is disruption going to happen? What would it look like and how would it be obviated?
• What will be the new platforms? Standards? Can we be defining one?

CUSTOMERS

• Who are we trying to serve and why? Who should and would we be serving if we roll the clock forward 5 years? Where would they be and where do they gather?
• What are our customers’ blind spots today? How do we feed into these collectively?
• How will we co-opt customers to innovate?
• What would be new communities formed around our services that could be monetized?
• What is the role of the Net and Social Media amongst other technology innovations? How do they affect demand? What are new channels that emerge?
• What are totally new white spaces, untapped market segments? What does an entire customer segmentation map looks like?

COMPETITION & PARTNERS

• What is it that everyone else is trying to do? How can we stand out?
• What will our competition look like 5 years from now?
• Who would we align & collaborate with tomorrow though we compete with today? Which partners will become competitors and which competitors partners?
• What will be the new value chain? How would company boundaries change?

MONEY, EXTERNALITIES & RISK

• What will the money trail look like 5 years from now?
• Who will have real power?
• What will the externalities be in the areas of environment, politics, global issues, etc.?
• What will be the new risks that emerge? What preventive measures should we anticipate taking? When?

NEEDS & SOLUTIONS

• What is an unanticipated customer need? Who would be this customer in the first place? Do we recognize them today? Cultivate?
• If we were to design a solution on a blank sheet, what would it look like? How many such offerings would we have to have? How would this scale?
• What happens if we did this for free?  What if we had to give it away in parts over time? What’s first? Second?…
• What would be new, unintended ways our products/services are consumed? What would corresponding new business models we need to think about?

CULTURE, PEOPLE & GOALS

• What are our policy constraints? Are we/would we encourage people to question our “Sacred cows” without fearing the disruption it may cause?
• Which customers would we have walked away from? What was the basis besides profitability or cost of serving the customer today?
• Which employees would have outlived their tenure, without a significant intervention? Which kind of new staff would we have to attract? Full time or consultants?
• What practices would have outlived their purpose? What will a reinvented company look like?
• What would be our new top 5 goals and why? What are the stakeholder implications? How would we know we have our bases covered?

UNKUNK (Don’t know we don’t’ know)

• What is that one thing that we have not even asked that could define our business landscape more than anything else? Can we paint a picture? What are the underlying drivers? Are we ready?

What questions would you add? Where?

I hope you have a wonderful year and decade ahead!

Download Seth’s ebook What Matters Now