Browsing Tag

markets

Intellectual honesty is the best policy

So I’ve had some great conversations over the last week and am having a great deal of fun with the Marketing IS in the Middle project.  I’ve had to connect on phone, via email and in person with key people I trust who do a little marketing which in and off itself has been very informative and rewarding.   This post is ultimately the synthesis of three key quotes from the project:

Did I get something to change and stay changed from when I started until when I left. – Chris Brogan

Being in the services industry (read: low IP) the value has to be defined at a very fundamental level – Vikram Singha

…honest self assessment of the firm’s realistic position in the competitive landscape is critical – John Mecke

If there is already a set of key themes in the feedback from the interviews they are culture and organizational alignment.   What is acceptable, what is required and where do you focus.   Another way to look at it is  –  What support does the greater organization provide, what contributions can you make and how can you impact sustaining change in an organization or for a given product/brand in a portfolio.  For some reason that takes many a marketer down the “we’re best and undifferentiated” path.

Not every product can be the best, but it may be the best for a very small use case and market segment, which doesn’t suck, but isn’t that exciting.  So we try and get a little creative and end up a little bland.  I’m not saying that marketers are dishonest, I’m more saying we are optimists and love our products.  To that end, some marketers optimistically position products as best in class, industry leading and other category killer references which are sure to drive explosive growth.

Being the best is the fun/easy, but isn’t really marketing.  Predicting growth is definitely the better side of product management and marketing, but not always like – sometimes you’re number 6 in the market with flat to declining revenues.  Ultimately buyers have problems and don’t necessarily care about your products, so if you could spend sometime figuring out what the problems are, rather than declaring your products the best you might be able to create a “behavior change” which is lasting and drives growth. To that end, perhaps a little intellectual honest about your product just might be the start.

I find that 9 questions will always help out when trying to gauge your position in a technology market:

3 Questions for your Sales Organization

  1. Who are the top 3 competitors and how do we rank?
  2. Why do we win against each of these competitors?
  3. If you could sell 2 of the competitor products which would they be and why?

3 Questions for your customers

  1. Who else did you consider in your search for a solution?
  2. Why did you select this product over our competitors?
  3. Will you buy more products from us? Please explain why

3 Questions for the Marketing organization?

  1. What is the reason you win?
  2. What is the clear differentiation against key competitors?
  3. How many sales calls have you gone on/customer visits have you had in the last 60 days?

If you extend a wide outreach into these stakeholders and look at the responses it might just tell a different story for your press release boilerplate, keep you honest and let you know the buyer just a little better.  The worst thing that happens is you find out your place for your product in the marketplace.

December 18, 2008 by
(4)

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
(3)

Dude – like social metrics, momentum and stuff

The launch of the latest interim board for Social Media Club has been an interesting thing. The traction has been pretty good and the numbers, while they may or may tie out in the press release to exactly 42 – they are directionally correct. So here is the “Social Media Dashboard” for the market launch:

  • 59 new members signed up since the press release
  • $2,000 in member revenue
  • 35+ comments of people wanting to be the 42nd interim board member, plus 7 private messages
  • Some folks think 41/42 are too many people for a board
  • A significant retort on Nuking the Fridge
  • Revitalized chapters and new requests to form chapters

With the email distribution of the “dashboard”, some of the board members have started their lessons learned phase and improvement iteration already. I suspect each member in their own way is executing something in the context of the “do goood” governance model – posting, actioning feedback and identifying a path forward. This is starting to look like a business and just like a business this dashboard information is a limited and latent view of the ongoing evolution of the conversation around the new board.

The conversation is all over the place – pros and cons. I thought I would spend some time to provide a little context to the metrics and information above for those of you who haven’t decided to get involved YET or may never get involved.

Increased momentum

The release and follow up content is establishing an initial inertia which previously didn’t exist for the social club. More content the better -right? There is no such thing as bad publicity, so I encourage @AmandaChapel to crank up the “hyperbol-ic” satire machine and go. Afterall, it is all upside. Even the group’s lemonade solution of the press release miscount, “the search for member 42”, has been reasonably fruitful and hopefully folks that want to be on the board push it well beyond the 35+ comments of interest.

In general, volunteer groups need more members and the social media club go some in the past week. So it appears the formation of the interim group is building the membership and awareness consistent with it’s corporate speak goes.

Size Matters?

While the momentum math is a little fuzzy, if you consider all the tweets and board member posts is considerably larger than represented above and it appears to be how you size the impact of an event in social media, increasing the share of voice. Without a large interim group, the reach would have been less and board size provides for increased skills coverage and redundancy for task execution. The whole concept about the board is do the work, whatever that is. That’s where the board is going – task groups, execution plans and exits. To that end, I think the use of the term interim is the correct adjective for the noun, the board.

Upon a little reflection though, these headline numbers, while interesting, may not be actionable at this point. This mirrors some of Kelly Feller’s key messages on the importance of metrics, deliverables and transparency in business around social media. As a business guy, who blogs both as an individual and as a member of a corporation, I couldn’t agreement more. Even with Eloqua, Google Analytics and WordPress stats – tough stuff to establish an increases revenue R factor.

<aside> I think overtime social media will move post the transaction and ultimately may not be a demand generation engine at all. Wouldn’t it be helpful is there was a standard based model/approach for social media metrics which could be generally accepted by businesses? </aside>

Metrics matter and is the biggest gap social media marketers have. Don’t get me wrong, metrics are available, but the one’s I’ve been watching for almost 2 years suggest that community is about customers, not prospects – at least in the B2B space which is where I exist.

If all you have is a hammer – everything is a nail.

Jumping the Shark?

So I clearly remember the jumping the shark episode from Happy Days and even recall thinking it was dumb when I saw it as a kid, the same with the Indy flying fridge, but I struggle to find a parallel to the board and based on these high level metrics this appears to be to be the general theme. That being said, putting Nukked the Fridge in the title does make for a killer headline. I think we have all seen enough copyblogger clones like “the 10 irrefutable laws of _________”, so I’m super groovey with the post on that level.

Delivering an ROI

The conversation is social media’s share of voice, old school PR – yuck.

The whole social media ecosystem centers on the key construct of conversation. A conversational approach  is essentially the key differentiator from a market approach for new media folk and consumers in the channel. Just to let you know, it isn’t that easy to define or to develop a business justification document against conversation as a deliverable.  I know – old school business – yuck.

Even the market metaphor is innately noisy. With increased adoption, diversity of voice and new use cases some of these things will work themselves out. The most interesting factor in impact is typically time oh but if only you could cube the future. Overtime the market participants we become more diverse in their focus, capabilities and the message will morph which will aid in developing more traditional business approaches on how to achieve a tangible benefit.

Diversity is a good thing. Ultimately, if there isn’t enough diversity in the social media conversation, then the risk is we’ll all continue to drink our own Kool-Aid. We’ll continue to distribute our Purplesaurus Rex on our blogs, friendfeeds and tweets with limited awareness, minimal credibility and acceptance. So perhaps the general goals of the Social Media Culb of awareness and adoption will help diversify the predominately “everything is cool, build it and they will come and rainbows and unicorns messaging platform”.

There is definitely the risk of the social media marketers to plateau as the deadhead equivalent of a marketer. At this point, the social media’s value prop is at best the revenue equivalent of “Kind grilled cheese & veggie pitas made with love for only a $1”, which trust me doesn’t scale and can’t be sustainable in the current energy market.

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July 13, 2008 by
(2)

5 Incomplete Thoughts on Social Media

Remember the title….

1. Manufactured Market?

There is so much noise about the market opportunity and the necessity to fund community initiatives for enterprises but little has materialize in respect to direct revenue and meaningful metrics. This is a challenge for traditional marketers on many levels and the type of topics I suspect are being at the Forrester Marketing conference. There is a after the show workshop that asserts the following which might be close to revenue:

Experiments with rich media, blogging, RSS, and social networks show how dynamic marketing techniques can touch on buyers’ emotions, educate and persuade them, measure interactions more effectively, and generate additional business.

2. Perpetual Social Markets

Shel’s interviews of Jeremiah Owang and the Sea World folks are both emblematic of the challenges of linking social media investments to a return. How can you effectively measure and manage social media as a growth engine? Examples exist where a specific event or a series of inferences can be leveraged to assume the impact of social media, as evidenced in the description of Sea World video at Fast Company:

Measuring social media is one of the pain spots for the enterprise. As Kami Huyse, says in this clip of her client SeaWorld San Antonio. “It all depends on what you measure.” …

What to measure indeed – hits, downloads….. Ultimately most businesses measure revenue from Marketers, so perhaps Sea World is an anomaly and most businesses know how to convert the social media marketing budget to revenue and understand how to successfully deploy/develop a community. Let’s see if this is the case from Shel’s interview of Jeremiah, you probably only need to listen for say, the whole thing:

3. Social Media as Infrastructure

With the metric challenges and elusiveness of revenue is social media a function of retention more so than demand? If marketers are unable to deliver/verify incremental new revenues base on investment, should the metric hunt move to revenue retention and customer satisfaction?

Cool technology should never be relegated to the “post-transactional” budget fight…..

4. Platforms as Markets

Is Twitter a market? Facebook? Myspace? With increasing platforms for exchange more and more opportunity appears to emerge as populations flock to platforms. Where people gather transactions happen right? There are many example of this in the physical space – Burning Man, dead shows and in the parking lots of panic shows. So if people are gathering, there has to be transactions to be had – right?

Information as currency and messaging as a service continues to be the key commodities being exchanged on social media platforms….

5. Community as a Commoditizer

The transactional efficiencies of social computing by it’s very nature puts downward cost pressure on goods. Ease of comparison, ease of purchase and ease of access to other consumers/product customers. Ease of discovery. Product differentiation through a cost center represents…

Maybe the title should have been 5 Incoherent Thoughts…

~cheers!

April 11, 2008 by
(1)