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 CommentREPAMA Guide Now Online
Despite being available in “beta” form to REPAMA users for some time, I finally got round to packaging up a publicly downloadable version of the Lustratus REPAMA Guide. This can be downloaded from Lustratus.com for no charge.
I should say a big thank you to clients, colleagues and everyone else who has provided feedback on the guide, which studies should be included and how they should be presented.
So “Thank you”!
And for those looking to understand the product marketing and go-to-market strategies of TIBCO’s competitors in the High Performance Messaging space – specifically Solace Systems’ Content Router, 29West’s LBM and IBM’s WebSphere MQ LLM – I’ve also put the High Performance Messaging REPAMA Segment Analysis Study in… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, go-to-market, high performance middleware, marketing, Marketing Strategy, positioning, product management, product marketing, Vendor-Related Posts | 29West, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, competitive, Content Router, Danny Goodall, go-to-market, ibm, LBM, LLM, low latency messaging, Lustratus, marketing, marketing strategy, middleware, REPAMA, solace systems, strategy, tibco | 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 commentAn “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 comment2009 Guidance for CMOs
I think Michael Gerard is spot on with his views on the need for different priorities and strategies for CMOs in 2009. He talks about the need to remove the disconnect between sales and marketing, decentralisation of both the marketing function and budgets to the region and also about the importance of sales enablement. These are all hobby horses of mine. It’s well worth a read, I hope CMOs are listening.
Danny Goodall
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Audience strata mismatch
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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 commentThe company doth protest too much, methinks
…or Shakespeare and Cuban heels.
Apologies to those fans of the Bard for the bastardisation of the famous line from Hamlet but it’s a phrase I’ve come to use for early market software vendors that are trying just a little too hard to convince prospects that they are bigger and more credible than they really are.
Claiming, front and centre on your web site and in the copy of your press releases that you are the “global leader” in somethingorother appears to be the fashion in marketing communications. In fact we see phrases like “global”, “market-leading” or “leading provider” so often now that I think we’ve actually stopped thinking about the meaning of these words and whether we… Continue reading
Indocilis privata loqui – expelled from the marketing circle?
Without the benefit of a classical education I can’t be sure, but I think the Latin in the title says something like “not right to reveal secrets”. It’s the motto of the Magic Circle – an organisation that guards its magic secrets jealously. I wonder what would motivate a magician to leave the ‘circle and expose the tricks behind the “magic” and in doing so disappoint people everywhere with the realisation that the women doesn’t really get sawn in two but is in fact two very small women bred specifically for the act. Probably.
Funnily enough an ex-colleague of mine suggested that I might be doing the same thing by blogging on some of the techniques used… Continue reading
What is this blog about?
So what is this blog all about?
I’ve never been a fan of mission statements for the sake of mission statements. I guess that is because most that I read are painted in the blandest shade of beige or taste of vanilla. This tends to make them less of an “inspiring, rallying-call” type of mission statement and more of “a collection of boring indisputable facts that we think the CEO won’t fire us for putting down on paper” type of mission statement.
Mission?
That said, I think it’s worth setting out a plan for the type of material that we’ll be covering in this blog in future editions. So here goes. I… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, Uncategorized | early market, high tech, Lustratus, marketing, mission statement, research, strategy, tactics | Leave a comment
- Corporate DNA @ Progress Software – Redux
- Heroku Versus AppEngine and Amazon EC2 – Where Does it fit in?
- …We didn’t have an ice cream…
- 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
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.