Browsing Tag

positioning

Marketing is in the Middle: The Recap

Thought I would provide a recap of the series which appears to be some of the most popular content here according to Google analytics…  So in case you didn’t catch it the first time, here’s the replay:

Sales Interface – Vikram Singha:  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.

Culture – Chris Brogan:   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.

Awareness – Steve Johnson:   …it’s just the concept of being in marketing.  The word marketing means different things to different folks.  1/3 thinks it is advertising, 1/3 hear MARCOM and the remaining 1/3 think it is strategy and products. The confusion of what marketing is challenging for a lot of people in marketing roles.

Roles – Chris Cummings:  The most interesting and challenging has been defining and explaining what it is, exactly, that I do. Over the years, more than one person (including multiple CEOs) have noted that: a) they’re not entirely sure how I do what I do but b) I always get the job done, and bring real value to the business. On the one hand, that’s a big compliment. On the other, it made me a little nervous

Engagement – Jay Baer:  ..stop (at least for this year) talking about the hot new thing, and instead turn our attention to doing the current things better. Social media optimization and integration would be a good start.

Customer Intimacy – Josh Duncan: I would say that now, more than ever, successful organizations are finding a way to align their marketing, sales, and support teams to best server their customers.  There is a greater understanding that all of these touch points are important when it comes to the customer experience.

Metrics – Elizabeth Quintanilla:  ..finding all the analytics based on the customer metrics and presenting them in a digestible format for the small business owner so they can see the impact of their marketing activities

Teams Matter – Jennifer Doctor: I believe what is hard is understanding and adapting to the different cultures I have entered and left. Each environment brings its own set of expectations and rules, mostly unwritten and tribal driven.   This can make it challenging to drive to what is right and make a difference.

Evolving Expectations – John Peltier: Product management is evolving and maturing as a discipline, which is helping illustrate to companies the clarity of vision that should exist for products brought to market.  Product managers should strive to establish a minimum set of deliverables that can clearly convey the essence of a product, and should strive to ensure they can complete it convincingly before delivering a product to market.

Field Success Matters – Marty Thompson:  One of the most valuable things any marketer can do is spend time with their sales team. Go out in the field with them. Walk a mile in their moccasins. Believe it or not, they really want you to help them be more successful. And they spend more time talking with customers and prospects, more than most marketers do now. Spend time with your customers, even the ones who are unhappy. Get out there.

All about the Product – Mukund Mohan:  Great products appeal to the customer in a uniquely satisfying way, making marketing’s job to only create awareness.  Satisfied customer’s allow for faster product adoption and provides quicker time to revenue.

 

You can’t move a brand without moving people…

212 slides on positioning your brand, sorta.  More about Innovation and Brands and how the channels of communication may just be the innovation. Great break down on brands by Johan Ronnestam, I’ve never thought of my name as a google keyword though.

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.

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.