Mar 25, 2013 | Breakthrough Marketing
Salesforce, the granddady of them all in Cloud Computing, has shifted Viewpoints again.
On August 31st of 2011, Salesforce announced the “Social Enterprise” -” Our social enterprise vision fundamentally changes how companies collaborate, share and manage information,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “By creating social customer profiles, employee social networks, customer social networks and product social networks, companies can delight their customers in entirely new ways.”
At the time, many of us thought hmmmm, are Salesforce’s customers really in tune with this. I was willing to cut them some slack as I saw this as a try to create some space now that the “end of software” really was no longer effective context for their Viewpoint to be impactful. At the height of Social media buzz, Salesforce was saying to customers, “Social is the future and we will get you there”.
Now, just 18 months later, it appears that the “Social Enterprise” has made way for “The Customer Company” . Announced this month, Salesforces boilerplate now reads:
“Founded in 1999, salesforce.com is the enterprise cloud computing leader. Salesforce.com’s social and mobile cloud technologies enable companies to transform into customer companies by connecting with their customers, employees, partners and products in entirely new ways. Based on salesforce.com‘s real-time, multitenant architecture, the company’s apps and platform revolutionize the way companies sell, service, market and innovate.”
So what’s going on here? Here what I think. First, it’s clear, that the end of software was not meaningful. But I think this new shift confirms that “The Social Enterprise” just didn’t resonate with customers. I think it’s because it was WAY too Salesforce centric, and just didn’t mesh with the day to day reality of the customer’s world. While there may be a shift in enterprise computing to “Social”, it’s not keeping Salesforce’s customers up at night or getting them excited to get out of bed. At the end of the day, “The Social Enterprise” was more aligned with Salesforce’s product and corp dev roadmap than it was with customer thinking.
This brings us to “The Customer Company”. In the KJR Viewpoint Framework, Salesforce is trying to move from a “Better Mousetrap” to a “Brave New World” , if you leverage us, you can become a Customer Company. Salesforce rode “The End of Software” through more than a decade of growth, an IPO and stunning success. Staying at the leading edge of Viewpoint is not easy, and at scale, Act 2 is much harder than Act 1. The Customer Company is try number 2. I think this is a step in the right direction. However, it still seems focused on what Salesforce WANTS their customers to become versus what they BELIEVE THEY NEED to become. Time will tell.
Mar 15, 2013 | Breakthrough Marketing
Introduction
This is part 3 of a 3 part series on the mechanics of building Breakthrough Viewpoint. This series is a “how to” guide to creating the 4 types of Breakthrough Viewpoints as described in this post – Trendspotting, Better Mousetrap, All Pain No Gain and Brave New World. In part 1, we used the STEEP framework to describe the customer’s new world and label the Trendspotting point A in figure 1 below. In part 2, we used the KJR AIM™ Framework to describe our Re-imagined and Unexpected solution to then label our Better Mousetrap Viewpoint, point C on our framework. In this post, we will look at the intersections points of STEEP and AIM and label the “All Pain No Gain” and “Brave New World”, points B and D below.
KJR’s Viewpoint Framework.
Point B– All Pain No Gain. Having described out customers world, and our solution in terms of shifts in reality and expectations respectively, we can now powerfully combine the two. Point B is the intersection of the today’s reality with the expected solution. This articulation focuses on the pain and/or missed opportunity of trying to solve today’s big problems with yesterday’s solutions. Describing this goes something like, “in today’s reality of X, if you depend on the solutions you expect like Y, you are left with a big problem(s), tremendous missed opportunity, or both” This works great when the pain is large enough to induce action, and is well recognized and acknowledged, yet unaddressed. As as example, Security solution providerFireEye talks about the Advanced Malware Threats and the resultant risk to create a compelling context for a discussion of their solution. They have experienced explosive growth and are reportedly poised for an IPO .
Point D – Brave New World. The final viewpoint articulation is the intersection of today’s reality with our re-imagined and unexpected solution. This Viewpoint describes the promised new state that the customer can arrive at if they implement your solution. It is powerful because it talks about the intersection of the customer’s world and the providers unique solution. It is articulated like this, “In today’s new reality of X, if you have a solution that provides/does Y, you can achieve this Brave New World we call Z”. KJR client DMTI Spatial has established a new Viewpoint called “Location Economics”. DMTI is challenging their customers to find new opportunities to build business and reduce risk by recognizing the power of tapping into today’s Mobile Society with DMTI’s powerful transaction enablement services, re-awakening a staid and conservative data oriented market. Their articulation goes something like this, “Today we live in a mobile society. The movement of people, things and information creates both opportunity and risk. If you can integrate location information that is timely and accurate into your critical business and customer facing transactions, you can unlock the power of Location Economics, increasing revenues and reducing risk.”
In summary, we have now walked around the KJR Viewpoint Matrix, and seen the process of articulating 4 types of breakthrough Viewpoints. By applying this framework to your marketing positioning and messaging, you can breakthrough the the clutter of information overload, grab the attention of prospects and buyers, and earn the opportunity to set the stage for high velocity marketing and sales execution. The power of a Viewpoint sets the stage for your go to market success.
