Reverse Engineering Force.com’s Approach to the Cloud Computing Market
I’ve been a bit busy recently and so instead of finishing off the complex REPAMA SAS into the “Cloud Computing / Cloud Software / Cloud Management / Application Services Management” study, I decided to produce a rough draft of the much simpler REPAMA into Force.com’s go-to-market strategy instead.
Whilst the segment analysis study only covers Force.com at the moment, I will add additional vendors/providers into the study over the coming weeks. If you have any suggestions who I should compare to/with Force.com, let me know.
I’m quite pleased with the result. Not because of any specific talent on my part but rather as I’ve already said here, Force.com’s marketing is a case study in how to take a new, disruptive technology to market. They understand their audience, they know what problems they solve and they know why they’re better/different. They communicate in clear language and they repeat their positioning strategy again and again and again consistently in all of their out-bound marketing communications. They’ve had successes and they’ve been able to document this and use it as proof of the claims they make. It’s been a joy to reverse-engineer it. That’s not to say that I think it’s perfect – they do tend to mix their audience and messages (audience strata mismatch) but it is very good indeed.
As I’m working through the cloud computing market and helping some vendors with their go-to-market strategies I’ve decided to share this and some future studies on here because as I said in my ironic blog mission statement all those months ago, I want to highlight best practice in marketing communications and product marketing through this blog. So I thought it would be useful to share what value propositions and messages a market leader is using to address their prospects.
Anyway, below is the positioning statement that I’ve reverse engineered for Force.com’s proposition to end-user organisations. (I don’t plan to tackle the ISV or SI propositions yet)
It’s a little woolly and raw at the moment but even in that state it’s clear that Force.com knows its market, its competition and its USPs. The REPAMA SAS containing just Force.com at the moment can be found online at Slideshare.net and is embedded below.
If you’d like a copy of the slides let me know. For details of how to interpret the results of the REPAMA study please review the Lustratus REPAMA Guide.
Danny Goodall
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