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Startup

It’s the first that’s always the hardest!

February 20, 2019
Image: Unsplash

Two interesting incidents yesterday – one at work and one at home – both again reminded me of a very important lesson – it’s the first that’s always the hardest.

Yesterday, we went to a nearby cycling park with my 7 year old who has been cycling for months now and really enjoys cycling. Though as soon as we rented a cycle at the park for him, he refused to ride. The park had rough muddy patches unlike our apartment’s smooth cemented road and the cycle was a bit bigger than what he was used to. We tried to coax him but he just refused, again and again! 

And then came our parenting storytelling skills to use (oh yes, as I always say, if children are one of the best negotiators, then parents are one of the best storytellers). We changed our pitch, we tried the following and these worked, albeit slow but worked:

  • Instead of saying – try it, it’s so easy, we changed it to – big boys ride big cycles, smaller ones are for babies. Riding bigger cycle will help you zoom faster (he loves speed).
  • If you’re getting scared of this muddy uphill slope, we will handhold you for the first patch. We will be there for you if you lose your balance and fall.
  • Try it out only for 1 minute. If you do not like it, we won’t ask you to cover the whole track. You can get down anytime you want.

Speed excites him and at his age, he has this strong desire to be not called a baby. 

Handholding bit gave him the confidence to try.

Get down anytime you want, eased out his anxiety to go through the whole unknown track. 

After a few initial hesitated pedals, he zoomed. 

Simply put what worked here were:

Value Proposition

Trust

Trial

And I remembered the conversation with one of my clients on similar lines yesterday. They had launched a new product recently with good discounts too but were struggling to meet their conversion numbers. After my initial analysis of their target audience, I felt discounts may not be the biggest triggers for that target segment. They may need a different approach and the first 100 might need a different strategy altogether than the remaining mass.

I shared with them my previous organization’s experience about one of the products that I had worked from scratch, right from concept to launch.

Out of the approx. 10,000 conversions that happened there in 1 year, the first 100 took me more than 6 months and the remaining 9,900 happened in the remaining 6 months :-). And out those first 100, the first 10 were the toughest!

What worked there?

• I was personally involved in first 100 conversions, in fact, first 1000. No outsourcing at all to any external agency.

• A lot of time was spent in defining the value proposition for each stakeholder. Detailed understanding of different audience type was done and then my marketing pitch was customized depending upon the user profile and what would be of interest to them.

• Handholding, training and robust support during the onboarding process to build the trust. 

• Trial to experience the product with transparent, no strings attached deboarding process.

• Taking all possible steps to ensure the first 100 who took a leap of faith with us had an excellent experience. Once they became happy, the word spread. 

Be it anything in life, right from dealing with your child to your customer, it’s the “first” that’s always the toughest. Isn’t it :-)? But if done right, it’s the first that leads to second and so on. 

Competition or Customers

September 29, 2017

Competition or Customers — Where do you spend your time more?

How I wish that organizations especially the ones starting up, spend at least half their time and resources in understanding their customers as much they spend in tracking their competitors. It’s amazing to see presentations after presentations detailing out the competition strategy but a very fuzzy or macro view of — who are we trying to sell to?

There is nothing wrong with being competition focussed, in fact it’s good to keep a close watch on competition but when you have limited resources and you’re trying to launch something new, it’s very important to understand where and how to spend your resources judiciously.

My recent interaction with two different businesses left me thinking more on this. One is a mid size company, been into business for few years, now venturing into a new category and the second one is a new entity altogether. Both have lean marketing teams to work on the launch and the maximum effort that both have spent as part of their market study is tracking the competition strategy. Details of their campaigns, social media initiatives, promotions — everything has been tracked and well documented. And both these companies are aiming at one objective while drafting their launch offer — how to be better than the competition? Yes, the prime objective is to come out with offers more lucrative than their competitors. We don’t even know if customers are actually happy with those offers or for that matter if customers are looking for offers only or something else? For company one, the competition strategy actually maps almost every player even remotely associated with the category and the product is as such that it can be of use to consumers as well as SMBs. A detailed competition analysis like this would have been actually a good thing if the team wouldn’t have been trying to focus on coming out with an offer that can be attractive to all segments. One can not have a paint-everyone-with-the- same-brush approach especially when launching a new category.

If we will be only competition focussed, we will at best be better than our competition but not necessarily the best choice for our customers. Deciding the focal point of any marketing plan is extremely important and it has to start with — understanding our customers.

The more granular we go into understanding our customer, the better we would be at connecting with her.Read More