lustratus REPAMA

Posts Tagged ‘marketing tactics’

I don’t mean to be crass here and I know that I’ve asked this question before, but I have to wonder whether we are experiencing as deep a slowdown as the media would have us believe.

Perhaps it hasn’t reached my part of the software industry yet but right now I’m working with four companies who are all doing incredibly well.  They’ve all had great years and are looking forward to a better year.  I have to balance that by saying that I’ve also got contacts in my network who have been hit by some real problems – but most of them are really closely tied to the investment banking market.

But most surprising for me is the UK job market.  I’ve been trying to help someone in my network to recruit for a sales position in the UK.  Because we work with lots of companies I have a very broad and deep network and from time to time I’ll try to help companies who are looking for good people.  I never try to pull people out of existing roles, but I’m happy to ask my network if they know someone “good” who is looking for a role.  Anyway the role I’m looking to fill looks excellent.  Good company.  Good pipeline.  Good people.  Good backers.  Good proposition.  But I’m struggling to find candidates.  “All the good people that have jobs and are staying put” I keep hearing.  So either this is the calm before the storm, or things are still “OK” out there.

I’m sure if we all believe it enough we can turn this slowdown into a real crisis but right now, in my network, things aren’t as bad as they might appear.

(This blog inspired by Troy McClure’s self-help film “Get some confidence, stupid!“)

Danny Goodall

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 sales representative from a high-tech company engages a prospect in conversation and the prospects asks the question:

“…so what does ACME do”?

Behind that questions is the implication that the prospect wants to know what ACME Corp. could do for him.  But instead of providing that information, I’ll wager that the sales rep will list a series of facts about ACME Corp.  He’ll start by telling the prospect the name of the company, the product name, the product category and he may also go on to describe some of the features of the product.  Like this.

“ACME Corp has recently introduced our DooperSuper product which is an advanced enterprise capability product that features support for the KJ8 standard”.

This is wrong.

Well it’s not wrong, but it’s the wrong time to provide this detail.  Remember the context of the question is that the prospect is thinking “What will this do for me?”, “What would I be left with if I were to become a customer of ACME Corp.?”.  An answer like the following would be more suitable:

“ACME Corp. helps our customers to reduce their data centre capital and energy costs”

This immediately tells the prospect what they would be left with if they were to become a customer of ACME Corp. and, if they’re interested, they can follow-up by asking for more detail.

So the question remains.  Why do so many high-tech vendors not lead with such a value proposition in their marketing communications?  The answer I think is two-fold.  Firstly, I think then many early marketing high-tech vendors have a very technical audience which means they feel that they should lead with some technical facts rather than translate this to a value statement.  This is naive because even the technical audience wants to know what they would get if they were to become a customer.

Secondly, many vendors do not understand the value that they can provide.  They’ve never documented the business value enjoyed by their customers.

So here are a few lessons for high-tech vendors:

1. Review your current customer successes
2. Look for a patten of the benefit or value that you’ve delivered
3. Adjust and tier your prospect communication.
   1. Lead with what your prospects will be left with – what will persist after the sale has been made.
   2. Add supporting technical detail where relevant.
4. Train the sales force to engage prospects in the same way

Danny Goodall.

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 one.  That said, I do recognise that it would be churlish to suggest to someone that has just lost their job that they should simply look on the bright side of life.  But someone’s loss has to be someone else’s gain – even if they were previously on the losing side.  It’s the way of things.

I believe that in enterprise software sales, generating interest is going to be tough for a little while yet.  But it is at precisely this time that market dynamics can be completely turned on their head.  The share of voice and vendor pecking order that “naturally” exists in a given segment can be completely, positively turned around when our staunchest competitors are focusing on the problem and not the opportunity created.

And as it is such a precious commodity, once we have generated a sales lead and it is handed over to the lead maturation process and ultimately the sales team, we better be completely sure that a) we’re saying the right things when we’re on our feet in front of the client and b) we know what the competition will be saying. This means laying traps for the competition, focusing on the things you do well and providing proof of the claims you make.

I think long-time marketing guru Seth Godin has captured it well when he talks about focusing on the wrong boxes.  And I think that the NLP fans out there would refer to the need for positive perceptual filters.  Either way I think it’s time to stop focusing on the red box and pay some attention to the others.

Danny Goodall

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

…slowing according to IDC’s Michael Gerard.  No surprise there then given the global economic slowdown.  I guess we’ve all seen some evidence of a slowing in spending and recruiting perhaps the surprise is that the slowdown is not as bad as one might have expected.  The results come from IDC’s 2008 Tech Marketing Benchmark Study (covered more fully on btobonline.com).  This is a piece of research that should find itself on every senior marketing exec’s highly polished desk.

Anyone expecting a grilling over budget requests should have studied this report beforehand for justification.  If you’re asking for money and you haven’t realised that your request is 10% higher than the average in the industry – you’re toast!  Well almost.  But knowledge is power and asking for cash whilst being able to point to good quality stats from your peers that justify the amounts against industry data will add weight to your request.

I’ve not seen the report but judging by the summary I’ve seen, it provides all sorts of benchmark data from budget levels (as a percentage of revenue), spending priorities to staffing levels.  What I found most interesting was the focus on the ratio of corporate (head office) marketing spend to field marketing.  Gerard concluded that in general it is too highly skewed towards central spend, depriving the field marketing teams of money that might work better for their local sales organizations.

“Hallelujah” is all I can say.  When I worked on the vendor side of marketing I held down a number of senior European field marketing positions.  This is an impossible positiong when budgets are tight.  You’re caught between the needs of the local sales VP and the corporate marketing organisation kicking out programs that you can’t use in Uzbekistan or France.  Well you know what I mean.

In addition the report provides some real gems showing where other technology marketing execs have placed their bets in terms of the marketing mix.  For example, across the entire study, marketing teams allocated the following budget percentages to the following program categories:

Events (22%), Advertising (17%), Direct Marketing (16%), Marketing Support and Sales Tools (14%), Digital Marketing (12%), PR (5%), Collateral (5%), Market Intelligence (4%), Analyst Relations (2%) and Other (3%).

These figures come from a mix of hardware (41%), software (40%) and service companies (19%) and across a broad spectrum of organisational size.

Any firm data that helps marketing organisations justify their plans and build better campaigns is good news as far as I’m concerned.

Danny Goodall

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 by marketing folks to stretch the truth and un-level the playing field.  It appears that my mate is concerned that our profession might get itself a bad name.  But I’m afraid it might be a little too late for that and anyway I’m not simply looking to expose crude marketing techniques with this blog.  I’m attempting to a) highlight both good and bad marketing techniques and b) analyse the output of marketing organisations to infer the real facts behind their highly polished press releases and their gleaming web sites.

In the UK we have a phrase “poacher turned gamekeeper” which I think is apt here.  I’d like to think we can make the marketing process more precise so that the best products can get into the hands of the people who need them.  I do sound rather righteous there don’t I.  In either case I’m certainly not attempting to be that magician that breaks rank and goes on an ephemerally short exposé career on TV chat shows.

But then again, I wouldn’t mind being the Penn and Teller of the marketing world.

Dan