Tagged: Entrepreneurship

Marketing your start-up to stakeholders – Employees and Customers

English: Creating lifelong customer value with...

Quick answer: It depends 🙂

Short Answer: What do you want to achieve from your marketing efforts? Once you answer this, may be you will have answer.
Longer Answer: There are many phases of marketing for any start-up, and as expected each level of marketing serves a specific purpose. I am sharing my experience based on  the discussions and I have had with people who started their businesses in India….
Level 1 – Enabling the business via Selling dreams (to the Core Team Members and initial Customers): A business is enabled when you idea is available for use and there is someone to buy that idea. In the initial days of a start-up the most urgent need for the company is to get things started – Idea being ready to be sold. In such a phase when kick-starting the core business is the most important hurdle for the company to jump – companies need people who are adept at making things work, and which means you need to spread the word about companies working philosophies, CEO’s and founder’s uniqueness, etc and attract eye-balls from people who might join your team. In this level of marketing you sell dreams to people – Dreams of an enriching lives with this start-up. You talk about great things which your company is doing and wants to do. You talk about what can this great idea do to enrich its team member’s life. And you keep highlighting the fact that how this company is different from others.
You speak to customers who might believe your potential, and give an importance and follow-up they have never seen so far, and tell that – We are serious about our business, Are You? These first hand believers actually make your business get a proof of concept, and these are the organizations which will help you build an empire later.
This level of marketing needs to be done at a personal level (mostly), and these are based on the connections you have built so far. You can get lucky with a few  (employees or customers), but 80% of your employees and customers would get converted only if you are working too hard with your first-level of contacts. And if I were to classify this class of marketing, it is mostly C2C marketing attempt.
[On an average, this level of marketing can extend anywhere from 6 months to 1.5 years, depending on how serious you are about choosing the right players to begin the game you wish to play! ]
Level 2 – Executing the business via Selling the Opportunity: Once your proof of concept is available with the stakeholders (internal and external) the challenge lies in eliminating the loopholes and strengthening the existing core model to offer benefits with clear additional advantages to stakeholders (internal and external). You basically create an opportunity out of the proof of concept you just achieved.
The challenge here is that – You have to sell the opportunity. Opportunity to internal stakeholders comes in the form of regular personal incentives (not restricted to financial incentives), and the opportunity to external stakeholders comes in the form of business rewards they achieve if they on-board your business.
As a promoter of the start-up you can not afford to get wrong in defining this ‘opportunity’ for your stakeholders.
This level of marketing starts to happen at organizational level and you start getting involved in the B2B marketing attempts.
[Keep it in mind, this is the longest phase of the game you are playing, this could extend anywhere from 2-5 years, this is THE most important phase of your business. You are vulnerable because now you have something to lose! ]

Level 3 – Enhancing the business via Selling the Trust: The opportunity you en-cashed in Level 2 is not going to take you forward if you forget (or fail) to innovate, and that means you have to innovate at a pace which gives you the trust of stakeholders. Trust comes when you deliver what you promised, and then you keep offering some more with time.
To an internal stakeholder, Trust comes when you make internal processes strong enough to make him love what he is doing. And to an external stakeholder, the trust comes when your services/products keep getting robust with each passing day.
This is a stage for an organization which demands a certain maturity level in terms of its processes – Internally you are mature enough to innovate the way business demands, and externally you are able to educate (and influence) the customer to adopt to your services/products at your price point.
Classifying this class of marketing, at this stage you are doing a B2M marketing. Where M stands for the Market – You attempt to interact and reach out to the entire market (Corporate, Industries, and People), and compete on a level playing ground.
[In terms of the time-line, this phase should ideally begin when the organization is about 3 years into the business, and then this should continue for ever! ]

Lessons from a successful e-Retailing entrepreneur

Entrepreneurship and the Green Economy

Entrepreneurship and the Green Economy (Photo credit: US Mission Geneva)

 

Recently I met the father of Indian e-Commerce, and had an opportunity to hear him out on several topics related to his Work, Life, Entrepreneurship and the Indian eCommerce Industry.

 

The person I am talking about started a e-Retailing in year 1998, succeeded in his effort by taking it to a level which is still unreachable by most of the companies despite all the funding and manpower they have in their hand. His lean approach in building the business, was evident in his precisely chosen tips for youngsters, and his client focus was loud and clear when he was reviewing some of the ideas put forward while the discussion went on.

 

He learnt it much ahead of time that e-Retailing is an art which needs patience, passion and courage which can’t be bought by investments from outside and keep watching it grow. He understood is really well, that the market would flood with e-Retailing business and all the companies would soon lose patience and they will start buying revenue under the shadow of a hallowed jargon – creating value 🙂 He laughs over the current situation and says that – The moment you have a huge pile of external money to build your business, you lose focus from the business and start doing things which appear ridiculous in the hindsight.

 

So, while he was years ahead in successfully executing his e-Retailing experience, he saw another opportunity ahead of the time – eCommerce 2.0 And hence in year 2007, when India was still going gaga over Flipkart, and its popular competitors, he silently moved on to his dream venture to take e-Retailing to deeper level for the next generation of e-Retailing – e-Commerce 2.0 . And so far he has exceeded his own initial imagination. He has an awesome client base, which is growing at a pace which would impress any investor or a probable competitor. And whats the best part – He makes money whenever people enroll for his platform to do the e-Retailing.

 

When I inquired about any possibility of making the platform run on the freemium model in future, his answer was clear and to the point – “Something which comes for free loses its value, and you develop a client-base which has a mindset of ‘trying’ things out. I don’t want a non-serious client base. I was to enroll only those clients who value the platform, and realize that their business would get a direct benefit out of this technology tool. I will not make it free ever. And if at all I have to invest into getting clients, I would rather invest in educating people about e-Retailing business, rest all will follow on its own. I might not win all the customers (and neither can I serve the entire market base), but at least the industry will benefit from the investment I will do in educating the market.”

 

While his e-Commerce 2.0 dream is nearing its peak, others are still announcing their plans and some are even evaluating the probability of e-Commerce 2.0 . And in the mean-time, he has already started executing his e-Commerce 3.0 plans 🙂

 

So, in all I was impressed to take away a few things from this gentleman…

 

#1. Always try to be a step ahead from the market while you are building something new. There is no fun in starting 399th e-Retailing portal which sells the same stuff which the 1st one started selling almost 5 years ago. You will always get bogged down from the competition and will never be able to concentrate on the business or develop a passion for doing things the way you always wanted to do.

 

#2. Know when to move out. In any business, a point comes when things reach a stage where market gets attracted to the idea and starts replicating it and eventually compete with the original idea. You must know when to move out, or else you will have to fight out the muscle power of the market and deviate from your core business motivation. The other way is to keep innovating so that market remains busy following you instead of competing with you. Imagine India’s first software outsourcing success – Microland, they saw great business, but didn’t understand that the market is following them and forgot to diversify or innovate and then never saw anything awesome after a few years of initial success.

 

#3. Charge Premium. When you do something new and solve a market problem, do not hesitate in charging your customers.   Always keep it in mind, the copying power of this market is so rapid that you would never know when you would have already lost the power of charging the premium. Understand the reason why online retailers can’t charge any premium now – Because they don’t have that power, and hence all of them are selling things like beggars.

 

#4. Invest in building a team. As an entrepreneur, your success is 99% of the times dependent on the core team you will build. And the chances are really high that you will continue working with them for decades to comes. Irrespective of whether you are a success or failure, if you have a dependable core team and if the team trusts your capability, you guys will never regret working with each other and the association will continue forever. [This person still works with the same core team which he had formed in year 2008].

 

[I have intentionally not mentioned the name of the person to eliminate the hype and unwanted popularity, which this gentleman hates.]