If you asked me this question five years back, I would have said unequivocally that you have to establish a presence in the US if you want to do business here. My thoughts on the subject have changed. I believe the answer is, it depends. Let me explain. Since it is the risk-reward equation that tilts the scales in favor of one vendor over another, we have to start out by thinking about how the...
There have been epics written on ways businesses should be: Identifying customers Acquiring new customers from competition Retaining customers Cross selling and up selling into existing customers Leveraging Customers for expanding business For a Product Manager, who has to deal with many internal and external entities, Customer is by far one of the most business critical entities that he has to...
You can’t invite people to a party and try to sell them stuff. Pretty much every starry-eyed startup that went after eyeballs gets it by now. Over the last seven years the web has moved away from a consumption medium (think NY times) to a creation-consumption medium (think Twitter, Facebook). But we’ve been very tardy in reshaping business models for this new model of the web...
Every customer support forum and blog has at least one post talking about the importance of ‘knowing’ the target customer. This is one of those well established cliche-stereotypes that David Foster Wallace points out in Infinite Jest – we talk about them so much because they happen to be true. The only question is, how true? Is ‘knowing’ your customer really enough? Cadbury’s knows that its...
You’re at an event, and you’re ready. You know your product inside out. You know the competition. You know the licensing terms. The deals. The partners. The competition. Technical details. Market details. Detail details. Regulations. Strengths. Compatibilities. Your head is stuffed. Crammed, just when – A customer comes to you. “I’ve got sixty seconds. Why should I buy from you?” You spent years...
Whenever faced by dilemma over any issue pertaining to sales and marketing, I recall a famous quote by Ben Feldman, who is considered one of the best salespeople in world history. Don’t sell life insurance. Sell what life insurance can do. Just by following this one mantra, Ben was able to insurance policies more than worth USD 1.8 billion in his life! It would be unfair if I don’t mention Steve...
I wish it was mathematical. But it isn’t. There are unlimited combinations when building a story. That’s what makes it so much fun to consume – you never know how the storyteller tells it… So instead of giving you tips in a bulleted format – let’s build a script together. What we know (or must know) before we start: This is for a 60 sec pitch video about a product called Glitch...
To position the product, you must first have clarity on the addressable market and its breakdown in terms of different industries or user communities (let’s call both of them as ‘verticals’ for simplicity). Then analyze which of them can benefit the most from your product, where your maximum contacts are, and which has the least competition. You can accordingly initiate preliminary sales efforts...
Most startups talk about product features and how they are better than their competition in terms of their offerings. They really don’t tell stories, however people remember stories for long and not the facts and figures. Most often than not, people say we are a startup, we don’t have paying customers and we do not have stories to communicate. The fact that they are developing a product itself is...
In the continuing series of Round Tables product veterans Samir Palnitkar, ShopSocially and Jatin Parekh, AirTight Networks took the participants through a journey of discovery about why they want to go global and taking a critical look at the challenges they must overcome. It takes a guy like Samir to lay the foundation for such a Round Table, having stoked the discussion with his experience and...
