On Informatica, Evangelism, Audience Strata and BIG-DATA
I attended an event the other week in London organised by Informatica entitled The Enterprise Data Management Forum.
I thoroughly enjoyed the event – except that it overran and I had to miss the Q&A panel to run and get a flight. That aside, it’s really gratifying to watch a large-ish vendor execute on marketing strategy with a single vision. I’ve long admired Informatica’s marketing, having worked alongside a couple of their ex-senior marketing folks and seen the disciplines they learned at Informatica. And it’s clear that the company is focussed, knows who it sells to and why they buy.
But I thought I’d share a couple of observations that reminded me that the Informatica marketing machine is not… Continue reading
Posted in Data integration, marketing | 
audience, big-data, gartner, informatica, john radcliffe, mdm, Target audience | 
Leave a commentAn Interesting Piece on Value Propositions from ITSMA
Whilst carrying out some research recently I realised that I need to arrive at a more granular categorisation of the types or categories of value propositions that vendors use.
And in attempting to do that I stumbled across an interesting read on the ITSMA site entitled Why You Need Three Different Types of Value Propositions. I hadn’t heard of ITSMA before but it appears that they focus on helping high-tech organisations to market solutions and services. I’ll certainly track them from here on in because I felt that I could have written the blog entry myself as it matches my own personal experience very accurately.
The three types of value proposition that the author refers to are in… Continue reading
The Psychology of Decision Making
Carrying on from my blog on “corporate shyness”, I’m looking here at the different ways we evaluate information and make decisions. The first thing to say is that this is a big subject and one that others are much better qualified to cover than I am. Myers-Briggs has led much of the work on personality types and if you’re looking for in depth information that is not a bad place to start. But I am going to look at how personality traits influence the way we make decisions and what impact that might have on a marketing strategy aimed at influencing people.
Intuition
People who rely on intuition to make decisions typically believe that they see the whole… Continue reading
Standards-based marketing – an antidote “Sell Differently” Part 3
Part 3 – Sell Differently
I’m continuing this series of blogs here by looking at the techniques that software vendors can use to create the “illusion” of differentiation in markets where technical standards have led to little material product difference.
Perhaps the most obvious differentiator between organisations that have “broadly” similar technology, and an area that particularly hurts smaller or less well established software vendors, is the vendor’s approach to selling.
Which audience strata do you aim at and what do you say to them?
At its most crude this can be the difference between Vendor A talking to a technical audience about the features of Product A whilst Vendor B is talking to line of business managers within the… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, differentiation, go-to-market, marketing, Marketing Strategy, pain, positioning, product marketing, reason to buy | audience, benefit, competition, competitive, Competitive Marketing, Danny Goodall, differentiation, marketing strategy, REPAMA | Leave a comment“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 commentAudience Strata
In infrastructure software sales and marketing, Lustratus categorises the primary end user target audience as one or more of the following three categories:
- IT Technical – Represents the overtly technical disciplines within the IT organisation that have no management, strategic or commercial responsibilities
- IT Business – Represents the higher management levels of the IT organisation that have strategic and/or financial responsibilities
- Business – Represents the line of business functions outside of the IT organisation
Whilst there are many subtle distinctions between these these layers a general description of the types of positions and the role of they play in enterprise software sales for infrastructure software is shown in the diagram below:
Danny Goodall
Related posts that you might also… Continue reading
Positioning and the Positioning Statement
Positioning and the Positioning Statement
This page contains a summary of a series of blog entries I made during January and February 2009. It describes the format of the positioning statement that we use in the REPAMA competitive intelligence methodology. I refer to the concept of positioning and the positioning statement frequently so I wanted to pull them all together in once place. So here you are.
Danny Goodall
Links to Original Posts
The Positioning Statement
FOR… positioning element
WHO…positioning element
OUR…positioning element
IS A…positioning element
THAT PROVIDES…positioning element
UNLIKE…positioning element
OUR PRODUCT…positioning element
Part 1 – Positioning
Happy 2009! I’ve been in debate with a number of correspondents about the layout and format of the positioning statement… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, differentiation, go-to-market, ideal customer, marketing, Marketing Strategy, positioning, product category, product marketing, product name, reason to buy, Uncategorized, usp | alternative, audience, benefit, competition, competitive, competitor, customer pain, Danny Goodall, ideal customer, Lustratus, main benefit, messaging, offer category, positioning, positioning statement, primary alternative, primary reason to buy, product category, product marketing, product name, REPAMA, Strategic Marketing, target customer, unique sales proposition, usp | 1 CommentPart 6 – The “THAT PROVIDES [main benefit]” element from the positioning statement
The Main Benefit or Reason to buy
In this series of blogs I’m exploring the format of the positioning statement that Lustratus uses in our REPAMA research methodology.
Today I’m looking at one of, if not the most important elements. This is an element that in my experience vendors often find the most difficult to define about their own offering. This is the “THAT PROVIDES [main benefit]” element. First some let’s look at how this element fits into the context of the complete positioning statement.
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… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, esb, go-to-market, marketing, Marketing Strategy, positioning, product marketing, reason to buy, Vendor-Related Posts | audience, benefit, competition, competitive, Competitive Marketing, Danny Goodall, esb, Lustratus, marketing strategy, positioning, positioning statement, product marketing, reason to buy, REPAMA, Strategic Marketing, strategy | Leave a commentInaction. The biggest “competitor” in a slowdown
I often find that when building competitive strategies, vendors tend to focus all of their efforts on other vendors with similar products and technologies. They believe that if they understand how the other vendors in their segment are taking their products to market, they will give themselves a good chance of winning business. Whilst there is nothing wrong with this strategy, it is very easy to get trapped into the habit of seeing things only from a vendor perspective and forgetting that the customer always has a choice.
The result is that vendor A believes that as long as he/she builds clear differentiation versus vendors B,C and D he will win the business. The reality is that vendors… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, cloud computing, communication, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, marketing, Marketing Management, Marketing Strategy, product marketing | application virtualization, audience, budgets, cloud computing, competitive, dasm, Lustratus, marketing strategy, REPAMA, slowdown | Leave a commentAudience strata mismatch
 |  |
If I were to write in this blog
“18th century art has always been my passion. It’s my belief that mid-18th century, art, as captured by oil on canvas, has never been surpassed in terms of quality.”
You may ask what on earth that has to do with you – a visitor to a blog about high-technology marketing. You’d be right to question it because I’d obviously written the wrong thing to the wrong audience. My message may have been exactly what I wanted to say but I chose the wrong audience to deliver it to. As it happens, I’m afraid I’m a bit of a philistine when it comes to art appreciation – but hopefully… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, marketing, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Tactics, positioning, product marketing | audience, competitive, Competitive Marketing, Lustratus, messaging, product marketing, REPAMA, strata, Strategic Marketing | 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.