Browsing Tag

marketers

Marketing IS in the Middle: Ben Cody

Oh development – they HAVE to be the problem, that’s the common believe in a good deal of companies.  The next expert in delivering his take on Marketing being in the middle is one the of best technologist I’ve worked with and a development leader writ large, Ben Cody.  I call him Benji, mainly in my head, but he is a what I refer to as a practical visionary.  Ben transitioned from be being a developer leader with great ideas I depended on for years to an industry leader in B2B technologies and BPM.  I trust Ben on every level because he provides input, improvement and access to his ideas and team, not a common thing for a marketer (my opinion) and why I think it is important to get his marketing insights.  Ben currently is VP of Product Management at Global360 and continues to change the industry, glad to know him – glad he participated in the interview below.

What marketing roles have you had and in what markets?

Various roles in Product Management, Product Marketing and Field Marketing in the enterprise software markets, with a predominant focus on Financial Services and Manufacturing.

When you look at your career in marketing, what discipline/component have you found most interesting/challenging?

Although not what I do day to day anymore, the field marketing.  Demand generation is a challenge – getting people to respond to various programs – was one of the more fascinating studies in human behavior.   A given tactic works for one product, but not the other.

What do you feel the most important component of a successful marketing gig?  (Product, Brand, Positioning)

I came out of development, so I’m definitely a Product person.  The product is the hardest one to change and takes the longest to build right.  The right product with the right capabilities which solves problems is all that the market can ask for.  But this often isn’t the product that marketers are positioning.  Buyers see through lipstick on the pig these days like never before, so stretching capabilities in a data sheet or simply polishing the UI doesn’t work in a competitive marketplace.  Too many were burnt in the last big wave of enterprise IT spend back around the turn of the century, so Product is the key component.

What experiences brought you to this conclusion?

I’ve worked multiple markets, in various stages of maturity, from new markets to laggards and with varied targets, such as the SMB or Enterprise. To that end, I’ve spent a good deal of time taking legacy products and repositioning them has taught me the hard way that lipstick wears off.  Not that much fun, profitable, but not fun.

If you could design the perfect corporate environment for a marketer to be successful what would that be?

I’ve worked multiple markets, in various stages of maturity, from new markets to laggards and with varied targets, such as the SMB or Enterprise.   Along the way, I’ve been fortunate enough to work with some industry leading, incredibly innovative solutions, as well as my share of also ran’s and legacy products.  No matter how hard you try, lipstick wears off and the pig over time, and the pig will show his real face.  In many ways it’s like cooking, if you don’t start with quality ingredients, you won’t be satisfied with your meal in the end. If you could design the perfect corporate environment for a marketer to be successful what would that be?
It’s the leadership and how they view investment, market pursuit and strategic planning.  Leadership starts at the top, so in my experience the #1 thing by far is that the CEO needs to have a vision for the market and the company that they pursue above all else.  And that vision needs to be something more than a targeted earnings per share.  Typically these leaders come from sales.  They do occasionally grow up through the product ranks as well.  What I’ve seen fail is a pure P&L oriented mentality that is typical of leaders that grew up in the finance office.  In fairness I’ve known a one or two finance types that were good CEO’s.  But finance types are the ones who ran GM, Ford and Chrysler for the last 20 years.  These are the leaders who didn’t feel there was enough $ in hybrid cars (forget the environment) or that “good enough” quality was good enough.  – need I say more?
How far is this from reality?

It is the reality today in successful companies…

December 15, 2008 by
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Marketing IS in the Middle: John Mecke

The next person who was kind enough to participate in the Middle series was John Mecke.  John is a revenue optimizer and true operator.  John has experience in all kinds of organizations – small, large, start-ups and mature organization, so his world view is balanced I suspect by the diversity of organization, products and strategies he has pursued/developed over time.  This interview not only turned out to answer the questions, but perhaps has some good use cases which I can steal and use for myself, hopefully you can to.

What marketing roles have you had and in what markets?

I’ve had just about every role from a marketing perspective – Business Development, Corporate development, Product Management.  I was even lucky enough to be a CMO, which is one of the toughest jobs to ever have in marketing!  I’ve not only been a marketer, I’ve done a good deal of work in other functional areas – support, professional services and operations which provides a good lens to view the market from.

From a market perspective, I’ve participated in teams delivering enterprise application development platforms, e-learning and human capital, non-profits and B2B infrastructure solutions.

When you look at your career in marketing, what discipline/component have you found most interesting/challenging?

Demand Generation.  In my career I have worked primarily with products and services that are in either the early majority, late majority, or laggard parts of the technology adoption life cycle.  When solutions reach this stage of their natural evolution, customers and prospects are not banging down the door to buy your products.  Prospects typically have multiple vendors they could purchase their solution from.  The key challenge in this type of environment for Marketing is how to enable the organization to find, develop, and close high value opportunities.  Most battles that occur in later stage technology companies occur between the Marketing and Sales teams.  Sales feels that marketing never delivers enough quality leads and Marketing feels that the Sales team is sitting by their PCs and fax machines waiting for the orders to fly in on their own.

What do you feel the most important component of a successful marketing gig? (Product, Brand, Positioning)

Positioning.  For middle to late stage technology companies, honest self assessment of the firm’s realistic position in the competitive landscape is critical.  The reality is that in established markets there is a pecking order for the vendors in the market.  There are always the leaders (as measured by revenues and customers), the middle tier players, and the niche players – think of Geoffrey Moore’s Gorillas, Chimps, & Monkeys.  In middle to late stage markets the players rarely change where they fit into the pecking order via organic growth.  Typically changes occur because of mis-execution by management teams (think restructurings, investments in products/services that never had a chance of succeeding, layoffs, or liquidation) or by mergers and acquisitions.  Go to any technology company’s website and you will find the term in their ‘About Us’ section “We are a leading provider of . . . . “  In many cases the management team and especially marketing really believe that they are the leading provider — if the market would just really understand how their solution was ‘superior.’

If you have the courage to really understand where you fit into the market, there are dozens of strategies and tactics that can be employed from a product, brand, and positioning perspective to steal existing business from both competitors that are larger as well as smaller than your firm is.


Since you selected Positioning, how have you seen that contribute to revenue?

I can think of several situations where realistic positioning has materially contributed to revenue growth, but I’ll talk about two specific examples.

When I was in the enterprise application development tools business in the 1990’s we sold these very expensive Computer Aided Software Engineering products.  These were tools used by application developers in Global 2000 enterprises to model business applications and the generate the actual application code for COBOL, C, IMS, DB2, Oracle, Sybase, CICS, IMS, MQ Series, Tuxedo, & BEA environments.  My company, Sterling Software, was the largest player in the market primarily as a result of five roll up acquisitions.  Once we were established as the leader we still have fend off the chimps and monkeys who were riding the e-business market wave in the late 1990s.

We realized that only 15% of the Global 2000 would ever respond to our core value proposition.  The most receptive people believed in the theory of ‘model-based application development.’  This theory was somewhat of a cult – the adherents truly believed that by modeling their business requirements and systems designs using rigorous graphically based meta models that they would catch errors much sooner in the application development process and as a result deliver higher quality applications faster and cheaper in comparison to traditional application development approaches.  All cults have leaders.  Our market was strongly influenced by technologists like Ed Yourdon – the father of structured analysis and design, Peter Coad, James Martin, and Grady Booch.  We created a concept called Component Based Development (aka CBD).

We decided to leverage these trends and create a concept called a concept called Component Based Development (aka CBD).  We then promoted one of our internal senior architects as the definitive expert on Component Based Development.  Dr. Allen Brown became a prolific writer published by Prentice Hall (these were pre-blog days).  You can check out Alan’s publications at http://tinyurl.com/5kgvpe .  We also formed a USA-based and International CBD Customer Advisory board that held meetings twice a year in very nice locations.  Our ‘cult’ of Component Based Development enabled us to market and sell effectively to the 15% of the Global 2000 that were receptive to our core value proposition.  It also helped us to maintain extremely high maintenance retention rates on our software maintenance business as well.

Another great example of how realistic positioning contributed to revenue involves the concept of Competitive Steal Aways.   How can you create enough hard dollar savings that would encourage users of a service or product to move to another service or product.  The concept of competitive steal aways typically are a late stage laggard market play.  The biggest challenge is that you can’t only provide price reduction, but you need to provide more value over the current provider.  That requires effective positioning, promotion and placement to be successful.

What experiences brought you to this conclusion?

I have had the opportunity to work in startups, companies that were ‘crossing the chasm’, as well as companies that truly were providers of legacy solutions to existing markets.  Sitting around the executive table the common lament has always been “how can we grow revenue in a tough market environment.”  I’ve seen companies deny the reality of their true competitive and market position – most of those companies eventually failed or were acquired at what could only be considered to be a discounted valuation.  I have also worked in companies that had the courage to accept the reality of their situation and creatively find ways to execute against their competitors.

If you could design the perfect corporate environment for a marketer to be successful what would that be?

Ideally I would love to be in an environment that comes up with the next Google or iPhone.  Working for a company that creates and then sells the hottest product or service is a dream almost everybody in the technology world wants.  Since I have as much of a chance of winning the Mega-Millions Lotto as I do of stumbling into that type of situation the perfect corporate environment for a marketer like me would be an executive team that has a firm grasp on the reality of their competitive landscape and the courage to use highly creative approaches for demand generation.

How far is this from reality?

Not far at all.  The number of technology companies that truly dominate their markets is few. The number of technology companies that wish they could dominate their markets is measured in the thousands.  The concepts I have laid out here are applicable to all of them.

December 14, 2008 by
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Marketing IS in the Middle: Chris Brogan

Marketers are EVERYWHERE and not all are formally trained, I for one am an accidental marketer so I thought it was important to reach out to other folks who aren’t formally trained.  So as I continue to look at marketing and my network, I thought it was important to engage not just traditional markets, but also folks that help drive the overall ecosystem.  Chris Brogan is just one of those folks.  I actually didn’t follow Chris at all until he responded to a corporate blog I participate on and piqued my interest.   I’ve had the opportunity to meet, read and appreciate Chris’ take on social media and the larger marketing opportunity with social media.    Make no bones about it – Chris is a marketer and his new venture as president of New Marketing Labs is proof.  Chris was cool enough to participation in the marketing is in the middle conversation and below is his view:

What marketing roles have you had and in what markets?

None. I was a technologist for the last 18 years, but got into marketing by way of joining an events marketing company (Pulvermedia), and just haven’t left the circus since. Over the last 10 years, I’ve been blogging and using social media for improved business communications. Turns out that *became* marketing when I wasn’t looking.

When you look at your career in marketing, what discipline/component have you found most interesting/challenging?

Interesting: listening. I think that listening and customer service are the new marketing. Screw your stupid tag lines and contests. If I listen to prospective customers’ needs, and I can improve the way a customer works with my company, then I’m doing what marketing really wants to do: acquire new customers and keep the existing ones happy. Have fun with your contests.

What do you feel the most important component of a successful marketing gig?  (Product, Brand, Positioning)

Moving a behavioral needle. Did I get something to change and stay changed from when I started until when I left.

Since you selected something I NEVER would have thought of how has that contributed to revenue?

Building loyal passionate communities is a great way to contribute to revenue. It’s lovely to ask people who are passionate about how you make them feel for money. They like giving. Revenue is a return on influence.

What experiences brought you to this conclusion?

I’ve run some very successful conferences, and I’ve also run some online marketing experiences for people. In both cases, my best proof is revenue. I hate the ROI question, because there’s no easy calculator that shows you what I’m going to deliver. So instead, I show revenue bumps as fast as I can. Seems like a fair trade.

If you could design the perfect corporate environment for a marketer to be successful what would that be?

Small, nimble, and focused on action, not beauty.

How far is this from reality?

Not far in my world. I’m working with some great companies, big ones, who love the idea that it’s as simple as listening, building relationships, and serving those relationships. I love developing quality content marketing for them, like group blogs or email marketing that delivers, instead of the same tired old marketing messages. I’m loving my ride, and looking forward to what comes next!

December 13, 2008 by
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Marketing IS in the Middle: Vikram Singha

So with the recent examination of my overall social network I got to thinking about the people who responded and those that I engage over and over to learn from, either via social media or in person.  To that end, I’m starting a series of interviews on Marketing, which are essentially just 7 questions.  I’ve got a bunch in the queue already, but wanted to start with a key influencer to my marketing experience, Vikram Singha.  I had the pleasure to have Vikram in my group for like 4 years and to work along side him as a peer during his last role I worked with him in.

Vikram is the type of product manager that looks at the numbers – the opportunity and the revenue, plus one of the best statisticians I have ever met.  Vikram is one of the founding members of Global Energy Talent and responsible for Marketing.  To that end, below is Vikram’s overview on how Marketing’s in the Middle from his experience:

What marketing roles have you had and in what markets?
Strategic Marketing- Federal Express; Ecommerce and logistics; worldwide
Product Manager- Inovis; B2B software and services; primarily US
Marketing lead- Global Energy Talent; Human capital  services for the energy industry; worldwide

When you look at your career in marketing, what discipline/component have you found most interesting/challenging?
The sales and marketing interface.  At most of organizations where I’ve worked there has always been tension between these two functions. The push and pull happens on many different levels:

  • who to target?
  • What markets?
  • What to build and pitch?
  • How to price?
  • How to get to the decision maker?

The successful organization aligns the Sales leader and the CMO tightly and creates structures that allow these teams to interact both formally AND informally. The trick is to make sure there isn’t an echo chamber and that creative differences can be brought out and thought through. My sense is that short term focused organizations (typically the tech industry which tend to be more quarter-driven) tend to have more differences. Managing this is always a challenge, as well as part of the fun of marketing.

What do you feel the most important component of a successful marketing gig?  (Product, Brand, Positioning)
Positioning. At the end of the day Marketing’s role is to tell the organization’s story– to prospects, customers, employees and different stakeholders in the market at large. This all boils down to how you talk about yourself, how you empower everyone in the org to tell the same story. Once you sell the vision then its easier to make the transactional sale, whether it’s a product or service.

Since you selected Positioning, how has that contributed to revenue in your experience?
Example at my current gig: Am part of a startup providing recruitment, training and consulting for the energy industry worldwide. We’re competing with both large global generalists as well as regional specialists. The only way we can get access to decision makers is to focus very specifically in one vertical domain and immediately connect with a pain point that most in the industry are generally aware of but usually don’t verbalize- lack of technical talent and the process to fill the crew gap. We’ve done this in a variety of ways and channels, and as result have entrée (and ongoing projects) at quite a few global oil majors that wouldn’t have given us the time of the day if our story was uni-dimensional. Being in the services industry (read: low IP) the value has to be defined at a very fundamental level, else it then just becomes a nickel and dime game.

What experiences brought you to this conclusion?
Trial and error!

If you could design the perfect corporate environment for a marketer to be successful what would that be?
Probably an environment where there is freedom to experiment. Ability to learn, and more importantly, institutionalize this learning. Key point is that this is not a marketing issue, rather an organizing principle at its core.

How far is this from reality?
Some companies are doing this already. Toyota, Apple, P&G, Nokia, Ideo. In fact Ideo has some very interesting approaches to ethnographic learning systems that drive marketing design decisions.

December 11, 2008 by
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