So unperterbed by Apple’s views on my iPad App, I am continuing along the road of building a range of Apps for Sales People. An email from a friend this morning prompted me to ponder just how far I have gone along this road. 

Working alone it is sometimes easy to overlook your own success. Those that know me know that I am not afflicted by modesty, but even so.  The original plan for the Apps business was to develop a series of Apps that would all fit into the Finance section. In fact that was not a “well formed objective” – in other words it was wrong!

Not sure exactly when, but at some point this morphed into developing Apps for Sales Professionals that use iPhones and/or iPads. This is a much better definition. In fact I can refine this further;

1. Primary Market: Sales professionals working with medium to large businesses who sell B2B (business to business) products and services. They are probably part of a sales team. The entire team might be between 10 and 30 people so not huge. They will spend a high proportion of their time out with clients (so road worrier types) and will be tech savvy. Geographically they could be anywhere, but they will be using English as their primary language.
2. Secondary Market: Sales professionals outside of the B2B sphere.
3. Tertiary Market: Business owner / managers who have to undertake “selling” within the course of their day to day business activities. They may not see it as selling and they may use different vocabulary to real Sales People.

So having defined the target customer, this simplifies many other problems;

• What product(s) shall I develop. Simple anything that a typical B2B sales person would need.
• How do we generate sales? Simple, “be everywhere” that a typical B2B sales person would be. What would they read, what events and so on.

Many friends and colleagues, talented people, spend a lot of time trying to spot a golden opportunity or to invent a dream product. This is probably a waste, a waste of their professional lives and skills. The simpler route is to define a target customer segment (only criteria is it should be one that you know something about!) and then set about providing solutions to problems they encounter. Having thought about this I can not think of any customer segment that doesn’t have some problems that could be fixed using technology…

Right. Now it must be time to crack on with the new Reporting section for Sales Planner.