Reflection – Learning Launch

Scenario & Challenge

I work with a global Telecom company in their Business arm (B2B segment). Since most of their  revenue come from retail segment, B2B segment didn’t get branded well. So clients related the  name with only connectivity even though the organization was offering solutions across many  verticals.

Having worked in their sales team previously, I decided to work on this issue when I joined the  strategy segment on an ad-hoc project for go-to-market. The challenge was how to make the  customers aware that we offered solutions beyond retail products and were capable of designing  business level products. The target customer was MNC and large corporates. Other stakeholders  included the sales team, products team and finance.

Selection

The most obvious solution was rebranding. But considering the clientele was not retail customers  and the budget did not allow for huge investments in marketing, Ad campaign and marketing  programs were put out of consideration.

So the team followed design thinking to reach on a list of ideas that we could implement in place  of these campaigns. I want to highlight the use of Learning Launch as a tool, simply because it  allowed us to identify the most effective solution from those ideas without splurging budget.

Application

As described above, the problem was about reaching the customer and conveying our capability.  So we shortlisted ideas that allowed us to directly communicate with our clientele. We ran 2  iterations of learning launch before finding the right solution or approach.

For first approach we decided to use Trade Shows as our target. In line with principle of Learning  Launch (Try small, fail fast), we decided not to target trade shows nationally. Instead we picked  the financial hub of the city and identified the 3 trade show with maximum participation by IT &  finance companies (as they were our core target). We set up a Demo zone, where we had displays  and model of our products. We demonstrated how they were beneficial for clients both  technologically and monetarily. We got very good reviews from our customers and many leads.

But we didn’t stop here as we knew we could learn from this. We noticed that certain companies  were repeat visitors in all 3 events, while some big clients never showed up. This brought us to  our second Learning Launch. We decided to visit this list of clients who were big enough to be  influencer in industry and yet didn’t attend these events. We created small setup of our products  and demonstrated them to clients in their company premise. We started with 2 clients and scaled  to 25. Having gained their confidence, we invited them to these events to view our Demo in full  effect. This also helped us with word of mouth as these clients pulled many other into our Zones.

Insight

The biggest insight we got was the segmentation in our clientele. We learned that targeting all the  clients with a single approach won’t work. We followed this with splitting our client base into 3  segments – Strategic, Major, and SME. Now we could target each segment individually. For e.g.  SME visited events and participated well and hence we setup Trade shows in cities with high  startup culture and small but high growth companies. On the other hand strategic clients required  attention and hence for them on premise events were held. Later iterations of Learning launch  benefited from this segregation of clientele too.

Approach

As mentioned above, use of Learning launch technique helped save time and money by  shortlisting the cities where approach 1 was used. While allowing us to reach out to remaining  customers. Going forward, the team is using this approach to scale up clients from 1 category to  other. Like a fast growing SME is treated as strategic by providing on premise Demo.

Also as an alternative approach, we learned that some companies act as influencers. So we  planned to utilize that fact by providing them free usage of our certain products like on a trial basis.  This approach which we gained from the insight will further complement our overall strategy.

