“Aim wider”, “focus everywhere” and other oxymorons
I’ve just had a conversation with a friend, an ex-colleague who was picking my brains (for free I might add!) about what he could do to make his sales year look better.
I asked him how his product was positioned and where his focus was on the market. He told me, and in doing so mentioned 3 industries, 3 market categories and 4 sub market segments, 4 or 5 target audiences and a similar number of problems they address in each of the 3 industries. I told him that this isn’t a focus. It’s a hedging of bets. It’s a baiting of many hooks in the vain hope of landing at least… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, go-to-market, ideal customer, marketing, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Tactics, pain, positioning, product marketing, prospects, reason to buy, usp | 
alternative, audience, benefit, competitive, Danny Goodall, focus, lead generation, Lustratus, marketing strategy, product marketing, prospecting, REPAMA, Target audience | 
Leave a commentOpen Source and the Impotence(sic) of Being Earnest
Q. What do the questions…
“How do porcupines make love?”
and
“How do you ‘sell’ open source software?”
…have in common?
A. The answer to both is “Carefully!”
Software sales is a funny business. Push too hard and you’re open to accusations of potentially ripping people off through aggressive tactics, don’t push hard enough and you end up having had many nice discussions (tea and biscuit meetings as they are known) with many nice people but your children go hungry. It’s a balance. And nowhere is this more in evidence than in the open source world.
I was chatting to an ex-colleague last week about the issues they have taking their open source software products to market.… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, go-to-market, marketing, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Tactics, product marketing, prospects, Vendor-Related Posts | Apache, Danny Goodall, JBOSS, lead generation, marketing, marketing strategy, MuleSource, open source, Red Hat, REPAMA, Strategic Marketing | Leave a commentPart 2 – The “FOR [ideal customer]” element from the positioning statement
The Ideal Customer
As mentioned in the previous blog entry on the positioning statement, I’m going to continue to flesh out the details of the seven other positioning elements.
This time its the ideal target customer, so let’s first revisit the format of the positioning statement just to give us a context.
FOR [the ideal customer] WHO [has this specific pain or problem] OUR [product name] IS A[product category] THAT PROVIDES [this main benefit and reason to buy] UNLIKE [the primary alternative or competitor] OUR PRODUCT [has this unique selling proposition].
The ideal customer allows the organisation creating the positioning statement to express the characteristics of their ideal target customer for the… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, esb, ideal customer, job roles, marketing, Marketing Strategy, positioning, product marketing, prospects | competition, competitive, Danny Goodall, esb, ideal customer, Lustratus, marketing strategy, positioning, positioning statement, product marketing, REPAMA, Strategic Marketing, strategy | Leave a commentBook recommendation – The Jelly Effect – Make your communication stick by Andy Bounds
A great book if you want to freshen up your client/prospect communications and empower your sales team to sell more.
I read a lot. Mainly fiction but I also read a fair bit of marketing strategy. In the main these books are OK and I typically “learn” something every time. But just occasionally, as was the case with Product Marketing for Technology Companies by Mark Butje they really make an impact. The Jelly Effect – How to make your communication stick by Andy Bounds is one such book.
If I’m honest, the structure is not completely intuitive. The main subjects – Networking, How to sell more, Referrals and Presentations don’t really gel together for me.… Continue reading
What do you do?
It’s an easy question isn’t it? But its one that in my experience is so often misinterpreted or wrongly answered by high-tech software vendors through their web sites, marketing materials and meetings with prospects.
When a prospect poses that question of a software vendor, what are they looking to understand? The answer is that they actually want to know what you can do for them. They want to quickly envisage what will be left behind after they have bought software from you.
So an answer like:
“ACME provides KJ8 compliant infrastructure that is compatible with the latest WP* series of standards”
…does not really answer the question “What does ACME Corp do?”.
Consider the situation when a… Continue reading
Funded Initiatives and lead generation
I’ve been scanning other marketing blogs recently, attempting to get a feel for what other folks are doing out there at the moment. I see lots of advice on creating strategies to generate leads through social media and the creation of networks. Whilst I wholeheartedly support any efforts to get closer to prospects by creating communities and networks, that alone will not cut it when IT spend is under such close scrutiny.
Imagine this situation.
You’re a senior manager in an IT division of a large corporation who is tasked with delivering more than you did last year with less resources than you previously had. You’re technically very savvy and when a software vendor proposes new technology… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, cloud computing, communication, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, go-to-market, high performance middleware, marketing, Marketing Management, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Tactics, positioning, prospects | application virtualization, budgets, competitive, lead generation, low latency messaging, Lustratus, marketing strategy, REPAMA | 1 CommentWhat Slowdown?
I was discussing the economic slowdown with some friends over the weekend. We were trying to predict the likely depth, length and impact but we came to the conclusion that logic and a sound understanding of economics alone couldn’t help. You’d need to apply complex chaos psychology first. The issue, we realised, is that whilst people anxiously focus on the harsher trading conditions, we’re not focusing on the positives – the things that will bring us out the other side.
I’m not going to suggest that all we need to do is shut our eyes and wish it away but if we stop anxiously focusing on the negatives, we can turn a bad situation into a better… Continue reading
An “average” marketing strategy
Mean. It’s a great word isn’t it. But what does mean, mean? If you see what I mean. It’s either hateful, the intended meaning of something or, as I want to use it here – an average. In this case it’s the “average” marketing strategy for a specific marketing segment. What would be the value of knowing the “average” marketing strategy for any number of strategic marketing elements for the segment in which you compete?
i.e. on average for your market segment who is the ideal target customer organisation? On average what job roles do your competitors target? On average which vertical markets are favoured? On average who does your competition see as… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, high performance middleware, ideal customer, job roles, marketing, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Tactics, positioning, product marketing, prospects, Vendor-Related Posts | 29West, competitive, ibm, low latency messaging, Lustratus, marketing strategy, middleware, positioning, REPAMA, solace systems, tibco | Leave a comment
- On Informatica, Evangelism, Audience Strata and BIG-DATA
- The marketing strategies of open source versus closed source ESBs
- Part 2 – First output from REPAMATron – WSO2 versus FuseSource versus Talend versus the ESB market
- First output from REPAMATron – WSO2 versus FuseSource versus Talend versus the ESB market
- WSO2 – Fits in between Talend and FuseSource…
- WSO2, or rather one of its competitors, has thrown its hat into the ring
- Wordcount.org – it counts words…
Recent Comments
May 12, 2011 (12:01) The Goodall Technology Reading Ease Index - How Complex is Your Marketing Copy? Hmm. I really do like the name Sarah but what about my ego? If I were to call the index 'GoodRead...
May 12, 2011 (11:36) The Goodall Technology Reading Ease Index - How Complex is Your Marketing Copy? I suggest calling it the GoodRead Index. Maybe it's over-reaching a bit, but you'll just have to ...
October 14, 2010 (4:19) Truth Denied? The Software Appliance Revisited. I hope you could tell that I was being more than a little flippant here Jacques. Perhaps I should...
October 13, 2010 (1:56) Truth Denied? The Software Appliance Revisited. Allow me to disagrre. At a customer, we have used Datapower for years to process XML (BTW, it is ...
June 7, 2010 (4:38) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances Pete,Thanks for your comments, and those of your colleague. I think Danny has answered the 'mar...
June 4, 2010 (4:03) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances Hi,I'd very much like to develop a point made in the report where it is asserted that software ...
May 6, 2010 (12:35) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances Thanks for your comment Blake. This is a marketing-focused blog that looks at different vendors' ...
May 5, 2010 (1:23) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances Hello There - It seems that this is a very provocative report, especially with respect to the sta...
April 14, 2010 (2:57) The Decision Making Unit for Cloud Computing Nice Technology Related Blog. Will visit again.
October 16, 2009 (5:56) The Decision Making Unit for Cloud Computing Very interesting point of discussion. I would be very interested to hear your results.