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…
Feb 14, 2014 | Breakthrough Marketing
Market leadership is a very desirable position, there’s no question about it. However, new entrants are really faced with an uphill battle in establishing market leadership. First of all, there is often an established category and leader. Second, in general, B2B buyers are a conservative bunch, and their bias is to buy from the established leader. As they say, no one ever got fired for buying from IBM (or Cisco, or Google, or Symantec…). Lastly, historically, getting know as an upstart was a long and very expensive proposition, brand building, PR and people.
However, with the sea change of information availability and independent buyers, has created a new a exciting dynamic for upstart B2B vendors. They can use new techniques of inbound and content marketing to create presence and preference. The barriers to content creation and distribution have fallen dramatically, creating the POSSIBILITY of breaking through. No longer do upstarts need to accept play
ing second fiddle, but the smart and savvy ones can create market leadership via flashmobs, parades and movements.
Flashmobs – the viral path to market leadership. Many products can build leadership from the bottom up, counting on viral end-user adoption, creating community and evangelistic users. These individuals act as sales reps for your team, building a flashmob of demand, and creating new leaders out of the acceleration of end-user and subsequent enterprise adoption. They switch jobs and refer to peers in other organization, and network effects grow both presence and users. They build product leadership. Examples: SolarWinds, Jive, Splunk.
Parades – As Pogo said, “If you want to be a leader, find a parade and get in front if it”. More so than 
ever, B2B buyers live in a tumultuous and ever changing world. New challenges and opportunities for both individuals and organizations come at a dizzying pace. At the root of this change are a set of changes that create context for just about everything. Examples of some of the technology meta-context changing items in B2B markets include BigData and SaaS. Other meta-context can be more cultural, like Privacy or more economic like the Increase in Income Inequality, or Environmental like Climate change. Vendors who “hook on” to one or more of these context, and build their go to market Viewpoint around these, become leaders of the parades, and customers and market share follow. These parade leaders grow quickly and gain share as category leaders. Examples include SunPower, Zuora and Cloudera.
Movements – Some contexts are SO big, that they become movements. Movements have many leaders. Like the civil rights movement had leaders as vary
ing as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, large market movements are made up of many related parades. And the leaders of each of these parades usually vie with each other to consolidate their movements under their leadership. Salesforce.com has parlayed its SaaS/CRM parade leadership to emerge as the leader of the entire sales and marketing automation movement. FireEye, is in the process of trying to parlay their parade leadership in Advanced Network Threat protection into a new movement to re-invent IT security around their brand and technology.
Within these movements, we see the constant bubbling up of new flashmobs, parades and spawning of new movements. Leaders find ways to create flashmobs, get in front of parades, and parlay their successes to build movements. Small vendors can emerge in ways that seem un-convievable out this process. But those who understand it can take advantage of it and thrive in today’s hyper-competitive markets becoming product, category and market leaders.
Sep 10, 2013 | Breakthrough Marketing
As we saw in part 1 of this series, B2B Technology marketers are dealing with a new reality. Information is abundant, Alternatives are Many and in response, Buyers are now fiercely independent and highly networked.
Proving ROI means nothing except a check box, if you aren’t strategic then nobody notices and if they notice they just don’t care. Yet, as we saw in part 2, many organizations are still clinging to Feature->Benefit marketing and solution and diagnostic based selling. This worked well in a world of tightly controlled information, high barriers to entry and sales led selling cycles. But in today’s reality, if you cling to those ways, you will be forever in the weeds of priority and importance.
Yet some vendors manage to rise above the rest, get noticed, grow and win way more than their fair share. I’ve previously described how companies as widely varying as FireEye, Zuora, Virgin Atlantic and Salesforce.com have leveraged context to win. They do this re-inventing their messaging and positioning to be top down, viewpoint driven and challenging and by doing so, they not only educate and engage, but they influence the way their customers see the world AND how they solutions deliver meaningful, strategic value. I call this Impact, and it is the first and most important milestone to reach in the Velocity Marketing framework. Add a heavy dose of Experience marketing into the mix, and you reach Breakthrough Velocity. You win, plain and simple!
So, let’s take a quick look at how our two Axis come together to graphically display what is described above.
Today’s Markets Require A Top Down, Viewpoint and Challenging Messaging Approach
As we can see, the usual and expected approach to messaging worked just fine in the Old B2B World. But if you try it today, buyers won’t notice or if they do notice they won’t care enough to spend time and money with you! But when we re-imagine how we message and position ourselves, and adopt a top down, viewpoint and experiential messaging, we match our approach precisely to the new reality of the buyer. We achieve Velocity.
Now, this shows our Viewpoint framework in action, applied to you the B2B Marketer as the target! I have argued that your world has changed, that your old approach will no longer work, and then proposed that if you follow my re-invented approach, you will achieve breakthrough velocity, a brave new world we all want to occupy. So, what’s your first step to Velocity? Building your Viewpoint. It just so happens, I’d love to help you out. And you can start right here with my series of blogs called, “AIM STEEP to Build Breakthrough Viewpoint”.
Aug 28, 2013 | Breakthrough Marketing
The second dimension of my Viewpoint is the articulation of a re-invented solution, which is covered in depth in this blog. To quickly recap, this blog argued that you can re-invent your solution along 3 dimensions, Approach, Innovation and Mindset or AIM; show diagrammatically here:
So when B2B Marketers look at their messaging methodology, to succeed in today’s Info Overloaded, Buyer Centric, Crowded Market they need to re-imagine their approach like so:
- The Approach –from bottom up to Top down
- The Innovation – from value to Viewpoint
- The Mindset – that we must challenge and engage on the customer’s terms
Let’s briefly take a look at each of these.
- From bottom up to top down – Rather than start with features, function and benefit, start with STEEP, the customer’s reality and world.
- From Value to Viewpoint – We must start with a well articulated Viewpoint, before we have the right to discuss our Value.
- Challenge and Engage – Our job is to challenge the customers assumptions and comfort. We have to move from Diagnostic Selling to Authority Driven Selling.
As we will see in part 3 of this series, if we shift our messaging approach as above, we set the baseline to achieve Marketing Impact and Velocity.
Aug 27, 2013 | Breakthrough Marketing
In this short series of blogs, I’ll be applying my Viewpoint framework to explain why I think context, yes what I call Viewpoint, is so critical to Breakthrough, High Velocity B2B Marketing. With deference to my friend and mentor Matt Church, who taught me not be afraid of “nested context”, here we go!
First, let’s define who I am talking to in this column and target the discussion firmly at B2B Technology Marketers. With that context, let’s take a look at the vertical axis of the Viewpoint framework, the B2B Tech Marketers world, and contrast the “old world” to the “new world”. Three fundamental shifts have occurred in the marketing and selling of B2B products and services; 1) information overload 2) the rise of the independent buyer and 3) the abundance of alternative investments. Let’s take a quick look at each of these.
1) Information overload – In the old world, information was tightly held and doled out by vendors based on the “qualification” of the prospect. Due to this stinginess of sharing, very expensive intermediaries arose in these markets, such as Gartner, Forrester and others. Today, vendors rush to share information, Google and social networks have become the new information intermediaries, and the analyst are just one source of many. Buyers have gone from SEARCHING or paying for scarce information to SORTING and triaging abundant information, from scarcity of supply to overload of supply.
2) The rise of the independent buyer – The Corporate Executive Board has published research that says 57% of the typical B2B sales cycle is over before the first sales contact with the vendor. In response to the great availability of information, buyers are becoming fiercely independent. They do research on their own, they network on social networks such as LinkedIn and easily find knowledgeable peers, and they pick and choose what content to read, and what to pay attention to. In short, we are now in the era of the “Buying Cycle” and NOT the “Sales Cycle”.
3) Alternative Abundance – Fundamental shifts in cost of solution creation and delivery, and the relentless drive down the cost curve, means that B2B marketers compete with many more competitors AND alternative solutions. In the old world ROI ruled the world. It was a land of feature, function, benefit. Today, ROI is table stakes. The real battle is strategic importance, first at a category level and then at a provider level. As Forrester has pointed out in their research, buyers want to be taught something, they want strategic insight into THEIR business from vendors. In a world off choice, Return on Strategy is real hurdle to jump.
These three shift can be summarized in the following table:
Three Shifts in the World of B2B Sales and Marketing
|
Old World |
New World |
Implication |
| Information |
Scare |
Abundant |
From Search to Triage |
| Buyers |
Dependent |
Independent |
From Sales Cycle to Buying Cycle |
| Alternatives |
Few |
Many |
From ROI Hurdle to RO-Strategy Hurdle |
This new world is can be a daunting one for B2B Sales and Marketing executives. It can create havoc with traditional communication and selling strategies and techniques. In the next blog, we will focus on how messaging strategy must be re-invented in order to win in this new world of information abundance, independent buyers and many alternative solutions.
Aug 23, 2013 | Breakthrough Marketing
Why do some companies, like FireEye, Zuora, and others raise their stories above the crowd, and get listened to and even obsessed over by prospects and customers alike? I think it comes down to these simple, yet powerful three “cies”:
- Consistency
- Veracity
- Ferocity
Let’s take a look at why these are so important…
Consistency – Relevant Definition: Reliability or uniformity of successive results or events – Telling a story once isn’t enough, telling it over and over again is what creates breakthrough and notice. How many years and times did Marc Benioff of Salesforce show up with the No More Software Logo. The first time it caught the eye, the second time it became interesting, and the 100th time it was compelling because every thing he said was a RIFF on this theme. You were a believer, and you came along for the ride.
Veracity – Relevant Definition – correctness or accuracy – Every time they tell the story, they back it up with supporting and compelling facts, data and figures! FireEye cranks out a ton of research to support their Next Generation Threat protection story. They are the experts, and they back it up by sharing that expertise, all the time!
Ferocity – Relevant Definition – The state or quality of being ferocious; marked by unrelenting intensity – To be believed, you have to be a true believer yourself. You can’t fake ferocity, and if you don’t have it, then your story will never have the impact of those that do.
So be ferocious and consistent, and back it up with real facts, and you too can create an impactful, breakthrough corporate story. What story can you tell, well I’d start with your Viewpoint.
