Mar 17, 2012 | Breakthrough Marketing
(Note: Viewpoint is a critical part of my Breakthrough Marketing Framework, to learn more about how it fits with Value and Velocity to create impact and breakthrough, read this post…Ken )
Walking across the Santa Monica pier, my senses rose to an unusually high level. The misty cool evening woke me up after a dinner with great food, new friends and fine wine. As we approached the lit up big top, I was immediately transported to the thrilling milieu of the circus. Thoughts of lions, tigers, tight rope walkers and clowns immediately flashed through my mind. It was at once familiar as well as seductive.
Passing the ticket taker and entering the tent, the energy, anticipation and excitement was palpable. And while the concession and souvenir stands were not much different than what you would see at any circus, something in the air said different, something said Cirque Du Soleil. Maybe it was the accents and slightly exotic appearance of the servers, register clerks and program sellers. Maybe it was the colors and smells, maybe it was magic. I’m not sure, but that’s OK, I’d already begun to move from the circus of my youth to the Cirque experience.
Entering and moving to our seats, we stared at a giant, translucent egg. Ova, the name of the show, was center stage. Next a team of exterminators entered the aisles…they began slowly pursuing butterfly and other assorted creatures. Exit the exterminators and enter into the aisles giant crickets as a few fleas and spiders began to climb 8 foot flower stems on the stage. All of this, while the big top was still less than full, and patrons continue to be seated. The stage still covered by the giant egg, remained a bit of a mystery
The stage was set, this was not your Ringling Brothers circus, it was a giant insect egg, hiding a new and exciting world yet to be discovered. The stage was set, I was ready to be amazed.
In its 25th year of thrilling audiences, Cirque has mastered the art, among many others, of creating a world view, or viewpoint, that transports audiences to new worlds, making them ready to be thrilled. By the time the show opens, you are already a raving fan.
Viewpoint sets the stage, and gets us ready to engage our hearts and minds in the experience to come. By building on the familiar, and transforming it into a new environment, Cirque Du Soleil does what ever marketer dreams of, it creates the perfect playing field from which to deliver against it promise to entertain and amaze.
Mar 13, 2012 | Breakthrough Marketing
It’s been almost a year since I starting blogging about the role of Experience in the new Cloud Go To Market strategy. In my post on Bridging to SaaS Success; A Basic Blueprint, I said:
Go To Market Tactics: E -> E: Evaluation to Experience. Today’s go to market mix, pricing, channel and promotion is built to drive evaluation and transaction. Successful service go to market requires a shift to tactics that drive experience and satisfaction. Successful SaaS organizations shift their go to market tactics and investments and become experience, not product marketers.
I then expanded on these thoughts with my post entitled SaaS Go To Market, Why Experience Rules:
“Today’s customer has little patience for White Papers, datasheets, detailed feature function product specs and the like. They may attend a webinar, but the next step is experience. Even for large organizations with complex buying behavior, the expectation of SaaS is easy, accessible and meaningful experience of the service, either through demonstration instances, trial or freemium models.”
And while the proof continues to mount that this is the case, each additional post I do on the topic inevitably invites some heated Twitter and or blog comments. I’ve enjoyed debating the topic at conferences as varying as the Goldman Sachs Cloud Computing Conference and the Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Meet-up Group’s Talk Cloudy to Me all day meetup.
Today I want to add another layer of detail into my V3 High Impact Go To Market Model, on how to use Engagement and Experience to drive impact. Velocity is a function of Delivery, Engagement and Experience, simply V=D*Engagement*Experience.
The HIGHEST velocity go to market programs, tailor their delivery to channel of communication and buyers place in the buying cycle. Content Rules, a popular book in marketing circles today, spends a lot of time focused on just this, and for me it is necessary and recommended reading and very good stuff.
However, in my experience, Content Rules fails to take on the other 2 variables in the equation, Engagement and Experience. In order to drive Engagement, a strong Viewpoint and Value position must be staked out and communicated. Then, this must be married with Experience driven delivery.
For a long time, I’ve been calling most White Papers YAWNERS™, Yet Another White Paper Nobody Ever Reads. The reasons are two fold, first, the White Paper format and typical writing is simply not engaging, because in 99% of the cases it has no compelling viewpoint, it is, usually simply a LONG WINDED DATASHEET.
Secondly, as I’ve stated ad-nausea, products are evaluated, services are experienced. We have truly moved from a products to services marketplace, and low experience vehicles, even with good engagement are just not enough. If we put these together in a simple 2×2 matrix, we see the emergence of what are truly high velocity programs.
In the upper right we see high velocity programs such as Trials, live demo instances and the like. In the bottom left we see low velocity deliverables such as whitepapers and datasheets. And while there is a role for these low velocity deliverables, high velocity marketing spend will heavily weight high Engagement and high Experience programs and deliverables.
In my final post in this series, we tie together Viewpoint, Value and Velocity with the traditional marketing and sales funnel, and see how this framework can create High Impact and growth.
Mar 2, 2012 | Breakthrough Marketing
Covey coined the idea of abundance mentality or abundance mindset, a concept in which a person believes there are enough resources and success to share with others. He contrasts it with the scarcity mindset (i.e., destructive and unnecessary competition), which is founded on the idea that, if someone else wins or is successful in a situation, that means you lose; not considering the possibility of all parties winning (in some way or another) in a given situation.
When we apply this idea to Go To Market Positioning, Messaging and execution, we begin to see our opportunities in a whole new way, and drive an execution that can surprise even our most optimistic expectations.
In my Viewpoint, Value, Velocity or
V3 High Impact Go To MarketModel, Value is the articulation of our winning business benefits that we use to move potential customers from awareness to purchase ready. Once we get their attention with our Viewpoint, we need to rapidly move to captivating them with our communication of our Unique Value.
Value definition: The Business benefits that a solution delivers for which customers are will to pay both real and opportunity costs to acquire. Unique Value is a value which only comes from us, not other alternatives in the market.
So, what are the 3 steps to articulating Unique Value, and using it to sneak up on and beat our competitors without them even knowing it
1) Adopt an abundance mindset. The abundance mindset simply says that we view our market not as a competitive dog fight for a finite and scarce amount of business but as a unlimited landscape of opportunity. When we do this, we change our perspective from one of battle to one of maneuver and our focus from better to different. (You do need to know that I am a fiercely competitive person, but the when we adopt an abundance mindset, we compete more like a Judo master than a boxer)
2)
Invest the time and energy to do the mechanics of building out our Value and its articulation in powerful messaging and positioning. We do this by starting with an honest assessment of our uniqueness and our Unique Value. We do this by completing the Venn Diagram here and then using it to drive well documented and customer validated positioning and messaging.
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| Finding Unique Value |
3) We then tilt the playing field to our advantage by changing the terrain from the conventional wisdom to our Viewpoint. When our Viewpoint creates the context for the customer and market conversation, the diagram magically changes to look more like this:
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| Viewpoint Can Tilt the Playing Field |
A Quick Case Study:
Palo Alto Networks provides an excellent example of this Unique Value in action. Security folks have long recognized that Firewalls were providing less and less protection as more and more network traffic went over the Web protocol (Nearly all Firewalls have allowed Web traffic through, it’s as if you’re door to your office let anyone dressed in a business suit in without regards to their intent). But it took Palo Alto Network’s courage to step out and say, “The Firewall is Broken” (Viewpoint) and we can fix it with these 3 key protection features, etc, etc. Did this anger customers who were writing hundreds of millions in checks to Checkpoint, McAfee, Juniper and Cisco, some yes, but others apparently not, as it soon becomes clear.
At the time of their initial launch, I was running Network Security marketing for Secure Computing, now part of McAfee. I can remember the product manager telling me that “Palo Alto is nothing but a web filtering box, it’s not a real firewall” Fast forward 4+ years and Palo Alto Networks has disrupted a stagnant market, grown from nothing to over $500M in revenues, and is expected to be one of the largest tech IPOs of 2012.
So while McAfee, Checkpoint, and others fought over the percentage points of share in the old Firewall market, Palo Alto titled the playing field, articulated their Unique Value and executed with excellence, and as we speak, they are eclipsing the the old market, being chased by the rest. Sure the others have noticed now, but it just may be too late.
As an aside, your best sales reps are usually the “canary in the coal mine” to tell you if the market is being tilted on you. I vividly remember a sales manager in my office saying, “We need an answer to Palo Alto” and me saying, “Really, what are they, $10M out of $3B right now, let’s keep our on on the real competition?” Boy oh boy, I got that one wrong indeed!
Feb 14, 2012 | Breakthrough Marketing
(Note: Viewpoint is a critical part of my Breakthrough Marketing Framework, to learn more about how it fits with Value and Velocity to create impact and breakthrough, read this post…Ken )
In my recent blog on High Impact Marketing, I said,
Viewpoint is a framing of the market in the context of your uniqueness. The uniqueness of your team, your capabilities, and your vision. Some call viewpoint thought leadership, some vision with a capital V, and some brand.
and I called on providers to set a unique and compelling viewpoint to create breakthrough for their marketing efforts.
While there are many frameworks and techniques to capturing Viewpoint, however defined, one of the simplest and most effective way I have, and one the first I usually pull out of my toolset, is to simple create an X and Y set of axis and coordinate labels for the market. A simple 2×2 matrix which will then set your view firmly in one corner of the world, the best one!
There’s a running joke in MBA circles that no presentation is complete without a 2×2 matrix. This dates back at least to 1968 and the classic BCG “Growth Share” matrix, which among other notoriety is the source of the phrase “Cash Cow”! With dimensions of market share and market growth, the BCG matrix provided a powerful way to understand and measure product segment profitability. This example illustrates just how powerful a 2×2 matrix can be in setting a framework in which to view a problem. From a simple idea, sprang a wealth of insight and business for BCG.
So let’s try applying the 2×2 matrix to the problem of articulating a market Viewpoint. Setting your market Viewpoint with a 2×2 matrix simple requires these “simple” steps:
1) Identify the X-axis. A good place to start here is with the biggest and simplest piece of your market vision. For Salesforce.com, this was the transition from Software to Service (now called SaaS, then call nothing really). Now that we’ve identified the endpoints, name the Axis, in this case let’s call it “Delivery”
2) Identify the Y-Axis. Here let’s try the biggest change in the customer experience. In the Salesforce.com case, it is from Coding to Configuration. Let’s name that axis, “Customization”.
3) Claim the upper right corner as yours. Here’s how this comes together in the Salesforce.com example:
The “End of Software” became Salesforce.com’s viewpoint, mantra and vision. All from this “simple” 2×2 framework.
Viewpoint is all about framing the marketplace discussion, so you can then deliver your value to the customers who see through your market viewpoint. Salesforce’s value came in the proposition of lower TCO, faster Time to Value, and greater utilization than traditional CRM software packages. And while “the End of Software” viewpoint did not sell any customers, it set a powerful market context for Salesforce to define and own the emerging SaaS CRM category, and create their own cash cow business.
Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape, and one of the most amazing bosses I’ve ever had once said,
“In the battle the bear and the alligator, the victor is determined by the terrain”
By articulating a compelling and meaningful viewpoint, organizations create the terrain so that they emerge winners.
Feb 8, 2012 | Breakthrough Marketing
Unless you are a hardcore (American) football fan, or happened to just catch the latest episode of HBO Real Sports, you may have never heard of Coach Kevin Kelley of Pulaski Academy in Little Rock Arkansas. But if you are a football fan, I’d imagine you may hear about him soon even if you forget about this blog. You see, Kelley’s teams haven’t punted since 2006. And in that time he has taken his small 350 kid school into the national top 100 rankings and to 3 state championships while winning well over 90% of his games…
“The average punt in high school nets you 30 yards, but we convert around half our fourth downs, so it doesn’t make sense to give up the ball,” Kelley says. “Besides, if your offense knows it has four downs instead of three, it totally changes the game. I don’t believe in punting and really can’t ever see doing it again.
and
He means ever. Consider the most extreme scenario, say, fourth-and-long near your own end zone. According to Kelley’s data (much of which came from a documentary he saw), when a team punts from that deep, the opponents will take possession inside the 40-yard line and will then score a touchdown 77% of the time. If they recover on downs inside the 10, they’ll score a touchdown 92% of the time. “So [forsaking] a punt, you give your offense a chance to stay on the field. And if you miss, the odds of the other team scoring only increase 15 percent. It’s like someone said, ‘[Punting] is what you do on fourth down,’ and everyone did it without asking why.”
So what’s going on here and what’s it got to do with this blog, SaaS and Product Marketing? I think quite a bit. Here’s why…
Despite the overwhelming evidence and success of his strategy (he also onside kicks on every kickoff and lets opposing punts roll un-fielded) and his growing popularity at coaches clinics and the like, it is not apparent that Kelley has attracted many disciples. He’s probably OK with that as he is amassing huge competitive advantage over his opponents. As the SI article continues:
Which is to say that most football coaches aren’t simply averse to risk—no shock, there—but that they make choices at odds with statistical probability, akin to blackjack players standing on 11. The explanation: Subject as they are to scrutiny, coaches have incentive to err on the side of conservatism.
This brings me full circle to one of my favorite topics and soapboxes, Experience Marketing. While conventional B2B marketing wisdom is that only very well qualified and vetted buyers should see demos or receive trials, without fail, in every scenario I have seen, the number one predictor of sales cycle success is the presence of a trial/POC or other real hands on experience.
Yet I see time and time again, sales and marketing teams in SaaS organizations, that could easily move the trial or experience to the front of the marketing and sales cycle, hang on to conventional wisdom, hiding or gating the actual product experience. Whether this is because of fear of failure or simple rejection of the new, or concern over investor or CEO second guessing, those in the old product mindset are punting away opportunity every day.
I have one thing to say to them: “DON’T PUNT – JUST GO FOR IT “. Whether that means a try and buy, freemium model or live demo instances, put EXPERIENCE front and center in your go to market strategy and tactics. IT WILL give you the Kelley No Punt advantage.
It’s no surprise that Kelley is out on the corporate speaking circuit talking about thinking outside of the box. It’s a simple recipe for winning. Look at the data. See it in a new way. Change your mindset. Have the courage to ask. Where else can cloud providers get a Kelley advantage…if you know, act now and win!
Jan 26, 2012 | Breakthrough Marketing
Most CEOs I talk to have a jaded, if not skeptical view of marketing. While they recognize the importance of marketing to their long term success, they have a hard time understanding and measuring how well marketing is doing. And while more mature organizations have a good handle on very well tuned marketing metrics and measurement, the question is still always out there. With the advance in marketing automation, new channels of communication, and the avalanche of marketing data now available, marketing has evolved, in many CEOs view, from a black art, to a black science.
Hidden behind the dashboards and metrics lies a more fundamental problem. In today’s hyper competitive, global, instantaneous market, where buyers and consumers have nearly unlimited access to information and each other, the fight for attention and share has become a treadmill of constantly faster speed. With the proliferation of social media, and competivite solutions in even the most specialized market segment, we need a new Breakthrough marketing formula to feed the machine.
Simply put, we need a new model for getting noticed and getting bought. To achieve the highest breakthrough possible, we need to get great at Viewpoint, Value and Velocity. We need to move to Converged Viewpoint, Unique Value and High Velocity.
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| Viewpoint, Value and Velocity Converge to deliver breakthrough |
Let’s look briefly at each of these elements, what they are, and why they are needed.
Viewpoint
Viewpoint is a framing of the market in the context of your uniqueness. The uniqueness of your team, your capabilities, and your vision. Some call viewpoint thought leadership, some vision with a capital V, and some brand.
Why is Viewpoint critical? Without a doubt, we live in a world of data and information overload. But often overlooked is the aspect of information over-availability. As anyone who use Google knows, the challenge is not in finding an answer or result, but it is in finding the right or most helpful one. What does this mean for marketers? Let’s take a look at one small experiment. In November of 2011, KJR Associates examined a sampling of companies from the Andreeson Horowitz venture portfolio; Here’s a screen grab of that set:
We then examined the websites of each company and determined its “market category”:
Finally, we did a Google search using the a quoted market category name and looked at the quantity of search results returned. This is displayed here:
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| Market Categories |
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| Google Search Result for Specific Results |
So, as is clear from above, and totally consistent with our intuition, it’s a CROWDED marketplace for products and ideas. Even in very niches market segments, we have hundreds of thousands of results returned. The ONLY way to be noticed in this market is to provide something different, a UNIQUE and RELEVANT viewpoint.
In order to define Viewpoint providers must tap into the macro trends that impact their customers, as well as the discontinuity they offer to meet these trends. In my related post on Viewpoint, I walk through an example of this process.
Value
So while Viewpoint is critical to getting noticed, Value is critical to getting into the buyers shortlist. Simply put, Value is defined as the intersection between your unique capabilities express as business benefits, your customer needs, and the missing capabilities of your key competitors. This is shown with a simple sketch:
This unique Value is then articulated in forms such as competitive positioning statements, messaging, market segmentations and product feature benefit charts. Then when combined with Viewpoint, I can tilt the market in my favor. This process is further discussed here.
Velocity
With ViewPoint articulated and Value defined, the last piece of the puzzle is to deliver high velocity programs, those that deliver high quality leads across the buying lifecycle. Marketing Velocity = DE**2, or simply put:
Velocity = Delivery X Engagement X Experience
High velocity marketing is strong on message, meaning it effectively and creatively communicates Value within a powerful market Viewpoint. High velocity marketing uses appropriate Delivery channels and investments that meet buyers whereever and whenever they are in the buying lifecycle. More and more so, this is about delivering compelling experiences, as I have blogged about extensively. Lastly, high velocity marketing is fueled by high levels of interactivity and engagement. Gone are the days of depending solely on complex whitepapers to explain solutions. Vehicles like live demos, interactive assessments, and engaging video case studies are now a must. Velocity is further explored in this post.
In today’s high velocity market, we need a new HIGH BREAKTHROUGH marketing formula to feed the machine. High Breakthrough Marketing is a product of Viewpoint, Value and Velocity, or V–cubed! So, in order to deliver with velocity, organizations need to define a unique Viewpoint, articulate customer driven Value, and execute high Velocity programs. Without these 3 Vs, investments in marketing automation, content marketing and nurturing programs will deliver at best, mediocre results.
Dec 30, 2011 | Breakthrough Marketing
When I was a wet behind the ears sales rep in the Rolling Meadow’s Illinois branch office in 1986 (yes, they had computers back then :)), I remember the big sign that hung on the wall;
Calls + Demos = Sales
Now this office sold everything from PCs to copiers (yes, IBM sold copiers) to mini computers (S34, 36, 38, and later AS/400 and RS6000s) and the biggest S360 Mainframes. Though the sign belonged to the “Office Machines”, ie Copiers, team, I quickly learned in my territory of small manufacturers and distributors, the key to selling the minicomputer lay in not just having the right software package, but in putting a killer demo in front of the customer. As Jerry Maguire might say, “show me the money” and I say then and now, “show me the demo”.
Fast forward 25 years or so and I now have come to the corrolary to this sign for B2B technology vendors:
Marketing + Experience = Sales
As I have blogged about extensively, I believe that B2B technology sales and marketing is being transformed, as we move from products to services, we must move from traditional evaluation based product sales to experienced based service sales, this is true in SaaS models but in many other places too. In fact, just walk into any Apple store and see this in action, they are built to be giant experience labs, contrast that to the traditional cell phone store or Best Buy with product under glass covered cabinet shelfs or sitting tied down on turned off or canned displays.
Why is it then that B2B Software and SaaS providers continue to hide their experiences in the equivalent of a locked glass cabinet, behind weeks of qualification and sales calls that make a customer “prove” that they should be able to give it a go? Why not put the experience (trial, freemium, demo instance, whatever) front and center in your go to market?
I believe there are 3 main “reasons” for this hesitancy. They are:
1) The belief that the customer will not see enough “value” in the trial or demo experience.
2) The belief that my competitors will learn so much that this will put them at an advantage over us.
3) They simply haven’t invested yet (mentally or financially) in transforming their mindset, service and tactics to take advantage of experience marketing.
As you might guess, none of these reasons hold water for me. The first and second are simply outdated vestiges of the old way of thinking. If #1 is true, than shame on you for not delivering value, you best be fixing that regardless of your go to market strategy.
Reason #2 is just living in a fantasy land. First of all, a determined competitor will get a hold of your product or service, even if you spend a lot of effort and time to prevent it. Without passing judgement on tactics, I’ve seen shell companies, resellers, consultants and others to be effective paths for “back door” acquisition. It’s really not hard.
As for reason #3, rest assured, if you aren’t making this investment, one of your existing or soon to be competitors is. EVERY market is being disrupted and re-invented, you best be the one to do it to yourself. You can’t afford not to!
So with that I’d like to declare 2012 the “Year of Experience Marketing”…care to come along??
Jul 5, 2011 | Breakthrough Marketing
About 5 yrs ago, I had the pleasure of sitting through sales training with John Costigan. I remember John’s opening as he said something like, “How are you?” and got the typical quite reaction. John went on to say something like, “when I am asked, I say “OUTSTANDING” and you should too. Because to STAND OUT, you MUST BE OUTSTANDING”.
Fast forward to last week, when I was having a discussion on positioning with a very successful entrepreneur turned VC. He said, “the only way to win in today’s markets is to STAND OUT, create something new”. Immediately I thought of John and said to myself, “If you want OUTSTANDING positioning, you must STAND OUT from the crowd.”
When you look around B2B technology providers, those who do stand out usually take one of three fundamental approaches to differentiation, what I call 1+1=3, Embrace and Extend, and Copy and Paste. All can generate OUTSTANDING results and returns.
As Cloud computing goes mainstream, ISV, Hoster and other service providers can no longer depend on the previously successful, “We are X category, but as SaaS” such as early pioneers like Salesforce.com did. To truly STAND OUT and poke above the clouds, these three strategies offer proven paths to success.
1) 1+1=3 or Market Consolidation – Simply put, this is a strategy of adding together existing, adjacent capabilities in order to consolidate markets.
KJR client Nimsoft (now a division of CA) changed the IT monitoring market early on in the “Cloud era” by providing one product to consolidate the monitoring of Datacenter, Service provider and Cloud infrastructure, as I have blogged about extensively in this space. Market consolidation is an effective differentiation strategy because it provides clear value to the end buyer in cost savings and operational efficiencies.
Embrace and Extend – Next Generation X – The strategy of having competitive parity to existing capabilities and adding high value new ones.
Palo Alto Networks has created very rapid growth and disruption in the mature firewall space by embracing and extending the mature enterprise Firewall market with their “Next Generation Firewall” , not only consolidating the Firewall and IPS markets with their positioning, but by redefining the vary essence of a Enterprise Firewall to be Application and User centric, not port and protocol based. Their new App-ID and User-ID technologies changed the Firewall market dramatically, and gained them real first mover advantage over the incumbents. Embrace and Extend is effective because while disruptive, it goes after existing category dollars.
Copy and Paste – Stealing from other less related markets to create something
NEW!
While Embrace and Extend disrupts existing markets, Copy and Paste creates new ones. Success Factors copied KPIs from financial and capital management systems and created a Human Capital Performance management market. Splunk copied “search” from Google and the Internet to create the “IT Search” positioning that has made it unique and sustaining. Copy and Paste works because the value of the positioning is easy to explain and apply to new markets. Copy and Paste is a great way to position and explain disruptive technologies, and creates new spending rather than consolidation or taking existing category dollars.
So as you look for stand out positioning, leverage 1+1=3, Embrace and Extend, and Copy and Paste as three effective paths to rise above the clouds and generate outstanding returns for your company.
May 26, 2011 | Breakthrough Marketing
I am constantly surprised at how much my 4 kids teach me, but sometimes it’s really cool!!!
Owen, my youngest is a typical 3 1/2 year old boy, energetic, physical and fearless. He’s been riding on a glider bike for the last year, and loves to blast down hills with his feet in the air, scaring the daylights out of his Dad.
For those of you unfamiliar with glider bikes, it’s basically a pedal-less 2 wheeler that you propel like a scooter with your feet. I’ve been watching him scoot around on his glider wondering how he would do with pedals, would he need training wheels at all?? Would he be faster than his 3 older siblings at getting on a “real” 2 wheeler? (they all transitioned from training wheels at ages between 5 and 6, one with virtual ease, one with a few tries and one with 6 months of struggle. )
On Tuesday this week, the answers became clear. Owen said, “can I ride Addie’s bike?”. I said, OK sure. Owen hopped on, I gave him a little push and he was off pedaling, with the balance already second nature. Amazing, 3 1/2 and riding a two wheeler already with NO teaching, no back breaking run alongs, no leaning the wrong way for balance.
So, what did I learn? First I kicked myself for not having glider bikes for the other 3, oh well. Second I marveled at the effectiveness of learning balance and pedaling separately, and how it eased the transition in a way that training wheels fail miserably at. Third, I learned that the boy is crazy fearless, but I kinda already knew that from his accumulated trips to urgent care and many other sorties in playgrounds and parks.
This episode got me thinking about transitions, especially ISV to SaaS transformations, and how to ease the pain and difficulty. Certainly, doing this requires a good deal of fearlessness and courage to change mindset, organization and tactics, as I’ve blogged extensively about. However, I think most organizations can find a glider bike or two to help speed the transition and avoid losing organizational balance in the process.
For example, one client of mine who has been incredibily successful with this transition, was already selling their product in subscription mode 90+% of the time. Perpetual to Subscription is a huge and often challenging business problem. However, for this client, it became a glider bike to SaaS. Pricing drives many sales and customer behaviors, my client rode this glider right into the SaaS model.
Another glider bike to SaaS might be your go to market model. Do you focus on customers getting a taste of your product through download or guided demos? This focus on direct product experience can be your glider bike to SaaS success.
What other glider bikes are out there to help speed this business transition? Would love to hear your stories…
In the meantime, we will be shopping for a new bike for Owen this weekend, and hopefully not going to urgent care!!!
Cheers
Ken
May 16, 2011 | Random Musings
(Ken’s note Sept 2016 – This is an older blog, but a relevant one still)
I recently finished my blog series on Bridging to SaaS Success, and I’ve been thinking a lot about one part of that framework, Mindset. I talked about the SaaS mindset, and said, “Mindset is made up of 3 things, orientation, perspective, and focus“.
Since then, Mindset has come up in my client work with technology clients, not only in the SaaS context, but in the discussion of transformative selling. Then it was there again in my non-profit work with our local school district and lastly in some work I’ve started on career transitioning from engineering to marketing. In all cases, my OPF (tm) Mindset framework has proven to be a quick and powerful way to both explain and leverage mindset as a way to understand and drive transformations in belief and action.
The OPF Mindset Framework:
Mindset is made of 3 components: Orientation, Perspective, Focus. In the OPF framework, each of these have a very specific definition.
- Orientation – My relationship and adjustment to the environment that I am in
- Perspective – My way of regarding/judging and interpreting facts
- Focus – Where I choose to concentrate my attention
Let’s take a look at a couple of examples.
Example #1, The SaaS Mindset – As I blogged earlier, 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.
Example #2 – Transitioning an educational institution. There has been a lot of talk in our schools about the pressure put on young students to perform to ever increasing pressure and academic standards. Tales of preschoool parents worrying about whether their preschool is the right feeder to the Ivy Leagues is now a cultural meme. Fighting this are documentaries like “Race to Nowhere” and “Waiting for Superman” which document the huge costs to our children and society of this over emphasis on achievement. Locally, I’ve been working with our elementary school on trying to raise “whole children” and what this means to the community. I believe that to succeed, we must redefine the communities mindset when it comes to their goals of the public school:
- Orientation – From Curriculum to Learning
- Perspective – From Achievement to Development
- Focus – From “Teach to the test” to “Teach for life”
I firmly believe that if we can shift our mindset on our educational goals, we can actually not only raise healthier, happier children, but can actually improve our levels of achievement.
Example #3 – Transitioning careers from engineering to marketing. I work with a LOT of engineers, many who have marketing in their job titles. The #1 thing that separates those who successfully make this transition is those who change their mindset.
- Orientation – From Technology to Business
- Perspective – From Details to Big Picture
- Focus – From Problem Solving to Solution Sharing
Engineers who fail to change their mindset are easy to spot. They have a hard time focusing on scale related business problems and solutions. They get trapped in “features and functions” and can’t see the proverbial forest for the trees.
As you can see from above, the OPF Mindset framework can be applied to a wide set of transformations, from organization, to cultural to individual. So the next time you are faced with a transformation that is failing or struggling, step back for a minute and examine the Orientation, Perspective and Focus that you, your organization or team has adopted, and whether it is the right one for success, or anchored in your behaviors and beliefs of the past.
Happy Bridging – Ken
