Word of the Week – “Old Pro”

Jun 20, 2017 | Random Musings

“Old Pro” – (n) Noun –

1) A bar in Palo Alto, as in “The Old Pro”.  The Old Pro is a very popular sports bar currently housed on Ramona Street in the building that formerly was Ramona’s Pizza.  The Old Pro has often hosted the royalty of Silicon Valley and was one of the late “Coach” Bill Campbell’s hangouts.  Also, many a Stanford Business School student have hoisted a beer or two or three at Tuesday night F.O.A.M (see F.O.AM.) night at the Old Pro, both old and new.

Example – “Meet me at the Old Pro to watch the (49rs, Stanford, Warriors, Giants, A’s …) game”

2) The “Old Old Pro” – Valley veterans will remember the “Old Old Pro” that was a in a World War 2 Quonset hut on El Camino and Page Mill roads. The Old Old Pro had a peanut covered floor, with some shells maybe as old as the building itself, and was covered wall and ceiling with now non-PC Budweiser, Nascar and Rigid Tool Bikini Clad girl posters.  Many, including the author miss the Old Old Pro.    Other valley bars of Old Old Pro vintage include the now defunct Wagon Wheel complete with poker room, the St James Infirmary in Mountain View with its massive Wonder Woman statue and popular with Moffet Field Airmen, Santa Clara’s Peppermill, as well as Palo Alto’s Antonio’s Nut House which is still hanging on as of this writing on California Avenue.

3) Old Pro (rare usage) – Possibly one of the rumored denizen’s of Thursday night happy hour at the Rosewood.  As in, “She’s an (old) Pro”…enough said…

 

Leadership, Breaking Rules, and Reframing; Two Books and One Story

Jun 16, 2017 | Leadership

I walked into the conference room with my PR manager Jody.  Mike awaited us to review our launch plan. About 15 minutes into the conversation, Mike interrupted us and said, “Damnit, I pay you to be a firestarter, not a fireman, come back with a plan to start some fires!” So chastened,  Jody and I walked out of the office with our proverbial tails between our legs.  

This was a memorable, though certainly not unique interaction, with the late Mike Homer.  Mike, who died tragically young of a rare brain disease at age 50 in 2009, was the a key driving force behind the commercial success of Netscape from prior to it’s IPO in 1995 to after its sale to AOL in 1999. Eighteen years later, I still remember Mike as one of the leaders who taught me the most and led the best.

I was reminded of Mike when I read the new bestseller by Sam Walker, The Captain Class.  In the book Walker first uses sophisticated analytics to identify the 16 stand-out sports teams of all time, teams as well known as the Pittsburgh Steelers (1974-80), the Boston Celtics (1956-69), and the Brazilian National Mens Soccer Club (1958-62) and as obscure as the Collinwood Magpies (1927-30) of Australian Rules Football fame.  He then asked the seemingly impossible question to answer, “what made them great?”. His surprising answer, the presence of a certain type of team captain.  One that shared 8 characteristics that he identified.

Among the eight, four stuck out to me when I think of Mike.  First, they weren’t the usual suspects, i.e. the superstar. Mike was not the Marc Andreessen of Netscape any more than Helderaldo Bellini was the Pele’ of the great Brazilian soccer teams.  Second, they were not Angels. Mike, like many of the captains outlined in the book, lead a hardscrabble childhood.  Growing up in working class San Francisco, the son of a bar owner, Mike was a product of not the Ivy league or Stanford, but of UC Cal. Mike rose meteorically based on his skill and street savvy. Third, they broke rules. Mike was a street fighter. If there was a rule book to marketing, Mike knew it, and knew instinctively when to throw it out and break it.   And last, they did potentially divisive things. Some of Mike’s conflicts were legendary, I’ll leave it at that, but in hindsight, they served the purpose of actually rallying the company to action or necessary change. When Mike saw the what needed to be done, he willed it to happen. Mike may be gone, but for those of us on the Netscape team, he’s the captain that won’t be forgotten.

The second book that I just finished is Michael Lewis’s “The Undoing Project“. The book is a profile of the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two Israeli psychologist who, as Lewis puts it, formed a “Friendship that Changed Our Minds”. This is a challenging book for engineering types like myself who have transitioned into business careers.

We, myself included, think the world is rational, we are all in our minds, economists who believe that humans make decisions rationally. This, Kahneman and Tversky show us is NOT true. Over the course of decades, they showed that decisions and choices are impacted by our emotions according to things like recency, anchoring and relevance. Their work explains things like why people regularly turn down good gambles, make seemingly obvious mistakes in decisions over and over again and let bias impact their judgement. And this simple description does little justice to either Lewis’s book OR their work.

One concept that stuck out for me is framing, which says that “simply changing the description of a situation and making a gain seem like a loss, you can cause people to completely flip their attitude toward risk (pg 276) ” The classic Asian Disease Problem showed that Doctors would make the opposite decision on numerically identical choices when framed as potential success (# of lives saved) vs. potential failure (# of deaths). Astonishing.

I’ve long believed that in highly competitive markets, CONTEXT is a powerful motivator and critical part of messaging.  It is the way we stand out from the crowd, by connecting to and FRAMING the way the market thinks about problems and solutions. But I left this reading thinking it may be nearly the ONLY think that matters when trying to differentiate our solution from competitive ones.  Mind boggling!

Having had our context REFRAMED by Mike,  Jody and I left and after licking our wounds, we came up with new FIRESTARTING plan, broke a few rules, and came back with a new and more powerful course of action! 

Leadership it seems, is all about breaking rules and re-framing context! So now let’s go undo something together!

Word of the Week – “Open Source”

Jun 12, 2017 | Random Musings

Open Source – (n) Noun – 1) A hypothetical business model that has made money exactly once (see RedHat) and is often bandied about as the next new thing.  Also, known as the last ditch effort to save a failing software company.  This is not to be confused with “Freemium”(see Freemium), another business model that shares the same strange characteristic of making money by giving away value, but has succeeded at least a few more times.

2) Software freely distributed, developed and maintained by volunteers working on an “open source project”.  This is kinda like the Woodstock version of software.   Often seen together or described as “Crowdsourcing”, the theory is that more people can build better software.  This is often proven true, and the benefits are great.  However, as it has often been predicted, Open Source is NOT the business model of most software companies, at least those that are profitable – see #1 above.

3) The industries attempt to wrest control from Microsoft, IBM and Oracle.  It has kinda worked, but SaaS (see SaaS) has arguably had a much larger impact.

Example – “We are going to open-source this project/product/company so we can scale.  We are going to monitize (see monitize) it by delivering an enterprise supported version”

See also – RedHat, Hadoop, Mozilla, Docker, and thousands of other projects.

Message-Market Fit Trumps Product-Market Fit?

May 3, 2017 | Breakthrough Marketing

Product – Market Fit is an important concept in very early stage start-ups.  It is the thing that is perceived by founders and investors alike as THE milestone to signify that customers want the product and it is time to accelerate growth investments.  As Marc Andreessen is quoted as saying, “Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market”. Blogger Sean Ellis (@seanellis) of GrowthHackers.com defines Product Market Fit as the time when 40% of your initial customers say they would be  “very disappointed” without your product.  Netscape’s CEO Jim Barksdale said it in a bit more folksy way, “It’s not dog food if the dogs don’t come off the porch and eat it.”  Product market fit, implies that it is indeed dog food that’s in your dog food can.  So, now, we gotta let the dogs know it’s time to come and get it.

However, as Dan Olsen (@danolsen), author of The Lean Product Playbook, discusses in this slideshare entitled, “How to Achieve Messaging-Market Fit” Message-Market Fit is determined by “How appealing the messaging sounds” to the customer, not by how well the product meets their needs as in Product-Market Fit.  Dan goes on to give a good primer on the basics of good messaging and positioning.

In my book, Launching to Leading, I dive deeply into the market leadership life-cycle and what that leaders must do to breakthrough and lead.  Here, let’s use the lens of Message-Market fit to frame this discussion.  There are three levels of Message Market fit that you must achieve to lead and win your market. Let’s call there Level I Value Fit, Level II- Unique Value Fit and Level III – Viewpoint Fit.  Moving through all 3 of these levels is necessary as you grow from launching to leading your market.  Let’s take a quick look at these three levels.

Message Market Fit Level I – Value Fit –  When we launch and start to invest in growth marketing, many are at a Level 1 Value fit.  Value fit means we have articulated a set of benefits that our initial set of customers are willing to pay for.  And that this value is greater than the cost of acquisition and ongoing use or implementation of the solution, it has a positive ROI.  Unfortunately, at this level of fit, we are only launching into the market, we are not yet moving toward leadership.   To begin to participate in shaping and leading the market, we must move to a Level II message market fit, Unique Value.

Message Market Fit Level II – Unique Value – To achieve this level of Message Market fit, we must move from Value to Unique Value.  Unique Value are the benefits we can deliver to the market that the competitive alternatives, be they other products, services, build you own, or do nothing, can not.  And these Unique Values must matter more to the customer than any Unique Values that our competitors can deliver.  And, this is NOT a feature discussion, it is a benefit one.  Unique Value is the first time we begin to establish our participation in the market as a leader.  This level of fit is how we win competitive deals, but it can be expensive, bloody street fighting.  To really breakthrough and lead, we must move to Level III of Message-Market Fit, Viewpoint Fit, and in doing so we tilt the entire market battle in our favor.

Message Market Fit Level III, Viewpoint Fit – This level of Message Market fit operates at a level above the other two, that of context as opposed to direct benefit.  When we achieve this level of fit, we answer perhaps the most challenging question of all, why should customers listen to us in the first place.  How do we rise above the cacophony of noise in the marketplace to get attention so we can communicate our Level II Unique value to more and more receptive prospects?

Customers live in their context, not ours.  To achieve Level III Message Market First, we must relate our uniqueness to the customer’s world.  We must show them why we matter, and why our mattering aligns to their world and it’s challenges and opportunities.  We should them how our unique approach, our mindset, our innovation aligns with their world and how it can be the magical power that can make their world so so much better. I call this telling your Viewpoint Story, and you can read more about how in the detailed blog series here.

Market are conversations.  These conversations are framed in the customer’s world and in the known approaches to solving their problems.  By starting our conversation with prospects with a Viewpoint anchored in their world, we raise our importance, breakthrough, AND actually can grow our Unique Value.  Leaders with Level III Message-Market fit start and end their stories with the customer and their reality.

Product-Market fit is a necessary first step to growth.  However, without paying close attention to Message-Market fit, and driving through the 3 levels of Message-Market fit, companies will stall and fail to grow despite having a product that fits the market.  And who wants to join the set of companies who solve a problem but fail to matter.

Pure Go To Market Harmony – Why We Need Both Classical and Jazz Performers and Performances

Apr 20, 2017 | Leadership

“We built the best deck ever, and sales just insists on changing it, they can’t stay on message” – Head of Marketing

“That marketing deck is out of touch, our audience just doesn’t want to listen to that” – Head of Sales

Sometimes, as a consultant, I just want to go all Rodney King on my clients and scream – WHY CAN’T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG!

The truth of course lies somewhere in between, as it usually does.  Marketing, for it’s part, needs a story that scales.  They need to grab attention, keep it and create sales opportunities, real ones.   And while we can tailor our message by audience and industry, the number of variations we can effectively create and manage is by the very nature of marketing, somewhat limited, by bandwidth, budget and media channels.   And while Account Based Marketing and sales, buyer persona driven marketing, and technology driven personalization let us do more, we are still at the end of the day more like Classical Composers and conductors, writing and conducting the score to a large audience.

Sales on the other hand needs the story that wins NOW, with this customer, in this industry, against this competitor, in this economic environment, it this part of the buying cycle.  Now, this conversation, not tomorrow’s or next weeks.

While at the Topo Summit last week, I was chatting with my friend Paul McGee, founder and CEO of sales enablement vendor Sharper Ax about sales and marketing messaging, and how they differ.  Paul and I had done some previous work together for Sharper Ax and Paul had come up with the metaphor that great sales reps are like Jazz musicians, they know a lot of riffs, and they play the ones that are right for the small intimate audience they are performing for that day.  Great sales reps are Jazz Musicians.

Great marketers are Classical Music Composers and Conductors.   

Great sales reps are Jazz Musicians. 

NO WONDER WE CAN’T GET ALONG!!!

To succeed we need to both understand and learn from each other.  Here’s my ideas for how we can bring our sales and marketing music into pure Go To Market Harmony –

Marketers MUST understand that sales is a performance more akin to Jazz and Improvisation than scripted set pieces.  While marketing needs classical music to do their jobs, sales performers need small repeatable riffs that they can string into story and on the spot performances that resonate with their audience of the moment.  Providing sales with these riffs; be they stories, value statements, silver bullets and the like, is a critical sales enablement task for marketing teams.  So when supporting sales, stop just writing symphonies and novels, and start writing musical riffs and poems.

Sales professional MUST understand that without classical training, your jazz improvisations will fail.  Take the symphony (“The Deck”) as a work of art, worthy of respect. Before you start riffing on your own, master the classical version.  Only then make it your own.   Respect the effort and thought that goes into the deck,  find the value, and then amplify it with you improvisation.  And rather that telling marketing they “don’t understand” the audience, teach them by constructively telling them which riffs and passages are getting the most applause from the buying audience. Be a partner so they get you better raw material to build your performances from.

We all must understand that to win, we need both Classical and Jazz music performers and performances in our Go To Market approach, then we can all get along!