Sep 22, 2016 | Breakthrough Marketing
(Authors note: It’s no secret among my friends and family that I have a preference between the two candidates in this election. However, I have tried to keep politics out of my business communications, and this blog will NOT try to be a case for voting for either of what I consider the worst pair of major party candidates I have seen in my lifetime. Instead, I want to focus on what the current campaign can teach us about B2B marketing, so here goes nothing, wish me luck)
The 2016 Presidential campaign is something different than we have ever seen in my lifetime of voting, which dates back to the Reagan Era. The cover story of the most recent September 10th edition of the Economist is entitled, “Art of the Lie: Post Truth Politics in the Age of Social Media”. The economist observes of Mr. Trump, “He inhabits a world where Barack Obama’s birth certificate is faked, the Clintons are killers, the President founded the Islamic State, and the father of a rival was with Lee Harvey Oswald before he shot John F Kennedy” . The article goes on to observe that Mr. Trump is not alone in his “Post-truth politics”, witness everything from the claims of the Brexit campaigners, to the justification of the massive “purge” of enemies in Turkey, and Putin’s post-truth that the people of Crimea were begging for the Russian annexation.
Facts, it seems in today’s political environment, mean little compared to what Stephen Colbert so elegantly coined in 2005 as “Truthiness”. Colbert in an interview with the esteemed satire site The Onion, defined Truthiness as “What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.’ It’s not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There’s not only an emotional quality, but there’s a selfish quality.”
Without getting too political focused, we certainly need to ask, if Truth is so subjective, and Truthiness can sway voters, what then, about the facts. Well, as Mark Twain popularized, there are 3 kinds of lies, lies, damn lies, and statistics. We have seen both sides of every argument use statistics to support their case. Traditionally, a fair and unbiased media would sort fact from fiction, truth from lies. Today’s highly bifurcated media, seems for the most part, to be talking to the converted, not fairly reporting the facts and exposing the lies. And while fact checking sites expose mis-statements, it seems for many in the media, truthiness is more important than facts. Time will tell how the American voters judge this.
So, then, what can B2B marketers learn? In my book, Launching to Leading, I argue that B2B marketers must tell their story with consistency, ferocity, and veracity. In many ways, consistency and ferocity are dimensions of believe-ability. If I say things enough, and with conviction, they become believable, or even dare I say, “truthie”. However, truthiness without veracity is short lived in B2B markets. Buyers, voting with the investment of money and time, are far more discerning than voters in the voting booth. They will demand facts and proof, not just truthiness. In B2B markets, claims without factual backing will be a fantasy claim that buyers will, after time, dismiss and ignore.
On the flip side, facts without conviction and ferocity, will sound like statistics and even lies. Secretary Clinton is fabulous with facts. She can go deep on policy and is a self described wonk. And while she may well have the facts on her side, she often lacks “truthiness” , the conviction and ferocity that delivers not only facts, but connects with the listener. Mrs. Clinton reminds me of many of the technical CEOs and finders I know. They have the facts on their side, but lack the ferocity and boldness of claims to convince the market.
In less than 2 months, we will know the result of the US election. Truthiness may win the day. Facts may not matter. Time will tell. But B2B markets are much harsher judges. You must have facts AND truthiness behind your claims. In politics, we may see that consistency and ferocity, without veracity, will be enough. In B2B markets, you need all three.
See you in the voting booth and in the marketplace!
Ken
Aug 26, 2016 | Breakthrough Marketing
I was thinking about, or maybe more the case obsessing about, market leadership on my bike ride the other morning. I had just gotten a tune up and a fix up of my road bike, and was enjoying a early morning ride that was reminding me why I love living in Northern California, 68 degrees, sunny and the road nearly to myself. That is, until I got about two thirds of the way up my climb of Old La Honda Road and passed the always cruel intersection with the well marked “Upenuf Road“. Of course, to reach the summit, you are NOT up enough at all. You still have a third of the way to go.
Building and tuning the right machine isn’t enough to get you to the summit of market leadership. You must fuel the machine well.
Starting your climb is not sufficient, you must execute until you reach the summit and beyond.
And unlike cycling, which is, even when riding with a group, a fundamentally solitary endeavor, achieving and sustaining market leadership is a team accomplishment, one that requires great leadership.
Some observations (and links to more thoughts on each):
That’s right. Leading and winning in your market is HARD work. Damn hard work at that. You need the right machine, committed execution and the right leadership. I’ve blogged, I’ve spoken, I’ve consulted, and clearly, even when I am not “working” I am thinking about this. And I’ve concluded that great companies are led to market by great leaders, who build amazing go to market machines, and execute with excellence. No small task indeed.
Back on my bike, I did summit Old La Honda Road that morning. And while my execution was far from perfect, I definitely enjoyed the journey, the view from the top, and the long winding descent down and back home where fresh eggs and a warm shower awaited as my rewards.
The rewards of market leadership are many. But the journey to the top is what great leaders really enjoy. Because once you reach the summit, everything gets easier as you descend down to the other side of success, and your competitors are not “upenuf” to keep up.
I wish you all success on whatever road you are summiting as an individual or a team. Keep your machine well tuned and fueled, your execution committed, and your leadership focused, because it is all about all three!
See you on the road or in the marketplace!
Ken
Jul 7, 2016 | Breakthrough Marketing
You’ve invested in marketing automation, content marketing people and programs. You’ve just finished that new messaging project. Now what?
Having the right messaging and positioning, no small task in today’s crowded buyer centric B2B markets, puts you at the base of the mountain. To reach the summit, you must do three things.
First, execute with consistency, veracity and ferocity. You have to say it so many times, you get sick of hearing yourself say it, then you need to say it again. And yes, you may tweak it on the edges based on A/B testing and performance in programs. But you must commit. You must believe. And you must back it with facts, case studies and data.
Second, you must invest in people and programs. People and programs are the fuel of marketing success. They drive the race car, which is made of your marketing automation engine, you content marketing tires, and your high test messaging fuel. But without investment, results don’t follow.
Third, you must be comfortable with risk. In today’s markets, conservative, traditional messaging, built on feature function benefit, and delivered in descriptive whitepapers and websites just doesn’t cut it. And while your new messaging is cutting edge and powerful, you must resist the temptation to move back to the average. For example, technical marketers want to stick features functions and technical benefits. They feel they may “insult” their buyer if they push on their beliefs. But few companies can win without changing some status quo. And marketing and sales leaders know this, but can be pulled back to more conservative execution. Don’t let this happen. To the risk taker goes the rewards.
Nobody ever summits a mountain without preparation, investment, and the right amount of intelligent risk taking. And nobody wins in B2B markets without these same characteristics. Great thinking can get you ready, but consistent and ferocious execution and responsible investment, with a good chunk of measured risk taking is what can get you to the top of the mountain.
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May 16, 2016 | Breakthrough Marketing
What does market leadership look like? Faster lead conversion? more visibility and fame? better metrics like leads to revenue? CEO rockstars the conference? competitors on their heels and chasing? All of this and more! What it looks like is a snowball rolling downhill. Market leaders often get benefits well beyond their product differentiation would suggest. It’s a virtuous success cycle, as the snowball get bigger and gains momentum, rolling over less well positioned competitors.
Palo Alto Networks, a leader in network security solutions is a great case in point. When they launched in 2007, their message layers looked like this, focused on product and value:
The $3B firewall market was filled with hard to implement, highly technical product, Palo Alto launched with the slogan, “It’s time to fix the Firewall”
But to really establish market leadership, they then layered unique value on top of this with 3 items, user, application and threat awareness.
This created a new leadership position, by shifting the conversation to their unique value, value that other Firewalls simply could not deliver.
From here, Palo Alto added the context that was bubbly in the market, Next Generation threats. By adding this context, they raised their leadership profile above the Firewall market, to the broader Network Security market. In fact, prior to Palo Alto, Firewalls were really consider access control policy engines, not threat prevention products.
Finally, as Palo Alto expanded it’s product line, it continued to add more purpose to its messaging, the end of the breach era, and the full messaging Snowball now looks like this:
From a standing start in 2005, Palo Alto Networks should pass $1B in revenues in 2016 and has a market cap of nearly $12B. They have all the hallmark metrics of a market leader. What’s your market leadership message snowball look like?
Ken Rutsky is a Marketing Consultant and B2B Market Leadership “Ninja”. Ken helps organizations climb the ladder to market leadership. His upcoming book is entitled; Launching to Leading: How B2B Market Leaders Create Flashmobs, Marshal Parades and Ignite Movements (Morgan James 2016)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Mar 15, 2016 | Breakthrough Marketing
In today’s highly competitive B2B markets, to be a leader, you must build and run a modern marketing machine that can be thought of like a race car. In fact, market leaders need to be great at three things; Marketing Automation, Content Marketing, and Messaging and Positioning. These can be thought of as the engine, the tires and the fuel of the race car.
When you have a high performance engine, the right tires, and high test fuel, market leaders can achieve high performance with content that is relevant, programs that are efficient and results that are highly effective. This is show in this simple drawing:
Let’s take a bit of a closer look at the intersections of each of these circles. As we can see, if we want to achieve leadership, we really do need all three. For example, with poor marketing automation, we are left ineffective and inefficient. Without good content marketing processes and approaches, our go to market will lack efficiency and relevance, and without good messaging and positioning, our go to market race car will lose both relevance and effectiveness.
This diagram may seem obvious to some, and daunting to others. As a consultant focused on Market Leadership, I’ll make three observations related to this, and look forward to hearing yours.
- If I were a CMO again, as I was last year in an interim role, I’d focus first on having the right fuel for the car, ie, building the best messaging and positioning I could. Given that doing all three of these with excellence is difficult to achieve, I’d strive for excellence here first.
- Observation 2 – My next investment priority would be in building a well tuned marketing automation engine. My reasoning for this is that before I tackle efficiency by optimizing and investing in excellence in content marketing, I want to drive effectiveness and relevance first.
- Observation 3 – Many organizations I see are highly efficient with their go to market efforts. They have tuned the engine and have beautiful tires. However, they are feeding their car with low test messaging and positioning, and fail to be relevant and effective like market leaders are. It’s no surprise that the Content Marketing Institute’s September 2015 study entitled “B2B Content Marketing 2016 – Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends” reported that the number one challenge identified by content marketers was “producing enough relevant and engaging content”.
How do we build the right race car and feed it with the right fuel? Why do so many organizations struggle for years with nailing the right messaging and positioning and what cost do they pay? What does success look like?
I’ve written a brief whitepaper on this very topic, called 6x in Six Months, which outlines my thoughts on a road map for achieving market leadership and increased revenue, and briefly answers some of these questions. If you’d like a copy, send me an email at ken@kjrassociates.com with the Subject: 6x in 6 or schedule a 30 minute chat with me here.
Happy racing – Ken
Mar 15, 2016 | Breakthrough Marketing
When I chat with CEOs, CMOs and VPs of Sales in B2B technology companies, it’s almost always about “re-messaging” or “re-positioning” their company, product or service or some combination of these. Often I hear, “I know we need to do this, but I am not sure it’s the right time…”
Well, I believe that if you are not sure, it probably IS the right time! Here are five windows of opportunity that I find are DEFINTILEY the right time, and if you miss these, you miss an opportunity to increase your breakthrough, opportunity generation and sales.
#1 – Our sales guys say the “messaging is broken” – Sales is your canary in the coal mine. They are the first to feel market shifts, long before the folks in the “factory” become attuned to it. If sales says it is broken, it probably is. Also, fixing messaging is a great opportunity to bring senior sales folks into the process and get both their insight into the market and buy-in into the output.
#2- We aren’t in the deals we should be – Sales is finding out about deals late. And when we do find out, the competitor has already nearly locked up the deal. This is a symptom that you are playing on someone else’s turf. You need to step back and develop a Viewpoint message that aligns with your customer’s world. This may be the missing piece of the equation.
#3- A new product, product line or major capability about to be launched – A natural time to step back and ask, “why does this matter to our customer’s world”, “what’s our unique value”, and “have we told the story the way we need to”. Every homeowner knows that when you add an addition to the house, you often end up rippling changes through everything, not just the addition you did. Cohesive messaging, like cohesive design, can’t just be tacked on. When it’s time to remodel, think about the whole, not just the new part
#4 – That pesky competitor is getting all the buzz – And damn it, we’ve been shipping all that stuff forever, or that one feature sure seems small, what’s going on? Often the landscape of the customer shifts in a way that a small nimble start up notices and you don’t. Pay attention not just to the technology, but to the VALUE that customers think they will get from the new shiny object. And why is that value rising to the top of the buyers priority. Are we aligning our value with the customer’s reality as much as our messaging should?
#5 – We are doing great but.. – There’s a bigger opportunity out there and it is time to be bold and capture it. Re-positioning from strength is often one of the most overlooked ways to accelerate demand and growth. Especially when combined with #3 above. Positioning from strength let’s you grow your market faster and leverage the experience and customer success you’ve worked so hard for.
Of course, it’s usually some combination of the reasons above. If you have not revisited your messaging and positioning with the last 12 months, it’s probably time, and there’s no time like now!
