Getting Noticed & Sustaining Momentum on Market Entry
Creating the right network is a crucial part of your go-to-market plan.
#marketentry#think/solutions/approaches#Strategy
Humans long to be noticed. We even die of loneliness if not able able to receive the warm smiles or attention of others. So without attention, we become irrelevant and wither away. Not many things worse than being irrelevant.
Business is the same.
So businesses need to get noticed. But that’s not all.
Before we talk about go-to-market, let’s chat about human behavior. We understand the world through stories, self-centered for the most part on ourselves as a hero or villain depending if we have been kind, rude, done enough work, finished that chore, etc. Fundamentally we project our interpretation of reality onto the people, places, and things in our lives. In the book Mind by Daniel J Siegel he writes on the location of the mind. “..information processing is physically distributed beyond the individual person” He describes how energy & information flow inside and outside of us within our ‘social field’. We are not separate ever, but part of a complex system of our interconnectedness. So if your mind is connected to others through energy and information but you go unnoticed not “feeling felt”, then you wither. Daniel writes how attention directs the flow of energy and information so we “experience the streaming of energy and information flow between and within us”.
Rober Lanza writes in Biocentrism how our brain processes information at 240mph, faster than we can think. So we act and make up a story after explaining why we did what we did. Hence the information and energy we receive from our environment can control us and more often than not, does. ( A reason competitors all copy each other). The book Connected, from which the cover image is taken, references many cases on the power of networks to influence our lives. How fat, happy, successful, and healthy we are; comes not from our decisions but the decisions of our networks. (In business school classes you will see this discussed as a market vs resource-based view of a firm).
“Networks have properties...that are neither controlled nor even perceived by the people within them”. A quick example from the book is a Farmington Heart Study showing that happy people tended to cluster in separate groups from unhappy people and unhappy people are most likely to be at the periphery of the network.
To summarize, we ( as individuals or businesses) are always part of a bigger network than our own identity. We are connected and influenced and controlled by forces outside of us, whether we notice it or not. So if we decide to notice it, we could change the connections and use it to our advantage. We don’t want to only be noticed when entering a market or creating a new one; we want to purposefully shape the connections around us and our place in the market (network).
Go to Market
Getting noticed is good, it draws energy ( paying customers, eyeballs, PR, investors) and information ( useful to decide how to succeed, what competitors are doing, how to win an RFP, make better decisions, improve products). We also need this newly won attention on our business to sustain and become a relationship.
How?
“We must co-operate with others, judge their intentions and influence or be influenced by them” Daniel Siegel, Mind.
When you go-to-market, decide what is the right ecosystem to create and why. How are you going to be in each participant’s lives: monthly? weekly? How are you going to influence them or be influenced; how can you be the platform they execute from and how will they decide that you are an important part of their network? What benefit do they have to introduce you to their network and support you?
Doing this allows you to think about being a core connector, or platform for your network and create network effects for your business or product. (Read about 13 different network effects here from NFX.)
On market entry into an existing market, we should try to integrate in a manner to direct the flow of energy and attention towards us (so we get sales!) and in a way that keeps the connections alive( engagement, repurchases, feedback, user-groups, loyalty).
So a blog, a whitepaper, SEM, SEO, and some SDR’s calling and sending emails is not going to do it. The book the Content Trap talks about how getting noticed is becoming harder than ever due to the explosion in content. This also creates a “problem of getting paid” in a world of free. Hence media companies being more and more attention-grabbing with their tactics but missing the point of relationship-building to create meaningful connections. Context is king writes the author, Bharat Anand. For me, the context can be created around your business’s purpose. Engaging with markets ( customers, suppliers, partners, media) around purpose is the key to creating a connected network so you can gain attention again and again. Connect to solve something bigger than individual interests. Because that is a powerful force you can use to shape the network you need to succeed.
How can you connect your users, suppliers, partners, influencers; in meaningful ways where they will serve your purpose, make it their own, and direct more energy to you as part of the network?
Will the value of what you do to your customers increase the more customers join you? As an example, one of our portfolio companies Hive Learning hosts a Peer Learning Platform for its customers: large corporates. The engagement and value to the customer increase every time a new employee contributes insight or problems for discussion. The organization itself gets stronger as more of its employees start teaching each other directly, solving problems much faster than when they learn alone. Hive Learning’s team spend their time building the engagement to a level where the network thrives and grows under its own energy. It is quite remarkable to see the data from when it “catches” and becomes its own learning machine, under its own steam.
Humans and businesses have always existed outside of themselves as parts of networks. The connections are now more obvious in the digital era. So now you know you're not alone; here is an exercise you can undertake with your team to make sure you keep ‘good company’ so to speak:
Map your market (network participants)
Decide if you are in the right network, or if it needs reshaping.
Come up with a plan to decide which network effects for each player you should create (direct and indirect) that will strengthen your position in the network
Create a plan for how you will make the connections sustain and compound in value
Decide the value they will gain, what you want them to do in terms of energy and attention (promote, generate content, teach, purchase, build)
You can see a previous post I wrote on how to map a market’s network participants here.
Let me know what you thought of this post and do share it with others you think may enjoy it!
thanks
Lee