A marketing consultant recently narrated his experience in selling market research services to businesses. He had diligently segmented his market and zeroed in on his target segment. But to his dismay, the businesses that he thought needed his services the most, were the ones who were dragging their feet on decisions. Many of us have had this experience. Is there a way to proactively avoid this situation?

Classical segmentation – revenue, size, vertical, geography – is a good way to get started. But as professional service providers, we need to be recognize that our buyers within the target company might have an agenda that needs to be negotiated. The model below of prospects is one way of segmenting the market.

Do not see the benefits of your offering.	Buyer of your services sees the benefit. But he is faced with the dilemma “This is my job. How can I outsource this to you?”	Have a huge need for your services. Lack the skills internally. No one in the organization currently performs the job.	Large organizations with well-established practices for outsourcing. Typically time-constrained. Appreciate the value of your services.
Should not be pursued.	Should be engaged if only to unearth objections to your offerings.	Should be pursued aggressively. Qualify early for their ability to buy your services.	Should be pursued aggressively. Have ability to pay. Need to have a clear and crisp story on why your service offering is better than others.

The above model provides a quick and easy way to segment prospects for your professional services. It may need to be tweaked for your industry and offering, but the pattern plays out quite often across industries. Following this model helps you cut through the initial noise and stay focused on where you are most likely to succeed.

Days of adrenalin rush are punctuated by depressing troughs of lost opportunities, marketing & engineering missteps, with the occasional remind-me-why-we-are-doing-this days. We’ve had our share of these  — as well as coached clients and friends through such phases. One key insight we garnered from these experiences is the need to understand why people start companies* and to answer for yourself, why you started or are planning to start a business. This piece of self knowledge can help the company and you stay focused and manage the ups and downs of a startup.

1. Personal pain point – Many small, and the occasional large corporation, get their start from a personal pain point that the founder faced. Recent examples of companies that would fall into this category include Redbus and earlier eBay.  The pain of trying to get info (and tickets) for a intercity bus triggered the founder of Redbus to get rolling.
2. Passion - In many ways this is opposite of the personal pain point. The passion a person has for a subject or activity drives them to start a business. While they may still find getting a bus ticket difficult, they focused on what they enjoyed or loved and began a business.  Examples of such startups include folks who love hiking (MuddyBoots), doing craft (Etsy), collecting books (LibraryThing), or helping people find their true career (iReboot)
3. Expertise - Most consulting and high technology product companies fall into this category. While the founders may face many personal paint points (how do you get Indian drivers to drive safely) and may be passionate about any number of subjects (music, books, educating children), they focus on starting businesses that leverages the special expertise they bring.  We are expert analog designers (Cosmic Circuits), technology marketers (<blush> Zebugroup) or search pioneers (Google).
4. Market Gap – In many ways personal pain, passion or expertise are inside out approaches to starting a business. When an unaddressed need or gap is found in the market, entrepreneurs – even if they have no expertise in the domain – can run in to fill the gap. Badri Seshadri, serial entrepreneur says about his lastest startup “I loved reading and couldn’t find a whole lot of subjects covered in Tamil or other vernacular books – so we started New Horizon Media.” Other example of startups who have come into fill gaps in the marketplace include Amagi (local advertising on Indian TV) and YCombinator (2.0 entrepeneurs need a whole lot less money but need a fast leg up)
5. Diversification - This, while mostly applicable to companies or businesses already underway, is particularly true for proprietor-owned businesses we see in India. If done too early in a startup’s life it can be distracting if not downright disastrous. Apple entering the phone business (and dropping computer from its name), or Flipkart starting to sell DVDs and cell phones are a couple of recent examples of diversification. It can be a way for startups with multiple founders to find their own interests (spin offs) or explore new businesses while not burning bridges on their present business.

As consultants, we find ourselves advising others (and at times ourselves) to follow the money – which might lead one to believe doing a startup to address a market gap is the best strategy. However rarely are things that clear. Entrepreneurs by their very nature perceive gaps well before customers are prepared to acknowledge them. And being early to market can be one of the most frustrating, and potentially bankrupting experiences.

Ideally one or more of the internally focused items – personal pain, passion or expertise overlaps with a market gap so that both the external opportunity and internal motivation sustain your journey to success. So it’s worth asking yourself every so often, “Why am I in business?”

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*Much of the credit for these 5 reasons has to go to my colleague Bikash Chowdhury who first formulated them.

1. Plan your day the night before Mom was right – we should get ready the night before. Yep, it is tough to make this a habit but it is time tested and works. Now is as good a time to get started. Draw up your to-do list for the day the night before and you will be already ahead. The list will give you a clear idea of what the next day will look like and you can be prepared for it.
2. Attend to the most important task first As Brian Tracy, author and inspirational speaker puts it “Eat That Frog.” Starting off your day by tackling and completing the most important, and often hardest, task in your to-do list, can work wonders. You stay motivated for the rest of the day and what remains to be done seems so much easier.
3. Check your email late in the morning Attending to your email the first thing in the morning is probably the biggest time waster in the modern  era. The trick is to postpone this task to a later part in the morning so that the most important task in your to-do list gets its due attention. It is also well worth limiting the frequency at which you check your email, so that your day is not chopped up into short unproductive bits between email sessions.
4. Bookmark sites that you want to revisit Scheduling a time slot for every activity is one smart way to improve productivity. In the course of working your to-dos or on specific projects, when you come across an interesting site, bookmark it, rather than be distracted by exploring it. Set aside a fixed time slot to do your internet browsing without an agenda and explore these bookmarks. Such bookmarking can also save you a lot of time in finding the right content when you actually need it.
5. Reduce the time you spend on social media Technology that allows us to stay in touch with our friends easily also makes it addictive. We can find it difficult to get out of chat sessions and status updates that seem to run all day. This year, measure and schedule the time you spend on social media and try to restrict your time spent on it during the work day.

Hope these tips from blog posts by Stephani Davis and Productivity 501 and others such as Zen Habits will help you plan for higher productivity in 2010.

• Set up four folders in your Documents folder – Inbox, Actions, Incubate and Archive. Make Inbox your default download folder for all applications. Move the scattered files on your desktop to the Inbox folder.
• Twice a day process the files in the Inbox folder so that it is empty at the end of the day. Move the files that you can start working on immediately into the Actions folder. Use the Incubate folder for those files that you can’t deal with right now.
• Work on the Actions folder and when done, move them to the Archive folder. If you are ready to deal with a file in the Incubate folder move it to the Actions folder.
• Once a month backup the contents of your Archive folder.

Try it and let us know how it works for you.

The best way to do this, is to put all that we have learnt about marketing, positioning and selling to customers, to work in communicating with our own teams first. In other words eat our own dog food. A good way to start is Zebu’s PAIR method namely, 

• Plan – Put down in four or fewer bullets what you reckon marketing needs to accomplish this year. Be specific – in a recession, (yes, Dorothy we are in one!) every dollar is going to get scrutinized and it is better we are ready to justify our actions before the bean counters unsheathe their machetes.
• Align – Before you present your plan, start by asking the CEO and other members of your team, what it is they expect from marketing and LISTEN. Even if you just went through your annual planning process, distilling what they expect, down to three or four specific bullets in plain English will help. This is a good time to ensure your four bullets from the planning phase are well aligned with what the CEO wants.
• Innovate – in everything you do. As the man said, “What got you here, ain’t gonna take you where you want to go.” Your conventional toolbox may no longer suffice, particularly with shrinking marketing budgets. Adding digital and social media to your tool mix is no longer optional. Don’t confine such efforts to only your customers but use it internally as well to get buy in from sales, execs and engineering.
• Refine – A strategy holds true only till such time that you begin executing it. Good marketers will measure everything that they do, and refine their plan repeatedly. The only strategy that matters is one that works and the only way you know its working is by measuring it and refining it.

The Plan, Align, Innovate and Refine (PAIR) method  is in many ways a marketing campaign, but one directed internally, to achieve goal alignment with the stakeholders inside your company, starting with the CEO.

Harvard University professor John Quelch in a recent post titled “How CMOs Should Function in a Recession” discusses the increased relevance of CMOs and marketing. In his article, he states the expectations of a CEO, from his marketing team as:

• Understand customers & profitability better as customer expectations and behavior change, CEOs are looking to marketers who understand the company’s products to re-segment and reposition, if required, the company’s offerings.  
• Manage price & value perception Even while retaining the core value of the company brands, marketers need to create product derivatives & variants, that meet customers expectations of lower pricing in a recession
• Stretch their shrinking marketing dollars Do more with less – doesn’t need much more explanation. Greater accountability with the dollars spent, and fewer dollars to deliver same or better results.
• Go digital – a greater use of the internet Whether selling welding services or medical equipment, how can your company make better use of the Internet and the digital medium as a marketing channel and engage with your customers and build communities?

The full  post is available here. 

The best way to do determine what the CEO wants from marketing, is to put all that we have learnt about marketing, positioning and selling to customers, to work in communicating with our own teams first. Zebu’s PAIR (Plan, Ask, Innovate & Refine) method is one way to accomplish such alignment.

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