Influencer Networks

Ranking Potential

The question of potential is often raised by businesses looking for better ways to categorise and ultimately rank and prioritise both current customers and also prospects that fall within your target audience that may hopefully one day become valued customers and clients.

Actual Usage

Typically what a lot of businesses tend to focus on is that actual usage of a product category.  For example you sell photocopying paper and one of your current clients buys around a thousand reams a year and a key prospect who uses another well-known, rival brand of photocopying paper also buys around a thousand reams. In both cases these two businesses are both high potential and relating back to a Boston Consulting Group type matrix would be a Star (i.e. high potential and high use for the current customer) and Problem Child (i.e. high potential and no use for the high potential prospect).

In both cases we have businesses that are high potential and so would be focused on with a view to either maintaining and growing the current client and convincing the prospect to switch to the alternative photocopying paper brand. Clearly the adoption of an actual usage criteria to evaluate potential is a simple and effective one that is universally applied however there is also a less apparent and often missed adjunct to this more obvious alternative.

 Influence

That more subtle aspect of market potential lies in influencer power and influencer network and perhaps the best way to explain this alternative is to provide an example of how it works in a real world situation.

The Kind Professor

Some years ago whist working in the pharmaceutical market I met a gentleman who by this stage had all but stopped seeing patients and for the most part because of this had been all but forgotten by not only my company but also that of every other rival pharmaceutical company. However I had a self-imposed rule that I at least wanted to meet every doctor at least once to introduce myself and provide any support for the right reasons regardless of how great or small their personal prescribing was at the time.

Through this discussion I understood that he himself was taking the very medicine I was charged with promoting to the market. With this I not only provided him some free samples but was pleased to update him on some recent exciting data that provided great comfort to him not only as a prescriber of the brand but also as someone taking it personally. Frankly that gave me a great feeling and I left it at that thinking I had done something nice for a lovely man.

Sometime after this other doctors I met in my travels that before this had been at best non-committal and at worst totally dismissive, had called me wanting samples for their patients and additional information on how to use the medication. What had happened I asked myself?

Influencer Network

Put simply this one doctor who for years had taught so many of the current ‘high potential’ doctors was still in contact with many of them through the divisions of general practice and more informally through social contact and through this ongoing interaction had acted as an advocate for the brand and the data I had shared with him.

So in light of this anecdote I’d ask you to re-calibrate your thinking. Certainly level of use and selective brand use are important aspects to this equation, but they are not the only important considerations. Influence as described above is a much more powerful and enduring marker of long term sales growth. Please consider.

So until next time, good luck and good marketing.

Regards,
Daniele.