AIM STEEP to Build Breakthrough Viewpoint – Part 2

Introduction:
In part 1 of this blog series on Viewpoint, we explored the Y axis of the KJR Viewpoint framework, repeated below

and discussed using the STEEP analysis method to label the Y-axis and defined point A, the “Trendspotting” Viewpoint.  In this blog, we will work on labeling the X-axis and look at how to describe point C, “the Better Mousetrap” viewpoint.    Then in the part 3, we will put these together to reach our point B,  ” All Pain, No Gain” and our point D, “Brave New World” viewpoint.

Ready, AIM™, Viewpoint!
It might seem trivial and simple to express what is “re-imagined” and “unexpected” about our product or service.  In fact, that’s why we love our product.  Some of the best products in the world are built by people who had a problem because of the the “Today’s Reality and could not solve it with the “usual” solutions available.  So they built a “Better mousetrap” and then said, “Hey, if I could use this, I bet a lot of people could”.  THE PROBLEM is, they tend to sound like this…

When I worked at Acme, we were faced with a situation where our protocol for X was incompatible with our current business solutions.  What we really needed was a feature that we call FOO that integrates the existing infrastructure with the emerging need for cross channel communication and is compatible with …That why we built this new dweelybopper, obvious, right?

When they need to sound more like:

When I worked at Acme, we were faced with growing margin pressure, increased regulatory scrutiny and a process for Y that was not responsive and was too costly.  Not only that, it was totally isolated from our current process, leaving us with un-substainable cost and compliance trade-off.   What we really needed was a new approach that was people, not technology driven,  and started with a whole new mindset that we could increase compliance AND reduce cost.  Once we understood that, we knew if we only had an innovation like FOO that allowed us to …  That’s why we built this new dweelybopper ..

Notice the subtle difference, we are not just telling the what:

  • The Foo enabled Dweelybopper”

But we have been much more explicit about the why from our STEEP analysis

  •  leaving us with un-substainable cost and compliance trade-off

And most importantly we are focused on the not just on one, but on the three hows:

    •  The Approach – people, not technology driven
    •  The Innovation – the foo
    • The Mindset –  that we could increase compliance AND reduce cost

By crisply articulated the Approach, the Innovation and the Mindset, we not only create a context for our innovation, but we make it DRAMATICALLY more deep, compelling and interesting, exactly what we AIM to do!

We can think of this in a simple triangle framework:

AIM FW
KJR’s AIM Framework Describes Solutions By Approach, Innovation and Mindset

 

By casting our innovation in multiple dimensions, we bring it to life, add memorability and create breakthrough.  Our innovation is no different, but by spending the time talking about our approach and mindset,  more and more people who will care and remember.  So, when we want to talk about our “Better Mousetrap”, it’s not enough to describe it technically, we MUST talk about the why and the other two hows of approach and mindset.

In the next blog, we will combine the STEEP and AIM axis of the Viewpoint framework, and find the powerful Viewpoints at points C and D of our framework, “All Pain, No Gain” and “The Brave New World”.

AIM STEEP to Build Breakthrough Viewpoint – Part 1

Introduction

In my previous blog,  Standing out – 4 Types of Viewpoint That Can Get You Noticed I discussed how to find 4 spots on my Viewpoint Framework that can powerfully set you apart in the market and get you noticed.     The framework looks like this:

 

where we labeled point A “Trendspotting”, point B “All Pain No Gain”, point C “A Better Mousetrap” and point D “A Brave New World”.  We then gave examples of each of these.  However to build a powerful Viewpoint, you need to be able to EFFECTIVELY describe the 4 axis labels on the chart.  On the Y-axis, we have “Yesterday’s Reality”  and “Today’s Reality”; and on the X-axis the usual and “Usual and Expect” vs. the “Re-imagined and Unexpected” solution.

In part 1 of this 3 part blog series, we will look using STEEP to build the Y-axis labels and the “Trendspotting” viewpoint.  In part 2 we will use KJRs AIM framework to build the the X-axis and “Better Mousetrap” viewpoint.  In part 3 we will put them together to create the “All Pain, No Gain” viewpoint and the “Brave New World” viewpoint.

Getting STEEP

Most business people are well aware of the SWOT analysis framework to assess the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of a company, product or strategy.  However far fewer have heard of STEEP (or its first cousins PEST, STEEPL, STEER, and PESTEL).   STEEP and its derivatives and excellent tools to scan an environment to understand it.  Perfect for our “Customer’s World” axis to define “Today’s Reality”. STEEP stands for Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental and Political.  To keep it simple, we will include Legal and Regulatory in the Political sphere.  (Now you see where the cousins come from!)

Most solution providers will focus on ONE of the STEEP factors when they think about their customer’s world.  Bankers think about Economics, Environmental consultants think about Environment, Technology providers about well, duh, technology.   This myopic view of the customer’s reality is self serving and self defeating.  STEEP is an excellent tool to open our eyes and find trends that we might otherwise miss.

STEEP is simple.

  • We  gather our customer experts, and even some friendly customers, and brainstorm a list of the top 3-4 issues or opportunities or  facing the customer in each of the  STEEP area.
  • We then rank order them by importance to the customer.  We define importance as the degree to which the item matters to either risk or opportunity to the overall business.
  • Once we have identified the top 10 of these items, we then rank order these factors into the top 5 that our solution can have positive impact on.   Such as E: Segment specialization P: Increased privacy regulation and T: Mobile device proliferation among customers
  • We then define the “Old Reality” as the opposite set of points so we can make statements like, E: “It used to be that Our (customer’s) industry players were 1 stop providers of broad solutions, however, there is a big move from consolidation to segment specialization” and P: “We are under ever increasing regulatory scrutiny on privacy of customer information, where we need to change from our standard of care and process oversight ” and T: “Our customers are demanding self service support and renewals on mobile devices”
  •  We then “add” these Statements together to form a Trendspotting label.  For example, Zuora added a compelling set of trends together (Economics: Advantage to buyers and seller of pay as you use models, Technology: SaaS and Cloud  Environmental: Ridesharing, etc…) and labelled them “The Subscription Economy”  They describe it at http://www.zuora.com/subscription-economy/  like this:

Commerce has evolved. In the last 10 years, there’s been a dramatic shift in the way both consumers and companies want to do business. Today, people would rather subscribe to services than to buy products. It’s happening everywhere. And it will have a dramatic effect on your business

Stepping back and viewing the customer’s reality through the lens of STEEP is an exercise that can pay off in many ways, including creating a powerful Trendspotting viewpoint.

In part 2 of this series we will take “AIM” (Approach, Innovation and Mindset)  at the x-axis of the framework to help create a more compelling articulation of our “Better Mousetrap” and then in part 3, we will look at the two powerful intersection between our STEEP and AIM analyses,  “All Pain No Gain” and “A Brave New World”.

 

Standing out – 4 Types of Viewpoint That Can Get You Noticed

(Ken’s note: This blog is part of a series of blogs on Viewpoint.  After reading this introduction,  you may want to check out my step by step guide on developing your Viewpoint,  a 3 part series of blogs called – AIM STEEP to Build Breakthrough Viewpoint.)

As I’ve blogged extensively about, today’s information rich and overloaded environment, combined with independent buyers, make getting noticed harder than ever.   Customers live in their world, not the vendors.  When organizations struggle with filling the top of the funnel with engaged prospects, it is almost always a lack of getting themselves noticed.

My Viewpoint framework, shown below and developed over the last 4 years in helping clients reach new speed and success in building top line growth and filling the top of the funnel, is based on the simple yet powerful observation that buyers notice when you align your context or Viewpoint with theirs.  This can be seen on the KJR 2×2 Viewpoint matrix here:

 

KJR’s Viewpoint Framework Aligns Your Solution With The Customer’s Reality

 

To create a compelling context for our marketing message to breakthrough, we must articultate a Viewpoint, a top of funnel message, that aligns with the customers world, by placing our bet on on of the four locations on the matrix, labeled below as A, B, C and D.  Let’s take a look at each of these Viewpoint types, label them, and look at the characteristics of and an example of each.

 

 

 

There are Four Types of Viewpoints that Can be Effective

Viewpoint Type A: Trendspotting.  This articulation of a Viewpoint is powerful in that it names and frames a environmental shift that is either keeping the customer up at night or creating great opportunities for them.   Zuora coined “The Subscription Economy” effectively owning the name of the megatrend that was engulfing the business world, and have built a highly effective go to market strategy around this articulation.

 

Viewpoint Type B: All Pain No Gain:  This articulation focuses on the pain of trying to solve today’s big problems with yesterday’s solutions.  This works great when the pain is large enough to induce action, and is well recognized and acknowledged, yet unaddressed.  FireEye talks about the Advanced Malware Threats and the resultant risk to create a compelling context for a discussion of their solution.  They have experience explosive growth and are poised for an IPO according to their CEO.


Viewpoint Type C: A Better Mousetrap:  If you know you have a problem, and are spending money to fix it, but either have not eliminated the problem, this positioning leads with, “Hey, what you have sucks and I’ve got a better solution here.”  This Viewpoint works great in replacement markets.  For Example, Palo Alto Networks took their “Next Generation Firewall” viewpoint to the bank to the tune of a $3+B IPO right around the backs of Checkpoint, Fortinet and others.  And while arguably those others have caught up with feature sets,  Palo Alto is still viewed as the gold standard of the next generation of firewalls.


Viewpoint Type D: A Brave New World:  This type of 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.  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.

All four of these types of Viewpoints can make you stand out and get noticed, creating excellent context for your Go to market and content marketing activities.

NEXT STEP:  For  step by step guide on developing your Viewpoint, see my 3 part series of blogs called – AIM STEEP to Build Breakthrough Viewpoint.

In Honor of Combat Post Keating – Three Lessons To Learn from The Afghanistan Front

In his haunting and inspiring book, “The Outpost – An Untold Story of American Valor”, Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) tells the story of the brave soldiers who gave their lives and honor to defend Combat Outpost (COP) Keating in the remotest part of Afghanistan, near the Pakistani border.  COP Keating was originally envisioned as a Provincial Reconstruction Team base.  To quote wikipedia, PRTs in Afghanistan are:

” the primary civil-military relations tool in Afghanistan and Iraq and are described as “’a means to extend the reach and enhance the legitimacy of the central government’” “

Nestled in a remote valley in the Nuristan province, Keating was positioned on the marginally passable road to Kamdesh, providing a base of outreach to the surrounding villages.   The location however was quite vulnerable from a military perspective, surrounded on 3 sides by mountains, prompting just about every soldier who arrived to say, in I’m sure even more colorful language,  “are you *&*&ing kidding me”.

Through 600+ stirring pages, Tapper tells a story of individual bravery and institutional failure.   Under-resourced, understaffed and isolated, the mission of the PRT is abandoned and COP Keating becomes a mostly military operation.  Poorly located, it is an easy target for both ambushes on the supply lines and eventually direct attack.   However, for 3+ years, soldiers and commaders continued to try to build the relationships with local elders to root out insurgents and build critical infrasturcute like water pipelines.   In the end, hundreds of years of tribal conflict, a complicit Pakistani intelligence service, the Taliban and the geography fated the mission; and too many soldiers gave their lives in defense of the outpost, until it was eventually attacked, successfully and bloodily defended and finally intentionally abandoned and then flattened by US bombers in late 2009.

It most certainly trivializes the immense sacrifice of the COP Keating soldiers to find lessons that we might apply to marketing, and before I do so, I want to take a moment to honor and remember their valor, bravery and memory.  At the end of this blog, I’ve listed organizations that you can donate to if you so like. Tapper’s book has moved me deeply, and I have an new found respect for our soldiers, and a renewed disgust with the brutal reality of war.  

So with that pause to reflect, I do find some interesting lessons to learn here.

1) When the mission changes, past decisions may no longer make sense –

When it became clear that the PRT was not going to work, the location became a combat outpost.  In that role, it could not have been in a worse position.   Yet past decisions and senior leadership commitment kept Keating going in its location, despite the change in mission.

If you’ve changed your mission, or pivoted, are you clinging to business decisions that no longer make sense.  Whether key partnerships are no longer strategic, or pricing and packaging are wrong, or team members need to change, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to NOT adjust your tactics to your mission.

2) Surrounded, the position left no real room for maneuvering and defense.  –

If you find Google on one flank, Facebook on the other, and  Oracle on the third, you may NEED to seriously consider repositioning your offering.  You need to find higher ground, move to a local peak that you can own and defend.

3) Despite the urging of those on the ground, the generals were paralyzed by not wanting to change what was clearly a failing strategy.

Are you listening to your team and open to change, or are you stuck and committed to a course of action.  Your sales team and other customer facing parts of the organization are at the coal face.  Listen to the feedback from the front-line.  Do so formally and informally, and do so often.  Change is a must in fast moving markets.

So, be clear on your mission, find higher ground to own and defend, and listen to the team and adjust quickly.  Seems pretty easy to say, but ain’t so easy to do.

(In honor of and in memory of the Soldiers of COP Keating, if you are so moved, here’s a few places you can make donations:  Army Emergency Relief, Defenders of Freedom, Fisher House Foundation Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors and the Wounded Warrior Project.

Charting the Customer Journey…

I’ve been thinking about maps a lot lately.   Not the maps you find on Google or Mapquest, but the kind you might find on the whiteboard of many successful or fledgling SaaS companies today, a map of the Customer Journey.

Customers today come in to services in many forms, freemium, trial or paid users.  But getting the sign up, long the purview of sales and now quickly become the territory of marketing, is only the first step in delivering and capturing value.  Customer must onboard, they must get value, and they must grow if the SaaS provider is to win and prosper.

It’s so easy to try, buy and leave! services today, that we must totally rethink our model. Monthly recurring revenues only grow when customers successfully onboard, utilize and grow their usage of features and add-ons.

How can we manage this?  Well, have we mapped the customer journey?  Do we understand all the milestones of service adoption, from onboarding to first value to growth?  Have we thought about usage signals that can indicate customers likely to leave, or even better, ready to grow?  Have we put engagement programs in place that drive customer through the journey so we deliver and capture the most value possible?

I’ve been working with my partner Totango and we’ve built a new Customer Journey Mapping Workshop which we will be holding on May 7th in San Francisco in conjunction with All About the Cloud.  You can learn more about the workshop here!

Chasm, What Chasm? Three Trends Collapsing the Technology Adoption Lifecycle

I’ve been wondering a lot lately about the Technology Adoption Lifecycle and Geoffry Moore’s classic Crossing the Chasm.   I believe that we are seeing the Chasm obliterated by technology and cultural changes.    I see three inter-related trends that are driving this collapse, none of these in and of themselves will surprise any readers, but I think when taken together, there is a compelling argument that the Chasm is collapsing, and smart marketers can speed time to adoption by understanding this dynamic.   These trends are 1) The consumerization of technology and its impact on the speed of diffusion 2) the commoditization of the creation and distribution of content and 3) the lower barriers and risks of technology solution adoption.

Before I continue, I do want to note that Crossing the Chasm might be the most dog-eared book in my fairly extensive marketing library.  It is a CLASSIC, and has guided much of my thought and practice of marketing over the last 2 decades.   It still has tremendous value and incredible teaching and learning in it.  The concepts of bowling pins, whole product and positioning are beyond their worth in gold.  End of story.

But, I think we need to take a hard look at the chasm today.  On page xi of his revised edition of 1999, Moore states:  “The Chasm Model itself represents a pattern in market development that is based on the tendency of pragmatic people to adopt new technology when they see other people like them doing the same.  This causes them to band together as a group, and the groups initial reaction, like teenagers at a junior high dance,  is to hesitate and watch.”   Let’s take a little time and dissect this statement.

1) “the tendency of pragmatic people to adopt new technology when they see other people like them doing the same” – Since the Chasm was “discovered” by Moore, technology has infiltrated our lives, as  Marc Andreessen says, “software is eating the world.”  Early adopters now surround everyone, kids and consumers often lead the way.   In addition, the technology continues to get hidden behind better and better and easier and easier user experience.  Today’s professionals are more comfortable with and better and faster adopters of technology.  From the secretary, to the CEO, from the line worker to the general manager, adoption patterns have compressed and changed.  CIOs and Business Managers who wait for “the mainstream” to adopt a solution will quickly find themselves in the late 
majority, falling behind competitors.

2)  “… This causes them to band together as a group”  – Which group?  How many affiliations do you have on Linkedin? How many communities do you belong to?  What technology did the PTA just adopt that has you thinking, boy, why aren’t we doing that?   It used to be information was held by vendors.   Customers and buyers depended on information brokers, such as Gartner, IDC and others to get aggregated views of this information.  Now they can go to Quora, or LinkedIn, or just plain Google.  Vendors now invest FORTUNES in content creation and distribution, because they must inform buyers now, or lose to competitors who do.  The group of peers has expanded dramatically and the information available to these groups has become free, available and subject to peer review.  One of the main reasons the group effect put brakes on mainstream adoption was the difficulty of obtaining and evaluating vendor claims.  We’ve entered the era of transparency and visibility, where the early adopters can more effectively share and make their informed views and experiences real to the mainstream.

3) “and the groups initial reaction, like teenagers at a junior high dance,  is to hesitate and watch” The new reaction is to try at small scale, fail and scale successes.  The speed and cost dynamics of the cloud have fundamentally changed the economics of trial and the risk of failure.  The risk and fear of failure is now lower than the odds of success and upside. 

I still believe in vertical marketing, I still believe in delivering whole products, I still believe in the power of positioning, but I believe the Chasm is closing and will continue to do so.  I hope this posts is controversial, and creates a discussion, I expect it will do so!  What do you think???

Salesforce.com and Three Other Companies Getting Viewpoint Right!

When I talk about Viewpoint, the first question I usually get is, “well, who does this well?”

The godfather of Viewpoint in the new era of cloud computing is clearly Salesforce.com.   As I have written here,  SalesForce.com’s “The End of Software” created a unique and compelling Viewpoint that aligned with the aspiration and frustrations of their target customers who needed faster and easier visibility into sales pipeline and performance.  As they and the market have matured, they have adeptly shifted to “The Social Enterprise”, seeking to capitalize on the technology, environmental and business shift to social computing.   So far, this seems to be a big win again for Benioff and team as even conservative Gartner Group now calls this category “Social CRM” .

But everyone calls out Salesforce, so I wanted to find a few maybe lesser know examples of companies who are staking out a Viewpoint which gets them attention, leads and business.  Here’s a few:

Zuora – The Subscription Economy – By building the business around the Subscription Economy, Zuora has created a fertile ground for discussing their billing solutions in a context that matters.  Rather than simply an accounting solution for selling term licenses, Zuora has effectively planted a flag of leadership.  They’ve even committed a whole website to the discussion of this Viewpoint.

FireEye – Sometimes a Viewpoint is as simple as saying “the world around you has dramatically changed, have you responded?”.  This is exactly what FireEye has done with their Next Generation Threat positioning.  By elegantly articulating what their clients already knew, that the bad guys were changing faster than their current defenses, FireEye positioned themselve as the expert to define and deliver what a next generation threat protection solution.

VirginAmerica –  Flying should be painful, crowded, stressful and miserable.  Right?  Wrong says VirginAmerica.  Experience the difference.  A great example of a Viewpoint which takes conventional wisdom and throws it out the window.  Backed by delivery of the promise of a new and differentiated service.  Cool!  Let’s book today!

By creating a unique Viewpoint, we create the space or the context to deliver our unique value, creating impact, the first stage of accelerating to Velocity Marketing.  What’s you Viewpoint?  (check out this blog for a starting framework… or join me for my Velocity Breakthrough Marketing Workshop in Boston on October 25th…)

Three Things You Should Forget about B2B Sales and Marketing

Sometimes the things we forget are as important as those we remember.  Well, here’s 3 things I think we would all do to forget in our B2B go to market strategies…

1) Demo only when qualified – NO – Buyers come in MANY shapes and sizes, with MANY email addresses, and in MANY states of readiness.  In all cases, they have come to expect to be able to see the service or product experience.   Since so many sales cycles are now ‘hidden’, if you don’t “show me the money” early, you could lose and not even know it…

2) Enterprise sales are top down, always – NO.  Just ask Yammer, Atlassian or even Salesforce.com and others.  Many enterprise sales cycles are now driven bottoms up by the line manager who has the problem to solve.  Now enterpise sales has ALWAYS been a combination of top down and bottom up selling, but today, the scales are tipping to the bottom up.  Velocity now requires trial, demo and value delivery EARLY and OFTEN.

3)Qualified leads matter most – NO, marketing must now deliver qualified buyers to sales.  Sales then must slam the door shut.  Marketing used to be the warm up act, and sales the concert giver.  Now it looks more like Marketing plays the first 2 acts and sales ends the show.   With hidden sales cycles and self directed buyers, marketing must not just find qualified leads, they must find the active buyers.

Each of these things to forget have broad and significant sales and marketing implications, on tactics, measurement, roles and org structutres…more of that to come in another blog…

Adopting a Cloud Mindset – Unleashing Enterprise Cloud Adoption

(This post was originally written as a contribute piece for Nimsoft’s Modern IT Blog, but I thought it would fit well here too – Enjoy)

Much has been written here, and in many blogs, about Cloud Adoption. However, most of this has focused on the tangible and critical pieces like technical architecture and operational considerations. This can’t be minimized in the least. However, in my work with both vendors and end customers, I’ve identified what is another critical success factor across all organizations, and that is adopting a Cloud Mindset. And while mindset may seem “softer” than the other issues, if we don’t shift our mindset, we will continue to cling to ideas and assumptions that served us well in the past, but can get in the way of our future success.

The OPF™ Mindset Framework:

I’ve developed a model to both understand and manage mindset transitions. In the OPF framework, Mindset is composed of 3 components; orientation, perspective, and focus. Each of these has a very specific definition:

      1. Orientation – My relationship and adjustment to the environment that I am in

 

      2. Perspective – My way of regarding/judging and interpreting facts

 

    3. Focus – Where I choose to concentrate my attention

In order to change, to bridge from one mindset to the next, it is often helpful to explicitly define, discuss and agree on an organization Mindset.

Let’s now apply this framework to the three transitions in question, ISV to SaaS, Service Provider to Cloud Service Provider, and Enterprise IT To a Cloud First Organization.

The SaaS Mindset

As I blogged earlier, ISV and new SaaS providers need to change their Mindset:

  • Orientation: from Product to Service
  • Perspective: from Spikey to Continuous
  • Focus: from Transaction to Relationship

Without these changes, the incentive to drive the organizational requirements for success and the framework to make strategic choices will be flawed. I’ve seen many cases where ISVs have not succeeded with the transition to SaaS, not because of technical barriers, but because they failed to change mindset and therefore made poor organizational, resource and strategic choices.

The Cloud Service Provider Mindset

Service Providers, of course are in the business of selling services, not products, so they have a different challenge in transitioning. They must become more agile, like the technology they support. They must accept that they win not only by expanding their service catalog, but by making it more “open” to other cloud providers, and adding value in layers above their traditional service catalogs. Applying the OPF framework to this transition, we can summarize this transition like this:

  • Orientation: from closed and control to open value add
  • Perspective: from customer value from me to customer value through ecosystem leverage
  • Focus: from Service expansion to Service agility

The more a service provider opens up and expands its catalog, business practices and value add to the Cloud ecosystem, the more opportunity opens and barriers to winning the Cloud melt away.

The Enterprise IT To a Cloud First Organization Mindset

Traditionally, IT has been the provider of services to the Enterprise. And while this is the role that they will continue to play, it is being transformed daily. First of all, with layers from IaaS to PaaS to SaaS being provided to IT, they must understand that they are no longer a buyer of services, but have in many cases become the consumer of these services. They must consume, add value and broker these services to their internal and external customers across web, mobile and other channels. They must move beyond exploring the cloud and drive to strategies that exploit it. In short, they are the beneficiaries of the work being done by ISVs and Cloud providers, but only if they learn to consume, exploit and effectively broker new and innovative services. In short, their mindset must shift like this:

  • Orientation: from buyer to consumer
  • Perspective: from exploration to exploitation
  • Focus: Service delivery to service brokering

As we see, Cloud Adoption changes the role and mindset across the IT service delivery value chain. Has you organization changed or is it clinging to an old mindset? By explicitly thinking, discussing and agreeing on an organization’s mindset, it’s Orientation, Perspective and Focus, you can change the speed and effectiveness of your cloud adoption and success. Happy Bridging…

Eat this Dog Food – Experience Marketing, Dogfood, Stone Skipping and More

Jim Barksdale is a pretty quotable guy, work for him for a few years like I did at Netscape and you leave with a small library of “Barksdalisms” that just stick with you.  One of Jim’s sayings was, “It ain’t dogfood unless the dog comes off the porch to eat it…”.

While Jim was making the point that you can love your product, but if the customers doesn’t buy it it aint worth much, I never think Jim was intending to be taken literally.  German pet food manufacturer GranataPet did.  Watch this video of a mobile enabled dog food dispensing billboard.

Kinda gets you hungry doesn’t it? OK, maybe not, but it will sure make your dog happy.

Ever feel like escaping the doldrums of your computer, sitting down by a mountain lake and skipping stones?  Sounds like fun.  That’s exactly the experience that the SkipTown promo for Sun Valley created by San Francisco design firm 11 did.  And while Skippy has since retired, check out the video of the world’s first (and maybe only?) web controlled stone skipping robot from Sun Valley Idaho. 

When I hear software, SaaS and other B2B companies hide their product or services experience behind a myriad of rationalizations and excuses I want to fire up these two videos.  If Sun Valley and Granata can do it, so can you!

KJR client WhiteHat Security recently launched it’s new RiskCheck program.  WhiteHat probably knows more about Website risk and attacks than anyone in the world.  But how do you give prospects a taste of that experience.  The RiskCheck, just launched last week is their answer.  Just complete this short web survey and receive a customized report comparing you to your industry and companies of your size. A small but highly valuable experience of the value that WhiteHat can deliver.

Experience and engagement create velocity.  So whether you are selling dog food, mountain vacations or website security, there’s a way to accelerate your pipeline today.

Now excuse me while I take Fido for a walk, skip some stones and futureproof my website.