Feb 11, 2016 | Breakthrough Marketing
I just had the pleasure of spending 2 days helping a client jointly with my good friend and colleague Tom Grubb. Tom, and the company he co-founded, Digital Pi, may be the most skilled marketing automation people on the planet, among other things, Tom used to run all of product marketing for Marketo, and the business he helps to run is growing beyond belief. In today’s world, whether you are selling anything from the latest cloud big data analytics automation security product, and who isn’t :), OR industrial supplies, if you don’t have a well oiled, tuned and managed digital marketing machine running, you will not win.
However, as Tom noted eloquently to me on the plane and then blogged about here, many of the clients he works with could really use a fresh look at their messaging. Because great messaging is the high test fuel that makes the content that the marketing automation machine depends on meaningful, relevant and successful. Without good fuel, the best machine is subject to knocks, stalls and eventual breakdowns.
At least that was true until today, when scientists announced they have discovered the elusive gravitywave predicted by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. This changes everything. Well, not really. Unless you are a nuclear physicist, then the entire context of your world view has changed. And on the off chance that your customers are the nuclear physicists of the world, you better understand that. Because if you are trying to sell a product or service to them, and you are talking about the world before this discovery, you will lack the correct context to chat with them, and they will probably not want to listen. But, if you can sell them a thing that can help them harness this discovery to better their lives, GET ON IT!.
OK, this is a kinda silly example, BUT, you’d be surprised how messaging fails in this precise way everyday. B2B marketers are way too often out of touch with the reality of their customers. They either assume that they know it, or they knew it and it changed. In a world where B2B buyers want vendors to teach them something before they sell them something, this is a fatal flaw.
Our value to buyers MUST be in the context of their world. If it isn’t, we are running our machine on low test crappy fuel. We’ve bought the car and we are running in on 60 octane when it needs 97. What do we do to fix this. It’s not that hard. Context first, before content. Find a framework like my Viewpoint Marketing one, that puts your value in the context of your customer’s world, not yours. Then fix your messaging to match that. Now you are running on high octane jet fuel. Go Go Go! You may even run into a gravitywave or two.
Ken Rutsky is a Product Marketing and Go to Market “Ninja”. His upcoming book, Stories that Sell, Messaging that Matters: The Viewpoint Marketing B2B Playbook to Market Leadership helps organizations elevate their positioning, messaging and programs from me-too stories and tactics to unique, compelling and breakthrough ones. You can read a short preview of the book here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Feb 11, 2016 | Breakthrough Marketing
Dear Reader,
I’m excited to share this preview content of my upcoming book with you. We live in a challenging time for marketing and sales professionals in B2B markets. Information flows freely, markets are crowded, and buyers only engage on their terms, in their context, and on their timeline, not ours. Basically, no one wants to listen to us. Even when they are ready to listen we must break through a cacophony of noise and clutter to both get attention and communicate value. For the last 6 years as a consultant, and for more than a decade before that in senior marketing operating roles, I’ve been helping to navigate these challenges and build market leading brands and businesses at Intel, Netscape, McAfee, FireEye and many others. The Viewpoint Marketing B2B Playbook provides a game plan to help you break through and lead your market by telling stories that sell, crafting messaging that matters and delivering programs that punch through. Winning examples of this from FireEye, Palo Alto Networks, Zuora and others are highlighted.
Here’s a brief sample of the book. I hope you enjoy it, But most of all, I’d love your feedback right here, via email or even an old fashion phone call!!
Thanks for your readership!
Ken
PS, let me know if you’d like to be on the early access list for the full book!
Feb 11, 2016 | Breakthrough Marketing
I do a lot of work with IT Security Vendors. It’s a fascinating place to be a marketer. There is no doubt, IT Security is a very technical market. And one that might change more continuously than any other B2B market I know. Of course, we all know that there are individuals and countries that are motivated to break into our most important network and systems and either steal our data, disrupt our operations or both. And whether their motivation is profit, political gain, warfare, espionage or fame, they are more networked, smarter and better resourced than ever. The non-stop battle between good guys and bad guys is a treadmill that has launched and fueled companies like Palo Alto Networks, FireEye, Barracuda and countless others small and large for the last decade.
A critical question that faces all IT Security companies is how to break through the noise and the crowd and be heard and noticed. In a few short months 30,000+ people will descend on the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco for the annual RSA Conference, the largest event in the global IT Security industry. Along with the 30,000 attendees, over 500 exhibitors will vie for their attention over four exhibit halls. Several hundred more will try to bootstrap some attention with offsite meetings, parties and even a few stunts. It was in this exact environment that FireEye successfully launched in 2009 with their “Advanced Threat Protection”. I will bet about anything that seven years later, you won’t be able to walk more than 10 feet in any direction without seeing some variation or combination of at least two of these three words. In fact, of the 505 exhibitors listed at http://www.rsaconference.com/events/us16/expo-sponsors/exhibitor-list, 385, or nearly 80% describe themselves with one or more of these combinations. (thanks to the Import.io service for making this analysis easy) But that’s the old news.
How then to stand out? It’s hard. But what works is to deeply understand the reality of the IT Security buyers and practitioners world. What has changed that impacts their success or failure? What are the key business initiatives they need to support? What’s changed in the world we live in that is making their job harder or easier? In 2009, FireEye stood out because they were the first to stand up and yell what everyone knew, the threats had changed but the ability to defend against them had not. With that context in mind, there are five things I’d shout about if I were one of the five hundred vendors on the show floor. Some of these topics are new, many are not, and finding my unique value is a second step, but first, let’s discuss what’s going on that is impacting the customer’s world –
1) The IT Sec Skills Gap – There is a tremendous shortage of IT Security people in the US and globally. The demand has simply outstripped the supply. As my friends at Seculert have pointed out, their are over 300,000 unfilled IT Security jobs in the US today, and that number is projected to grow to 1.5 Million by 2020! Hmmm, think you are going to hire your way out of your problems?
2) The Era of Ubiquitous, High speed, Always on Connectivity – this has been coming for a long time, but is now hitting a tipping point. Just yesterday, the Wall Street Journal wrote about this yesterday in an article entitled: The Future of Public Wi-Fi: What to Do Before Using Free, Fast Hot Spots , in which they reported;
…it’s one of the first parts of New York City to turn old phone booths into hot spots. In the months ahead, they’ll cover the city like graffiti in the 80s, meaning I can walk around town using fast, free Wi-Fi—not Verizon ’s slow, pricey data. Even better, it uses a new technology to automatically connect when I’m in range. No need to re-login.
At the same time, thanks to data from my friends at Skycure, we know just how risky public Wifi networks can be. Are we ready for our CEO to walk through Manhattan skipping carelessly and happily from Network to Network?
3) The Maturing of the Digital Natives – Digital Natives are taking over the workforce. Research show that while they are concern and skeptical about privacy and security in their use of devices and services, they have an almost defeatist attitude to the situation. As InfoSec magazine reported here, the new employee is more capable, more skeptical but lazier than their older Digital “Immigrant” co-workers. Think your workforce of the future is better prepared, able and willing to help you manage risk?
4) The Board Cares, of Course it Does – As Fidelis and Ponemon point out in the studies found here, and has been confirmed in countless other studies and reports, Boards care. The Target breach opened the eyes of boards, and the potential damage to brand, reputation and financial liability has more than gotten their attention, it’s now near the top of the list, and might be the biggest risk that any board needs to manage. This has changed the life of the CISO and his team dramatically, it’s increased both visibility, and often resources. If the CISO was asking for a “seat at the table”, he’s got it now. Just how hot that seat is, it just depends…
5) Past Prevention – We get sick. We will get sick. Every good doctor knows that sometime the bugs move faster than the body can defend against them. We are finally admitting this in our approach to IT Security. We can invest and invest in prevention, but the one that gets through is the one that can steal our data and disrupt our business. We must become not just protected but responsive, we can get sick, but we can’t let the infection win.
ONTO THE SHOW!…
To the 30,000 people at Moscone next month, none of the above will be shocking or surprising or even new. But the smart vendors are the ones who can teach us more about these mega-trends, what it means to buyers and how they can relate their value to what the buyer needs, not on the show floor, but back at the office. In 2009 IT Security knew the threat was changing. FireEye got in front of this parade and has rode it to great success with their solutions. Who will start the parade to market success this year at RSA? I don’t know, but I think they will be talking about one or more of the topics above, and doing it in a unique and meaningful way. It ain’t easy, but it’s doable and it is what it takes to rise above the noise of 500 vendors and 30000 customers. See you in the crowd next month!
Feb 11, 2016 | Breakthrough Marketing
There is no doubt in B2B markets many, if not all companies strive for market leadership, but few breakthrough and achieve it. Why? The reasons are many. Poor product market fit, poor user experience, misaligned pricing to value, the list goes on. But even those who get all that right can “self-limit” their success by not elevating their messaging mix to the heights required of a market leader. A simple diagram shows this relationship nicely. 
Most companies find themselves stuck at the bottom of the left pyramid with product-centric messaging. As they fail to articulate unique value, stuck in the low ground of feature/function/benefit, they struggle to find meaning in the customer’s mind. To achieve meaning in the market, we must message not only our benefits, but be crystal clear on the unique benefits that the customers will get from adopting our solution. Unique value is the entry level messaging needed for market leadership.
But to rise above meaning to impact in the market, where our messaging actually helps to shape influence and impact the market in our favor, we must elevate again and align our value to the world view, or Viewpoint, held by our customers. In this context we describe not only our value to the customer, but how we can strategically impact our customer’s journey to success or failure.
However, in today’s “show-me” short attention span world, if we want to truly break out of the crowd, we need to allow buyers to not just hear, but to experience our value early and often in the buying cycle. And then last, if we are successful in breaking through, we can add purpose to our messaging and truly transform not just our customers and the market, but the world.
Market leadership is a privilege that is earned not given. To earn it, we need not only a great offering, but we need to elevate our messaging to new and meaningful heights. It’s not always easy, but the rewards, both economic and intangible, go to those who dare to climb, not those who stay in the comfort zone of their product feature, function and benefit. Happy climbing!
Ken Rutsky is a Product Marketing and Go to Market “Ninja”. His upcoming book, Stories that Sell, Messaging that Matters: The Viewpoint Marketing B2B Playbook to Market Leadership helps organizations elevate their positioning, messaging and programs from me-too stories and tactics to unique, compelling and breakthrough ones. You can read a short preview of the book here.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Feb 21, 2015 | Breakthrough Marketing
In my last blog, I wrote about what I consider to be a bold and high return move by GoodData to lead a new segment that they call, “Insight as a Service” . Insight as A Service as GoodData describes it is a much better mousetrap than Business Intelligence in the Cloud. To lead a market, you need to define the context of the conversation, and GoodData is trying to do just that. I’ve known Roman Stanek the GoodData CEO for a number of years, so while writing the last blog, I sent him a few questions via email. The answers provide more insight into how and why GoodData is pursuing this strategy.
Ken: What led to need to change GoodData’s positioning to Insight as A Service ?
Roman: Our goal was to move the discussion away from technologies, especially vendor comparisons, so that we could talk about the real values thatwe are providing our customers. Talking to a CMO about becoming a leader in social analytics, or a technology CEO about building data products is a lot of fun.
Ken: How did you come up with the new positioning?
Roman: We looked at why we, and many of our current customers, were succeeding with GoodData. The common attributes became very obvious.The faster they went live with their first set of insights, the more frequently they renewed or grew their project. When we brought subject-matter experts into their projects, especially to talk about ecurity, or social media maturity, they succeeded even faster. About six months ago, we decided to build the collective intelligence we’d accumulated in all these projects into the product itself, so that our data discovery offering could actually teach or guide the user through recommendations we offer as they work in the product. We then said, “This is how we help our customers start at Insights…”
Ken: Why should customers care about Insight as a Service ?
Roman: We offer instant infrastructure, you can start tomorrow. We know nearly every data source they are likely to need, even when it changes. And we teach them how to perform good analysis both inside the Analytic Designer, and also through our experience. We give them a scalable yet agile platform that helps then succeed in their business very rapidly. In a world where nearly 80% of BI projects fail, mostly because the people, the data and the technology change too rapidly, we own two out of three of those problems, and then we coach the people.
Ken: Why wasn’t BI in the Cloud good enough description, or just BI as a Service?
Roman: It really didn’t characterize the value we bring. BI just sounds like tools and database drivers. We go far beyond BI.
Ken: Where do you see the messaging evolving to over time?
Roman: We see it becoming bigger and more encompassing. We think other vendors will copy it and help us build out this space in the market. But this collective intelligence we have amassed and keep growing is uniquely ours.
Ken: What’s the magical place you can take customers to who come with you on this journey?
Roman: Their magical place, is as the leader in their market. It’s already happening. Our customers benchmark their customers accentuating the best, and motivating the laggards. They build revenue generating data products. They know how to measure social data ROI. They do this because they have good data.
Feb 16, 2015 | Breakthrough Marketing
Business Intelligence is a established and growing market. BUT it is a changing and fluid one, being impacted by many many of the trendy words you might hear like Big Data, Hadoop, IOT, Cloud and well others I’m sure. It is also a crowded market, with established vendors ranging from IBM to SAP, new successes like 2013 IPO Tableau (DATA on NYSE, Mktg Cap 6B+!) and just acquired by Hitachi Data Systems Pentaho (for a reported $500-600M). Among the biggest trends in the space is “BI in the Cloud”. One of the innovators in moving BI into the Cloud has been San Francisco based GoodData. Founded in 2007, GoodData has been a darling of Sand Hill road, having raised a reported total of more than $100M in venture from stellar firms including Andreeeson Horowitz and Intel Capital. Life is “Good” when you are the leader of a big trend in a big market.
However, BI in the Cloud is a tenuous leadership positioning. Everyone is in or moving to the cloud. And while Salesforce.com could leverage their first to the cloud advantage to not only lead, but transform an entire market, competitors will not fall easily for that one anymore. More expectedly, customers, while wanting Cloud first, now expect it, and what to know why you matter to them more than everyone else does.
So, rather than rest on the strategy of being the “Leader In Cloud BI,”, or “BI as A Service” , GoodData recently transitioned their positioning to being the leader in “Insight as A Service”. To quote their website:
What does Insights As a Service mean? It’s when you have a tool powerful, flexible and efficient enough to move you beyond traditional BI and get to insights faster than anyone else.
In short, GoodData offers you a MUCH BETTER MOUSETRAP! It’s not just moving the cheese to the cloud, it’s about a new way to find and capture business value. As I describe in this blog, this is CLASSIC Parade Leadership positioning. Insight as a Service is a different approach, a different mindset, and driven by a set of innovative features. We are re-inventing BI, and calling it Insight as A Service, our new mousetrap. And with that, we will deliver you to the BRAVE NEW WORLD of guided analytics.
I have described in detail a process that helps companies create a unique and market leading Viewpoint like this one and I applaud both the courage and the strategy that GoodData is pursuing in declaring a new positioning; essentially, the end of BI and the delivery of Insight. Customers are driven today to find and take advantage of business insight faster than their competition. Traditional BI is a means but not an end to this insight. By positioning GoodData as an Insight provider, not only does GoodData stand out from competitors, but it aligns with exactly the value that customers are trying to get. This is a bold attempt to lead the market forward. If they are successful, then my belief is that the $100M venture investment will be a small small fraction of the value created. I wish the GoodData team well on their journey from having helped to create the BI in the Cloud market, to now leading the emergence of the Insight as a Service market and to eventually transforming the entire BI market to an Insight one.
Feb 2, 2015 | Breakthrough Marketing
I’ve been working on a new model to think about market leadership and how to message at different phases of leadership. I am doing a lot of work on this model, and would love your feedback.
Market leaders are created not born. In B2B markets, they will go through 3 phases of market leadership, which I call creation, leadership and transformation. My metaphor for these three phases are Flashmobs, Parades and Movements. I believe these ideas capture the “crowd dynamic” of each of these overlapping yet distinct market leadership phases. Let’s take a look at each of these phases and how they impact our messaging strategy.
Stage I – Market Creation
- Metaphor – Create a Flashmob
- Communication Objective – Insight
- Key Audience – Problem Owner/Solution Implementer
- Solution – Point product or tool
- Customers – hundreds
- Revenues – up to $10M
- Messaging Mix – 80% Value (Feature-Benefit) 20% Viewpoint (Business Context)
At this point of our market leadership journey, we are building our initial flashmob of customers. These customers care first and foremost on solving an immediate problem, and while they do live in a context, they are solution seekers first and foremost. We win the communication battle by articulating the value of our better mousetrap.
Stage II – Market Leadership
- Metaphor – Lead a Parade
- Communication Objective -Alignment
- Key Audience – Functional or key P and L owner
- Solution – Suite
- Customers – hundreds to a thousand
- Revenues – $2M to $100M +
- Messaging Mix – 60% Value (Feature-Benefit) 30% Viewpoint (Business Context) 10% Purpose (Destination)
In this phase our goal is to emerge as the leader of the new market segment. There are many new mouse traps for buyers to choose from. We must elevate our message to be almost half related to Viewpoint and Purpose, from pure value to the problem solver, to helping the P and L owner in their journey to success. This is perhaps the hardest transition to make, and many companies cling to hard to value, as discussed here. But the rewards are great, as those who succeed rise above the crowd and win more, grow faster and increase customer and shareholder value.
Stage III – Market Transformation
- Metaphor – Define a Movement
- Communication Objective -Inspiration
- Key Audience – Executive
- Solution – Platform
- Customers – Thousands +
- Revenues – $70M+
- Messaging Mix – 40% Value (Feature-Benefit) 20% Viewpoint (Business Context) 40% Purpose (Destination)
Those who create a flashmob and then transform themselves into a Market Parade leader, have the rare opportunity to Define A Movement. Movement definers go beyond value and current context to changing and transforming the market not just for their solution, but for other complimentary and related ones. They create business platforms for partnership and communications. Their messaging is not only about value and context, but about shared purpose with their customers.
This framework is summarized with this table (Click to view):
Zuora, an emerging leader in CRM solutions for subscription businesses, had skillfully executed this market leadership journey, and has started to Build a Movement of the Subscription Economy. To see more on Zuora, check out this post.
I’d love to hear what you think about this framework, please comment here or send me an email.
Sep 22, 2014 | Breakthrough Marketing
Part 1 – Baseball, SaaS and the Rise of the Data Nerds
Baseball really boils down to one stat, score more runs than your opponent and you win, score less and you lose. Do this 90 or more out of 161 games and you will probably make the playoffs. Win 11 or 12 post season games (depending on if you need to win the one game Wildcard playoff) , winning a 5 and two best of seven game series, and you are the champions. Easy!
For around 100 years, the management of a baseball team was built around this simple fact. Statistics, while numerous, really boiled down to 4 that were focused on. Batting average and Runs Batted In (RBIs) , for offense; and wins and Earned Run Average (ERA) for pitching. These seemed like the most applicable proxies to understand when evaluating how much contribution an individual hitter or pitcher contributed to scoring or keeping the other team from scoring. Of course, the primary way that teams evaluated talent was qualitative, through scouting, ie individual observation and assessment of a player’s skill and prediction of their future success.
The Rise of Sabermetrics and Money Ball – According to Wikipedia, Sabermetics is “the term for the empirical analysis of baseball, especially baseball statistics that measure in-game activity.” Sabermetrics eschews many traditional stats as flawed, and has build an entire language and measures of its own to understand and predict the value of a player, WAR, VORP, OPS and DIPS being some of the less obscure obscure of the new stats.
While starting around the 1960, Sabermetrics gained popular notoriety with the 2003 publication of “Moneyball”, where author Michael Lewis paints a compelling picture of how Oakland A’s General Manage Billy Beane used quantitative measures to “beat” the other General Managers in baseball by being able to understand and project the value of a player to his team dramatically better, and build winning teams at a fraction of the cost of other teams, a double win, on the field and in the bottom line.
To me, it is hard to overestimate the impact of Moneyball on American business. I believe there’s a PhD thesis that could be written on how Moneyball and Sabermetrics paved the way for and paralleled the rise of the analytics driven business. When I was in business school in the early 90s, “quant jocks” were confined to the finance and operations groups, while most business were run by the sales and marketing “poets”. But the shift has finished, after all, if the data Nerds can rule the sports world, why shouldn’t they rule the business world too.
Nowhere is this more true than in the world of Software as a Service, or SaaS, where everything can be instrumented and measured. Business, like baseball is simple. Collect more money (revenue) than you spend(Cost) , and you win. However, as we’ve become better at understanding the underlying economics of SaaS subscription businesses, we’ve become SaaS Sabermatricians, and developed our own set of statistics that we use to evaluate and predict performance. We’ve developed terms like CAC, CLV, Magic Numbers, MRR, ARR and MVP, supplanting the old language of simple Profit and Loss, Revenue and Margin. In the whole, this is a great thing, we are just plain better and managing our business.
Part 2: The Trade
Consider these facts :
- On July 30, 2014, the Oakland A’s, still run by Billy Beane, had a record of 66 wins and 41 losses, the best in major league baseball, and they held a 2.5 game lead over their divison rival Anaheim Angels, who by coincidence, held the second best record in the majors at 63 wins and 43 losses.
- On July 31, in a blockbuster deal, the A’s traded star outfielder Yoenis Cespedes to the Boston Red Sox in exchange for star pitcher John Lester and outfielder Johnny Gomes.
- Since the trade, the A’s have won just 19 games and LOST 29 games, and now trail the red-hot Angels by 10.5 games with just a week left in the season.
Did Billy Beane “screw the pooch”, trading away the chemistry and offensive spark plug at the heart of what was looking like a tremendous season? Lester is one of the premier pitchers in all of baseball, and I guarantee that all of the statistics said that a team with Gomes and Lester would be expected to win more than a team with Cespedes. Billy would not have made the trade otherwise.
Yet here we sit nearly 2 months later and nothing good seems to have come from it. There are two distinctly different views, well articulated by sportswriters.
In his article, “Oakland A’s: What If Yoenis Cespedes Is Magic?” of September 13th Matt King points out that,
“Since the A’s signed Yoenis Cespedes in 2012, the team was 228-131 with him in the starting lineup and 43-69 without him in the lineup, including their 15-25 record since the trade.
And while he readily lays out the statistical case against this argument, he finishes with the rhetorical flurry of:
So it’s more than just missing Cespedes’ production. It’s more than just a slumping offense. It’s not Lester. Maybe, just maybe, Yoenis Cespedes is magic.
On the other side, Alex Hall, in “Trading Yoenis Cespedes for Jon Lester has saved the Athletics’ season” makes a compelling Sabrematrics based argument of just the opposite, arguing persuasively with number that if you think things are bad now for the A’s they would be far worse had Beane not made the trade. In fact, Hall ends with this strong endorsement of Beane,
But if Oakland does miss the postseason, then please don’t blame Billy Beane and his all-in, win-now deal. Trading Yoenis Cespedes did not ruin Oakland’s season. In fact, acquiring Jon Lester may just have been the thing that saved it. And if the A’s do make it to October and make a deep run, you better believe that Lester will be one of the leading reasons why.
So who is right? King or Hall? Magic or Data? Scientist or Poet? Beane or NOT? Did the removal of Cespedes kill all the chemistry that had the A’s believing and winning? There is no denying he was an electric spark in the A’s psyche and make-up. Or did Lester’s great performances since being added save any hope the A’s had to finish well? The stats certainly are compelling.
I suspect we will never truly know, and both arguments are actually correct. We will never know because in baseball we will never get to see the result of the 2014 season without the trade. That’s life, as it collapses from future possibity to singular reality. If the A’s go on to win the wild card and the World Series, Beane will be hailed as a genius, even if the path was difficult and harder than the counter path may have been. If they don’t naysayers will say the trade was a giant blunder, despite whatever the stats the Sabermatricians trot out. Such is part of the beauty of sport and sports fandom.
Part 3 – What’s SaaS Gotta Do With It?
Every week when I am at any SaaS client’s board or senior management meeting, I see the magic vs. numbers argument play out. The numbers show X, and we can’t explain them. We dig deeper into the numbers once more, sometimes shedding tremendous light and insight into the discussion. We pick a new path and proceed on tackling the next problem.
Just as often though we get to the end of the numbers and left at a point of intuition or “magic”. The pixels have been placed, the pages and product features have been A/B tested, and we’ve combed through the data. We are faced with a choice, usually a big one. Do we do this deal? Do we change the roadmap? Do we acquire or build this piece of technology? The numbers say one thing, or they are inconclusive. Our intuition says another.
Which do we trust, numbers or intuition? Do we stick with Cespedes or do we trade for Lester? Unlike baseball, have we exhausted all of our ability to A/B test the alternatives?
And then we get to the point where we have to make a decision and use our best judgement, balancing data and statistics with intuition and feel. I guess that’s why human’s are still in the mix after all.
This reminds me of a story from early in my career at Intel as the Intel Inside Brand Manager, a quant jocks heaven before it was in fashion. At issue was a new chip that had the shell of a Pentium and the inner workings of a 486. Should we launch it as a Pentium Lite, a 486 Plus or even a 586, or was the cost to the brand promise so high, we should scrap it altogether. The chip was attractive because it would be very efficient and low cost to produce, and even at a large discount from the Pentium pricing be extremely profitable. The numbers said do it. That is, all of the numbers except the one that was hard to quantify, the cost to both the Intel and Pentium brands. Try as we may to model this, the data was inconclusive, and piled one assumption on top of another. At the end of the day, the quants voted yes, and favored the numbers which said to launch as a “586”, taking share from AMD and other “clones”. Me, being the brand manager, voted to scrap the project, saying that while I could not quantify it, the entire program put our hundred of millions if not billions of dollars of brand equity at risk. The decision? Well, to CEO Andy Grove’s credit, I don’t think you ever saw an Intel 586 did you?
Apr 10, 2014 | Breakthrough Marketing
I recently passed my 5 yr anniversary as a B2B marketing consultant in Silicon Valley and beyond. In that time I’ve met some amazing CMOs and CEOs. B2B Marketing is a never ending multi-layered multi-disciplinary challenge. One , as I described to my daughters 4th grade class with this presentation, that requires you to be part artist, part poet and part scientist. As a died in the wool 7 on the enneagram, it’s one of the reasons I love marketing.
However, I’ve also noticed that the CMO in any B2B company is a highly precarious position. It’s like walking a tight wire between sales, customers and yes, the CEO and the board. When things are going well, you are a flying Wallenda, a member of a rare fraternity of successful daredevils, performing feats of extreme physics with seeminly artistic magic. When you fall though, ouch!
In that spirit, I offer 5 profile of stereotypical of CMOs and other senior marketers that you meet on the way to Marketing Heaven;
1) The CM- Domain Expert – Jane’s got great experience and instinct. And market and product expertise. BUT and here is the big but, she is a) stuck in her ways and therefore answers no first to innovation, she want’s to stick with the tried and true, and b) does not make sales feel that they have real influence on the Go to Market plans and tactics. In the bar, Jane is even doubtful about how much impact she can have. She says, “Well we are pulling our weight, but sales needs to pick it up.”
2) The CM- Yes Sales – On the other end of the spectrum is Jim, the CM Yes Sales. Jim has a plan, but he blindly follows whatever the VP of Sales asks for. He’ll change plans midstream to be “responsive”. His tactics might win the day with sales, but over the long term, there’s no cohesive plan. He resigns his team to be a supporting rather than a leading role and contributor.
3) The Scientist – Jack is a data guy. Hypothesize, test, refine, wash, rinse repeat. He’s a big data analytics metrics machine. He’s got it wired. Jack is great at optimizing the strategy at hand and making incremental improvements. However, when it comes to changing the magnitude of marketing contribution through innovation in messaging, or packaging or pricing or channels, it’s not happening. Because the data isn’t there to support the risk.
4) The Artist –Jill is a master of the creative. From words to pictures to logos and brand, everything is beautiful. But Jill struggles with metrics and measurement. She can’t figure out why the beautiful website is converting worse than the competitors functional one. She confuses beauty for function and can’t really understand the numbers.
5) The Technician – Joe is a pro. Give me X dollars and I’ll get you Y leads. The budget will balance to the penny and Joe never over- or under-spends. Programs run smoothly and professionally. After all, marketing is about mechanics. Like his cousin the scientist, Joe has a great handle on the metrics, especially demand generation, lead flow and the like. He’s got the marketing automation and other technology humming, But Joe can’t craft a message like Jill can, and lead quality is a continuous issue with sales. The machine runs great, but the fuel is often faulty.
Today, we are in the midst of two pendulum swings in marketing, from art to science and from brand to sales. The Scientist, the Technician and the CM Yes Sales have dominant sway over the Artist and the Domain Expert. But as marketing technology becomes table stakes, and the balance between sales and marketing roles settles in response to this, the Artist and the Domain expert are sure to have another day in the sun.
Now of course, if you are a CMO, you probably started as a Jane, Jim, Jack, Jill or Joe. But you’ve learned along the way that you better have all of these personalities in your brain, or you will not succeed. But when the pressure is on, we all lean on our background and our tendencies. When you get to Marketing heaven, you’ve risen above any one of these personality types and you’ve actually become a little bit of all them. Your are an adaptable, multifaceted domain expert with market instinct, artistry, responsiveness, tactical excellence and analytic insight. Easy, no but doable. I guess it’s no wonder so many of us find ourselves falling, we just need to dust ourselves off and continue the journey!
Mar 25, 2014 | Breakthrough Marketing
Need feature benefit is the time tested sales and marketing technique that starts with a specific need, links a feature your product or service has to that need, and then proposes an expected benefit to be had. This worked great 10 years ago in what I call the age of ROI. Entire selling systems were built to convince the buyer that the features and benefits of solutions were enough above the cost to justify a business investments based on a Internal rate of return or hurdle rate.
However, three things have changed which mean that feature and benefit just aren’t enough any more:
- Buyers became increasingly jaded from vendors claims of ROI, as big investments failed time and again to pay off
- Buyers became overwhelmed with positive ROI investment/solution choices
- Business buyers bypassed traditional gatekeepers such as IT and purchasing
What to do about it?
I suggest we need to replace ROI with ROS, or “Return on Strategy”. To success, we must position our solution as strategic. We do that by talking about Innovation and Strategic Value instead of Feature and benefit. This may sound like splitting hairs, but when we talk about Innovation and Strategic Value we…
- Set a high bar for ourselves and our customers and our competitors by engaging in a business level and strategic discussion, versus a tactical one
- Set ourselves above the ROI based competition
- Appeal to business buyers who want to drive and implement change, and will invest to do so…
So, the question is how to do this. One way is by articulating and committing to a commercial Viewpoint that marries the buyers reality with your value. For more on that, see this series of blogs…
