The Little Guy: winner of tomorrow? Posted by Tomi Heikkinen , Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 21:20, in Labels: business development, customer overdrive, problem solving, seth godin, startups

Seth Godin happened to post yesterday about understanding business development, a topic I too brushed in my last post about Solving outside the box. I brainstormed some key questions for a sales & marketing manager who would like to develop her business with the help of proactive, eyes-wide-open sales people.

Seth offers a great definition for the term:

Good business development allows businesses to profit by doing something that is tangential to their core mission. Sometimes the profit is so good, it becomes part of their core mission, other times it supports the brand and sometimes it just makes money. And often it's a little guy who can be flexible enough to make things happen.

I love his last sentence. It made me wonder: How much should today's startups, "little guys", rely on detailed business plans, and how much should be left open for flexible business development?

Consider how networked the business world is currently, and how networking further increases. Due to this, startups (and established businesses!) who keep their eyes and ears open are constantly and increasingly bombarded with new openings, ideas and possibilities. (To assess these, Seth offers in his post a great checklist of issues to go through.) For a businessperson who is not just sociable but competent and efficient as well these are an abundant goldmine of profit and fun.

So, are the winner startups of tomorrow the Great Networkers, who have the ability to surf in their general field of business, adjust their core mission and constantly absorb great new openings and possibilities, and thus are hugely profitable? I think so. Firstly I believe Great Networkers are also Great Personal Sellers, due to their ability to solve outside their box. Because of all the people in the world, the customers are most competent to tell the Great Networker how to better her business. And secondly their ability to surf in their business area also deters fatal customer overdrive, being too customer-oriented, that threatens all little guys serving the bigger and/or older boys.

Does your business plan enable you to be a Great Networker? Are you a little guy at the core of your business?

Solving outside your box Posted by Tomi Heikkinen , Sunday, September 20, 2009 at 20:08, in Labels: personal selling, problem solving, tomi heikkinen

How much do you think your sales persons think outside and beyond your organization's current abilities and comfort zones when coming up with solutions to your customers?

How much idea power and effort do they employ when their customers directly or indirectly present a problem that they don't seem to be able to tackle with your current resources or offerings? Do you enable and help your sales people solve a customer's problem even if its not fully within the scope of your business? If yes, would it be profitable? Moveover, should you be bound by your current strategy or by your customers? Or both, or neither?

Something old, something new Posted by Tomi Heikkinen , Thursday, September 17, 2009 at 09:54, in Labels: clichés, marketing, rohit bhargava, tomi heikkinen

A couple of interesting entries from the blogosphere that deserve a mention in my "social learning diary".

Something old: 101 clichés of B2B marketing. This site has been online for a year now, and they show the 101 worst communication clichés a marketer can use. A terribly funny blog, it also serves as a valuable tool for creatives to measure the differentiation of their communication. It's useful for ad agency types but also for any marketing people who strive to make their message simpler, easier to understand, more attractive but above all recognizable from the mass.

Something new: Rohit Bhargava writes very perceptively about the end of mass broadcasting era. His post is about media convergence of the social media and broadcast television: the possible future role of television is to be a broadcaster specialized in live events, it has a potential point of integration with social media that revolves around real time interaction and collaboration. I agree with Rohit, this is an interesting possible trend that is worthy of further monitoring!

Segmentation based on our competitive advantages? Posted by Tomi Heikkinen , Friday, September 11, 2009 at 14:19, in Labels: chris fill, competitive advantage, kelly page, paul baines, segmentation, targeting, tomi heikkinen

Thanks to the upcoming Cranfield Experience(tm), I've been pre-reading Marketing by Paul Baines, Chris Fill and Kelly Page (2008). I'll possibly review the book later in depth, but many points have come to mind while reading their comprehensive, massive, but excellent textbook, and one in particular stirred some thinking.

The authors discuss the basics of segmentation and targeting. They go through both consumer and business market aspects of S&T, and while describing the business side of things, they mention some limitations of market segmentation. A particularly interesting point was that there is insufficient consideration how market segmentation is linked to competitive advantage. Moreover, market segmentation has not tended to stress the need to segment on the basis of differentiating the offering from competitors.

Why is this interesting? First we might consider what is competitive advantage. In rough layman's terms it means doing something critical to the customer so much better than the competitor OR having something critical to the customer that the competition has not. A sustainable competitive advantage furthermore is an edge that cannot be easily swayed from the supplier. However the competitive advantage is possibly two-fold: on one side, it's critical to the supplier because it enables it to differentiate from the competition. But on the other side, it might be critical to the customer - the supplier might have been selected because of the competitive advantage, ergo the offering should be vital to the customer's business. It is obvious not all businesses can have competitive advantages that are so remarkable. But shouldn't every business strive to develop advantages that become immensely important parts of the core businesses of their customers? Isn't it every CEO's dream?

Back to segmentation and targeting. A starting business, or even an established firm with a new business, should among other things consider their targeting according to their competitive advantages and their strengths. In other words, be both competition and customer-oriented. Key questions might be: What are our sustainable competitive advantages? For whom are we the most potent suppliers? Which advantage is most profitable? Who benefits most of our advantages, and are they profitable too? What kind of demands are we best suited to fulfill? Who are the customers to whom we could become a lifeline? A bit of blue ocean thinking too never hurts.

Maybe a well thought-out toolbox or a framework/mindset is in order? And maybe I just came up with a thesis project for myself?