Jul 7, 2016 | Leadership
Go to Market leaders in organizations are invaluable. You recognize them because they seem to anticipate your questions, they show the way to others, they have their fingers on both the pulse of the market, and possesses and uncanny sense of what to do next to build and grow the business.
Whether the CMO, the VP of Marketing, the Director of Product Marketing, the senior Field Marketing Manager in a geography, or even the Chief Technology Officer, Go to Market Leadership is not judged by title but by impact. All of these jobs have a mix of strategic, tactical and even clerical work. However, leaders rise above this to drive not only tactics, but strategy. In doing so, they not only raise their game, but create leverage and success for their organization.
When I first joined Secure Computing as a senior leader in marketing, my then boss and CMO Atri Chatterjee, tasked me with re-building the product marketing organization. His comments to me went something like this, “The product managers are seen as little more that data-sheet writers and Quarterly Business Review slide clerks. This function is not strategic and is not driving the business forward. We need to do something about this. It is the largest group on our team, yet it is not leading. Please figure it out.”
When I unraveled the team, I saw three things. First, we had a mix of skills and skill level, unevenly distributed among the team. Some were great at content creation and programs, others at packaging, messaging and channel enablement. Second, while a few of the team had mastery knowledge of their markets, some lacked the basic customer intimacy and competitive knowledge that they needed to lead. Lastly, none were influential and respected in the organization, perhaps their biggest challenge. Our task as I saw it, was to build leaders by broadening their skill set, increasing their knowledge, and teaching them to influence their peers, their management and their partners. No small task! But having identified these gaps, we re-balanced the team, put in plans for each leader, and found ways to create credibility and influence for each of them. Over the next 12 months, we grew the team to have 3 strong Go To Market leaders, one for each of the main product lines, who were able to leverage their influence, knowledge and skills to build and execute market leading strategies, programs and tactics.
Successful Go to Market leaders have the depth and breadth of specialized knowledge like the Jedi Master Yoda, the skills of the Renaissance man like Leonardo and the influence of the Evangelistic leader like Martin Luther King. Those aspiring to lead their product, division or product line to market, should put in improvement plans to reach mastery across all three of these dimensions.
Nearly 20 years ago, Ben Horowitz writing about the good product manager vs. the bad one said, “Good product managers are the CEO of their product”. Great Go To Market Leaders, wherever they are title wise in the org, are perceived and viewed in just this way, as the CEO who understands and is driving their product, division or company to market leadership.In the next 3 posts in this series, I will take a look at these three key areas, knowledge, skills and influence and dissect what it takes in each of these to rise to mastery in market leadership. Those who do, not only act like the CEO, they are destined to eventually become one!
Jul 7, 2016 | Breakthrough Marketing
You’ve invested in marketing automation, content marketing people and programs. You’ve just finished that new messaging project. Now what?
Having the right messaging and positioning, no small task in today’s crowded buyer centric B2B markets, puts you at the base of the mountain. To reach the summit, you must do three things.
First, execute with consistency, veracity and ferocity. You have to say it so many times, you get sick of hearing yourself say it, then you need to say it again. And yes, you may tweak it on the edges based on A/B testing and performance in programs. But you must commit. You must believe. And you must back it with facts, case studies and data.
Second, you must invest in people and programs. People and programs are the fuel of marketing success. They drive the race car, which is made of your marketing automation engine, you content marketing tires, and your high test messaging fuel. But without investment, results don’t follow.
Third, you must be comfortable with risk. In today’s markets, conservative, traditional messaging, built on feature function benefit, and delivered in descriptive whitepapers and websites just doesn’t cut it. And while your new messaging is cutting edge and powerful, you must resist the temptation to move back to the average. For example, technical marketers want to stick features functions and technical benefits. They feel they may “insult” their buyer if they push on their beliefs. But few companies can win without changing some status quo. And marketing and sales leaders know this, but can be pulled back to more conservative execution. Don’t let this happen. To the risk taker goes the rewards.
Nobody ever summits a mountain without preparation, investment, and the right amount of intelligent risk taking. And nobody wins in B2B markets without these same characteristics. Great thinking can get you ready, but consistent and ferocious execution and responsible investment, with a good chunk of measured risk taking is what can get you to the top of the mountain.
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Jun 17, 2016 | In The News
May 16, 2016 | Breakthrough Marketing
What does market leadership look like? Faster lead conversion? more visibility and fame? better metrics like leads to revenue? CEO rockstars the conference? competitors on their heels and chasing? All of this and more! What it looks like is a snowball rolling downhill. Market leaders often get benefits well beyond their product differentiation would suggest. It’s a virtuous success cycle, as the snowball get bigger and gains momentum, rolling over less well positioned competitors.
Palo Alto Networks, a leader in network security solutions is a great case in point. When they launched in 2007, their message layers looked like this, focused on product and value:
The $3B firewall market was filled with hard to implement, highly technical product, Palo Alto launched with the slogan, “It’s time to fix the Firewall”
But to really establish market leadership, they then layered unique value on top of this with 3 items, user, application and threat awareness.
This created a new leadership position, by shifting the conversation to their unique value, value that other Firewalls simply could not deliver.
From here, Palo Alto added the context that was bubbly in the market, Next Generation threats. By adding this context, they raised their leadership profile above the Firewall market, to the broader Network Security market. In fact, prior to Palo Alto, Firewalls were really consider access control policy engines, not threat prevention products.
Finally, as Palo Alto expanded it’s product line, it continued to add more purpose to its messaging, the end of the breach era, and the full messaging Snowball now looks like this:
From a standing start in 2005, Palo Alto Networks should pass $1B in revenues in 2016 and has a market cap of nearly $12B. They have all the hallmark metrics of a market leader. What’s your market leadership message snowball look like?
Ken Rutsky is a Marketing Consultant and B2B Market Leadership “Ninja”. Ken helps organizations climb the ladder to market leadership. His upcoming book is entitled; Launching to Leading: How B2B Market Leaders Create Flashmobs, Marshal Parades and Ignite Movements (Morgan James 2016)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
May 3, 2016 | Past Events
I’ll be presenting on Message-Market Fit, how to achieve it, and why it matters.
Product-Market Fit is an important concept in very early stage start-ups. It is the thing that is perceived by founders and investors alike as THE milestone to signify that customers want the product and it is time to accelerate growth investments.
As Marc Andreessen is quoted as saying, “Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market”. Blogger Sean Ellis (@seanellis) of GrowthHackers.com defines Product Market Fit as the time when 40% of your initial customers say they would be “very disappointed” with your product.
However, Message-Market Fit is determined by how your message of value breaks through and attracts customers. It is critical to scaling and growth. Building the right product doesn’t do any good if it can’t be found by buyers. This presentation looks at the 3 critical phases of Message-Market fit that drive growth for B2B market leaders.
https://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/session/2016/does-message-market-fit-trump-product-market-fit
Apr 3, 2016 | Past Events
Register today and hear my presentation on “Building, Breaking and Fixing the Machine” – How market leaders do it!
View the Webinar on demand here
Mar 18, 2016 | Past Events
East Coast Friends,
I hope you can join me for this event. http://b2bmarketer.net/ Looking forward to a great discussion. All attendees will receive a copy of my book, “Launching to Leading; How B2B Market Leaders Breakthrough, Lead and Transform Their Markets”
Ken
Mar 15, 2016 | Breakthrough Marketing
In today’s highly competitive B2B markets, to be a leader, you must build and run a modern marketing machine that can be thought of like a race car. In fact, market leaders need to be great at three things; Marketing Automation, Content Marketing, and Messaging and Positioning. These can be thought of as the engine, the tires and the fuel of the race car.
When you have a high performance engine, the right tires, and high test fuel, market leaders can achieve high performance with content that is relevant, programs that are efficient and results that are highly effective. This is show in this simple drawing:
Let’s take a bit of a closer look at the intersections of each of these circles. As we can see, if we want to achieve leadership, we really do need all three. For example, with poor marketing automation, we are left ineffective and inefficient. Without good content marketing processes and approaches, our go to market will lack efficiency and relevance, and without good messaging and positioning, our go to market race car will lose both relevance and effectiveness.
This diagram may seem obvious to some, and daunting to others. As a consultant focused on Market Leadership, I’ll make three observations related to this, and look forward to hearing yours.
- If I were a CMO again, as I was last year in an interim role, I’d focus first on having the right fuel for the car, ie, building the best messaging and positioning I could. Given that doing all three of these with excellence is difficult to achieve, I’d strive for excellence here first.
- Observation 2 – My next investment priority would be in building a well tuned marketing automation engine. My reasoning for this is that before I tackle efficiency by optimizing and investing in excellence in content marketing, I want to drive effectiveness and relevance first.
- Observation 3 – Many organizations I see are highly efficient with their go to market efforts. They have tuned the engine and have beautiful tires. However, they are feeding their car with low test messaging and positioning, and fail to be relevant and effective like market leaders are. It’s no surprise that the Content Marketing Institute’s September 2015 study entitled “B2B Content Marketing 2016 – Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends” reported that the number one challenge identified by content marketers was “producing enough relevant and engaging content”.
How do we build the right race car and feed it with the right fuel? Why do so many organizations struggle for years with nailing the right messaging and positioning and what cost do they pay? What does success look like?
I’ve written a brief whitepaper on this very topic, called 6x in Six Months, which outlines my thoughts on a road map for achieving market leadership and increased revenue, and briefly answers some of these questions. If you’d like a copy, send me an email at ken@kjrassociates.com with the Subject: 6x in 6 or schedule a 30 minute chat with me here.
Happy racing – Ken
Mar 15, 2016 | Breakthrough Marketing
When I chat with CEOs, CMOs and VPs of Sales in B2B technology companies, it’s almost always about “re-messaging” or “re-positioning” their company, product or service or some combination of these. Often I hear, “I know we need to do this, but I am not sure it’s the right time…”
Well, I believe that if you are not sure, it probably IS the right time! Here are five windows of opportunity that I find are DEFINTILEY the right time, and if you miss these, you miss an opportunity to increase your breakthrough, opportunity generation and sales.
#1 – Our sales guys say the “messaging is broken” – Sales is your canary in the coal mine. They are the first to feel market shifts, long before the folks in the “factory” become attuned to it. If sales says it is broken, it probably is. Also, fixing messaging is a great opportunity to bring senior sales folks into the process and get both their insight into the market and buy-in into the output.
#2- We aren’t in the deals we should be – Sales is finding out about deals late. And when we do find out, the competitor has already nearly locked up the deal. This is a symptom that you are playing on someone else’s turf. You need to step back and develop a Viewpoint message that aligns with your customer’s world. This may be the missing piece of the equation.
#3- A new product, product line or major capability about to be launched – A natural time to step back and ask, “why does this matter to our customer’s world”, “what’s our unique value”, and “have we told the story the way we need to”. Every homeowner knows that when you add an addition to the house, you often end up rippling changes through everything, not just the addition you did. Cohesive messaging, like cohesive design, can’t just be tacked on. When it’s time to remodel, think about the whole, not just the new part
#4 – That pesky competitor is getting all the buzz – And damn it, we’ve been shipping all that stuff forever, or that one feature sure seems small, what’s going on? Often the landscape of the customer shifts in a way that a small nimble start up notices and you don’t. Pay attention not just to the technology, but to the VALUE that customers think they will get from the new shiny object. And why is that value rising to the top of the buyers priority. Are we aligning our value with the customer’s reality as much as our messaging should?
#5 – We are doing great but.. – There’s a bigger opportunity out there and it is time to be bold and capture it. Re-positioning from strength is often one of the most overlooked ways to accelerate demand and growth. Especially when combined with #3 above. Positioning from strength let’s you grow your market faster and leverage the experience and customer success you’ve worked so hard for.
Of course, it’s usually some combination of the reasons above. If you have not revisited your messaging and positioning with the last 12 months, it’s probably time, and there’s no time like now!
Feb 16, 2016 | Breakthrough Marketing
When my good friend and colleague and marketing automation guru from Digital Pi Tom Grubb pointed out in this blog, “If you don’t get your messaging right and tight, the revenue you take will rarely equal the marketing investment you make” it got me thinking about the true value of great messaging, story and positioning. After Tom and I chatted a bit today, we concluded that it really comes down to one key metric, what % of, or how many deals go to revenue for every 100 leads that your marketing efforts capture. So I whipped up a simple model based on my Viewpoint Marketing client experience and that leverages data published by Marketo and others, to try to simply display the true value of great messaging.
Here’s what I came up with:
At the bottom of the ladder, when my messaging is product, or feature function centric, my conversion can be expected to be very poor, less than one in 200 leads converts to revenue deals. This is the battle that many organizations are still fighting. As I climb up to unique value, I see a 3x or more improvement to about 1.5 leads per hundred converting. Investing the time to get beyond feature/function/benefit to unique value is clearly a no brainer. Next, we move to what I call Aligned Viewpoint. I’ve blogged extensively about this, and it is a major component of my upcoming book, Stories that Sell and Messaging that Matters. To summarize here, if we control the CONTEXT of the market conversation by telling a story that aligns our value with the customer’s world, magical things can happen, and we see a doubling or more of this key metric. Honestly, many billions have been made by doing these two steps well. And that’s evidenced in part by a 6x improvement from our starting point. This is 100% under our control and if you aren’t doing this, you are missing a great opportunity to improve your business. This is the true value of great messaging.
However, we do not need to stop there. Today’s buyer wants to experience your value directly, early and often in the sales cycle. Once we have aligned our Viewpoint and Value to the buyer, we then SHOW rather than tell it to them with our marketing programs, be it demos, customized web experiences, or a myriad of other interactive content approaches. Lastly, if we are lucky, we emerge and a market leader and can drive a purpose, think Salesforce.com and “The end of software”. Markets are BRUTAL, and the market leader owns an incredible advantage because they are the defacto standard. Leads flow in and conversions skyrocket. They enjoy a 20X or more advantage over their product-centric messaging competitors.
Where are you on this key metric? Are you ready to do the work to fix your messaging, story and programs and climb the messaging ladder to market success?
