A Chat with Onward Nation’s Stephen Woessner
In this podcast, Onward Nation’s Stephen Woessner and I chat about my story, working out, making your customer the hero and other stuff! Hope you enjoy!
Are You Selling Like it’s 1999? – My Guest Blog on The CEO Magazine
In the late 1980s I had the privilege to attend IBM’s vaunted sales training. We learned techniques for rapport building, need finding, objection handling, and closing, even including, and I kid you not, the highly praised “assumptive/alternative close” which went something like, “Do you want that mainframe cabinet in White or IBM Blue?”
Many of these techniques, while feeling dated today, were backed by the sound principles of solution/diagnostic selling, which was the dominant B2B selling philosophy from then all the way through the opening decade of the new millennium. Then a funny thing happened called the Internet…
The New Math of Competitive Differentiation, 7 – 1 = 3!
New Math: 7 – 1 = 3. Stick with me here all you quant types!
How many times have you seen this drawing in a piece of marketing?
And the pitch goes something like this, “We are the only ones who can give you D, which is super amazing, because only we have A, B and C, everyone else only has A and B. ”
This logic seems OK, but it is very susceptible to the simple counter attack, which goes like this, “Our A and B are different, and we get you D too, just a different way.” Now we are in a total “she said, he said” argument. And for no reason, we’ve missed a key opportunity to make our differentiation.
The trick is the power of the intersections. Here’s what I mean, we need to name the 3 other intersections in our diagram, as shown here:
So, you see that 1+1+1 = 7, 7 not 4 items on the drawing. Then we can say, to get D, you need 1, 2 and 3. So if you take C away, you only get #3. Hence, 7-1=3. You not only lose C, you lose 1, 2 and D.
OK, this is a bit confusing, so let’s look at an example from my book Launching to Leading. In Launching to Leading I describe the Modern Marketing Machine as a Racecar, with Marketing Automation the Engine , Content Marketing and Programs the Wheels, and Messaging and Positioning the Fuel. It looks like this:
Notice the labels of Relevance, Effectiveness, and Efficiency. And now I quote with editorial liberty from the page 26 of my book, “As we see from the diagram, being great at content marketing and Marketing Automation and Content Marketing will make you efficient, but it will never get us to relevancy and effectiveness, and to be a market leader we need all three.” Given that my business is helping clients build their Racecar, and my secret sauce is my messaging and positioning frameworks, you can see exactly how the subtraction of great messaging and positioning is a 7 – 1 = 3 scenario.
7 – 1 = 3 is a powerful way to differentiate and deposition your competition. Read more about this and other messaging and positioning strategies in Launching to Leading, or contact me and we can see if we can put some new math at work for you.
Work with Me and Help Me Scale My Business and Launch New Offerings
My work-life is great but getting a bit crazy, so I am looking for help to capture and take advantage of growing and new business opportunities.
Opportunity #1 – Business Manager
This is a genuinely unique part-time opportunity for a high energy, organized, and creative person. You will play a dynamic and I hope exciting and fulfilling role in growing my small but high impact consulting and thought leadership practice. I’m looking for a Business Manager/Personal Assistant to support the work I do as consultant, author, speaker, trainer and mentor in the area of market leadership, servicing large and small, local, national and international clients.
For details read here: KJR Business Manager Description
Opportunity #2 – Entrepreneurial Corporate Event Creator
I am looking for an independent entrepreneurial corporate event creator who wants to build a new venture with me. This is a once in a long time chance to create an industry wide event to a totally under-serviced market. I’m looking for a pro who is willing to share in both risk and upside, which is very large.
Email me at inquiries@kjrassociates.com to chat about either role!
So You Want to Be a Market Leader?
“To be fair, these are tough questions. And Rutsky knows it. The easy answer is that everyone wants to be a market leader. But, as Rutsky earnestly proclaims, some companies lead while others lag. The leaders. They focus on winning by articulating and connecting their unique value to their customers’ world and context, while the others focus their communication on features, functions and benefits…”
Cybersecurity Go To Market Dojo – Inaugural Meet-up – Guest Speaker Dr. Chenxi Wang
Be part of a movement dedicated to identifying, engaging and growing the next generation of Cyber Security Go To Market Leaders. Join us in Mountain View for our inaugural meet-up of the Silicon Valley Cybersecurity Go To Market Dojo. Dr. Chenxi Wang will be speaking to us about “Winning the Analyst Game, an Insider’s View” We will chat over wine, beer and snacks about Goals, Values and Mission. Don’t miss it!
Launching to Leading Featured on the Marketing Book Podcast
Host Douglas Burdett said in his commentary…
Hear the podcast today on Douglas’s site , on iTunes or GooglePlay .
Launching to Leading Released – Read the Press Release Here!
LAUNCHING TO LEADING
How B2B Market Leaders Create Flashmobs, Marshal Parades, And Ignite Movements
By Ken Rutsky
Publisher: Morgan James
Publication date: February 2017
Price: $17.95 / trade paperback
ISBN: 978-1-68350-034-6
CREATING FLASHMOBS AND IGNITING MOVEMENTS
How Great Companies Capture Market Leadership
Business-to-business marketing as practiced by most companies remains wedded to traditional features and benefits messaging. This creates an opportunity for forward-looking B2B marketers to leapfrog competitors, rising above drab and boring content marketing by delivering messages, programs, and content that educates and compels potential consumers to action.
LAUNCHING TO LEADING: How B2B Market Leaders Create Flashmobs, Marshal Parades, And Ignite Movements, by veteran marketing consultant Ken Rutsky, provides a model for achieving industry leadership by relating a company’s value proposition to their customer’s reality, making the company’s solution integral to the customer’s market context and success.
Building on Rutsky’s 20-plus years of participating in and observing B2B markets, LAUNCHING TO LEADING is a playbook that lets marketers create the messaging and positioning that will vault their companies to market leadership. Rutsky’s clients have had IPOs, acquisitions, and private equity funding that have delivered over $10 billion of value to investors and entrepreneurs, and by following his game plan Rutsky says, “It is possible to show 6X improvement on key sales and marketing metrics such as leads to revenue in as little as six months.”
“Feature-benefit marketing and solution-based selling worked well in a world with tightly controlled information, high barriers to entry and sales-led selling cycles,” Rutsky says. “In today’s reality of information commoditization and buyer led purchases, if you cling to those ways, you will be forever in the weeds of priority and importance.”
Companies as diverse as FireEye, Zuora, Palo Alto Networks, Virgin America, and Salesforce.com have achieved market dominance by re-inventing their messaging and positioning to be top-down, viewpoint-driven, and challenging. In so doing, they influence the way their customers see the world and how their solutions deliver meaningful, strategic value.
LAUNCHING TO LEADING presents a five-step plan to achieving market leadership:
- Shift the Mindset
- Identify Market Leadership Objectives
- Create a Viewpoint
- Articulate Value
- Double the Experience
Rutsky, who is also a speaker and mentor, shows how to create a new kind of message, called a Viewpoint, which articulates the brand’s story to the marketplace, creating a powerful, shared context for a market conversation that both resonates with and influences customers. “Your Viewpoint is the well-planned and consistently articulated context that marries your value with the customer’s reality, taking them to a more successful result,” says Rutsky. “The Viewpoint sets the stage for your value discussion with customers and prospects.”
The book includes powerful techniques such as the Viewpoint Story Wheel, which enablescompanies to construct a Viewpoint that positions their value in a way that tilts the marketplace dramatically in their favor. There are four powerful types of Viewpoint stories:
- Trendspotting stories jolt customers out of a state of complacency and alert them to the fact that the world around them has changed.
- All Pain, No Gain stories take customers into the depths of despair because they are in pain or missing important opportunities. This type of story is effective when it is communicated in the language of risk and missed opportunity rather than fear and loss.
- Better Mousetrap stories imbue customers with the power of the company’s new and radically innovative solution.
- Brave New World stories inspire customers to transform their company and industry. In high-growth, new markets, when the transformation is large, this can be a very effective lead-story type.
Each of the book’s main sections includes Game Films, which are case studies and stories that directly or indirectly demonstrate or reinforce the content in the main body, and The Coach’s Corners, which are commentaries that add additional explanation and theory to the practical. An appendix is included containing all of the models used in the book.
By applying the techniques in LAUNCHING TO LEADING, chief marketing officers and other executives will attain market leadership by changing their stories, messages, and programs from me-too to unique, compelling, and breakthrough.
About the Author
Ken Rutsky is a B2B marketing consultant focused on helping his clients break through and become market leaders. Rutsky has spent nearly 25 years in B2B marketing roles, launching the Intel Inside broadcast co-op program in 1994 and then the Internet’s first affiliate marketing program, Netscape Now, while at Netscape from 1995–99. Since then, Rutsky has been the CMO at several start-ups and ran network-security marketing at McAfee, where he developed and executed a marketing strategy that grew its web security business from $60 million to nearly $200 million.
Today, as KJR Associates, Inc. Founder and President, Rutsky leverages his knowledge from his extensive Silicon Valley career to help his clients lead their markets. He has honed his Breakthrough Marketing framework with successful implementation at dozens of client companies including FireEye, Nimsoft, Sophos, and more. In the seven years in his practice his clients have generated more than $10 billion in shareholder value through IPOs, acquisitions and late stage private equity rounds. A past contributor to Brand Quarterly, CloudExpo Journal and Cloudbook, Rutsky is a well-regarded speaker and blogger, having presented at conferences including SaaS University, CloudExpo, SIIA Conferences, the RSA Conference, and many other user groups, meet-ups, and events.
Rutsky has an engineering degree in Material Sciences from Northwestern and an MBA from Stanford.
For more information, please visit www.KenRutsky.com or www.LaunchingToLeading.com.
A New Skills Mastery Model for Go To Market Leaders
I’ve been working on a model for clients who need to figure out how to build go to market leadership in their organizations, both at an individual and team level. I’ve come up with the following idea and would love to get your feedback. The eight slices of the pie equal the 8 key mastery skill areas. Like a compass, our skills model is oriented with tactical work to the north and tactical to the south, and brand on the east and demand on the western side.
I’d love to hear any of your thoughts on the following items
- Do the skills make sense? Are the labels “right” and is any critical area missing?
- Do the “compass points” all match up?
- Would this model help you in planning or assessing you or your teams skills, organization, development or staffing plans?
There is a lot of additional work to be done to flesh out the details and use of this model, and your feedback will be very valuable to me and the state of the art of Go To Market Mastery. I can’t wait to hear what you think!
Spirion – Stopping Sensitive Data Sprawl
Challenge:
Ken engaged with Spirion in April of 2016. Spirion, then known as Identity Finder, had been recently acquired by a Private Equity firm. The new CEO believed that revised messaging and positioning would be crucial to accelerating the already strong growth of the business.
Project:
Ken worked with the new CEO, the founder, and the team to develop new positioning around “Sensitive Data Sprawl.” As part of this project, Ken also evaluated the branding of the company, and recommended a new name be developed. Ken brought in a naming firm and project managed them in the development of the new Spirion name.
Results:
Spirion relaunched its brand, website and messaging in the summer of 2016. Early market reception has been very positive and they continue on their path to success and market leadership.
Featured Clients
