Incisive Marketing

I had the chance to speak with the founder of a very early stage (pre-funding) startup recently. The company is innovating in a very hot space and is certain to raise capital.

The founder envisions his market opportunity in one of two very different go-to-market strategies. I spent an hour on the phone with him and have a decent understanding of the issues. With my brief look at the opportunity, I came away thinking a blended strategy is more likely to be effective. While this runs counter to the conventional wisdom often given by investors (focus, focus, focus), I suspect the synergy between the two go-to-market strategies outweigh the additional complexity.

The challenge is that this strategy is clearly just my opinion, albeit informed by my experience as a founder and early participant in a number of startups. This entrepreneur has an impressive pedigree earned at several well-respected tech firms and has his opinion as well. How does he decide how he should bring this new offer to market?

More conversations.

For example, I had the good fortune to be a co-founder of a startup that was introducing a new kind of business intelligence technology to manufacturers. We developed a simple prototype to demonstrate the capabilities of the technology, but really had no idea about which business problems we should address with it. We quickly realized that that the best approach would be to have conversations with subject matter experts in a broad array of fields and see what they thought of what we had. We could have engaged a market research firm, but we were financing this venture from our own pockets.

Instead, we secured a major business school alumni list and looked for people who were currently in senior operational roles across many sectors. We set up calls as a “research project” (which it was), and found that more than 90% of the alums were willing to talk with us for 30 minutes or so (regardless of their seniority). We spent a few minutes understanding what their principle challenges were, and then we talked a little about what we had “on the drawing table.” In this non-threatening context, it was amazing what people could see with a little prompting about how they could apply our technology to solve their business problems.

Out of this 3-week effort, we formulated the business strategy, secured our charter customer (a top 5 pharma manufacturer), built our sales pipeline, got endorsements to use for marketing later on, and were able to claim to investors that we personally spoke with nearly 200 executives across a broad array of industries to validate our assertions. By the time we were ready to raise capital, it was a matter of documenting what we had, rather than inventing a story.

That is the power of conversation. Is that market research? Yes.

Can it be outsourced? I don’t think so.

I’ve been writing a lot of web copy lately. So, this great post ( and image) from Chris Garrett over at CopyBlogger really struck a chord. When I reflect on the value that I add as outside marketing help for technology companies, one of the recurrent themes is that I act as a bridge to the outside world. Specifically, part of my value to an organization is that I’m not inside the crucible. I’m usually not in the line of fire with sales, customers, engineering, or the board anymore. In the past, when I ran the marketing function as an employee at technology startups, I remember the hammering from all sides about what customers or prospects were really thinking, or what they really needed.

Well, after a couple of years of distance from those environments, I’m here to tell you — prospects aren’t thinking about your product the way that you are. They’re doing just fine, thank you very much. They certainly don’t want to learn your jargon or otherwise have to work to understand what you are trying to sell. Prospects are people first, with their own fundamental challenges (survival, health, money, families, career, aging, dignity, etc.) and only buy products or services that somehow connect to these needs — even in so-called business-to-business transactions. The trick, of course, is to align what we’re selling with the soup that our prospects find themselves in. And, the challenge is that it is nearly impossible to hear that prospect’s voice over the din of operational meetings, goals, and monthly and quarterly objectives.

When I write copy for a company as an outsider, I see my job as bridging the gap (or maybe abyss) between what we sell and the real-life concerns that the reader (or prospect) lives with — a job made more effective by doing it from outside the crucible.

I’m doing product testing and evaluation for a consumer electronics company, whose name I can’t mention because I’m under NDA. Suffice it to say that it is a well-known brand in the telecom office products space. This is the second product I am evaluating for them, and by now I am known to a least a couple of the product managers at the company. My office is close enough to their headquarters so that they can occasionally drop by and do some video of their products in action.

I suspect I get called back (by this company and others) because I attempt to add value in my evaluations. Rather than checking a box that says I like the packaging, for instance, I’ll tell them that I think the images on the outer packaging address their target demographic pretty well, and they could potentially improve their reach by using a slightly different image. It’s not that I am being overly generous — I just can’t help myself.

This strikes me as a relevant product evaluation strategy. If your company needs to test products, packaging, or even messages, tapping marketing consultants as evaluators seems like a highly-leveraged, win-win approach. For my trouble, I get to observe the brand characteristics of companies (who aren’t yet clients), and a couple hundred dollars to spend on Amazon, while the company not only gets their evaluation, but they also get marketing perspective from outside their four walls.

I’ve recently had the pleasure of working with some India-based clients. Working across cultures has always been a mixed blessing for me. While I love the reminder that there is a greater world out there beyond the U.S. marketplace, sometimes I crave the simplicity of working with people who already “get it.”

Specifically, the big issue seems to be context. How can you use words to explain a writing style or tone, being incisive vs. wordy, the overuse of tired buzzwords, cliches, and the like when you’re still battling the Queen’s English vs. American English? Annual turnover or revenues? When talking about design, how do you use words to describe a look-and-feel that seems dated or tired? Even with a myriad of examples to point to on the Web, how do you get your offshore design people to understand that a banker doesn’t appreciate a Web 2.0 style the way a high tech exec might? Or, that the ads that Americans see in print, on billboards, and even the TV shows we watch, influence our sense of design and appropriateness — every day.

The economics of producing marketing content offshore are compelling. I find that production costs are about a third of what they are here. Even creative is considerably less. Factoring in the obligatory back-and-forth required to spell out every detail (no, we don’t use A4 paper in the US), there are still costs savings to be had.

However, I’m not looking for a new career just yet. Until there is universal context that transcends our global marketplace, I’m not worried.

Another post from Software 2007. Listened to Mark Benioff, Chairman and CEO of SalesForce.com deliver a keynote address. I was actually looking forward to this talk as it was scheduled for an afternoon session, after the other block of keynotes in the morning. I had suspected that Benioff would rattle some cages and continue his “software is dead” rant to the discomfort of the enterprise software crowd. Instead, what we got was a 45-minute commercial for his product and platform.

Not only was it a commercial, but it was the wrong commercial. He clearly didn’t connect that he was delivering a keynote address to close to 2,000 industry executives — people who likely did not need a description of the salesforce product or platform. While he briefly described how the company beat Siebel at its own game, largely by being unencumbered by the baggage of a licensed software model, he spent the rest of his talk describing the merits of their platform play. I learned nothing I didn’t already know. In fact, I had spent 10 minutes on their website before the keynote and learned more than he shared. Everyone I spoke to afterward universally spoke about how put off they were by his talk.

This brings up an interesting distinction. While every keynote at this event was surely bought and paid for (our group estimated somewhere well north of $1ooK for the privilege), and one could argue that for that kind of money, you should be allowed to do anything, there remains a question about using the time effectively. This crowd did not want to be lectured to about the cool features of the product or platform. They certainly did not want to watch a demo that included poorly rehearsed banter between Benioff and a product manager. Instead, they were looking for real insights into the nature of changing the game, as salesforce clearly has done with CRM and perhaps the rest of the industry. We didn’t get much of that.

Was this money well spent? Was this a valuable use of his/our time? Did anyone on his team think about the goals of this keynote address at this particular venue?

I attended Software 2007 last week and heard a number of keynotes. By far, the most interesting was from Hasso Plattner, chairman of SAP. His talk introduced their new product, code-named A1S. The product targets the mid-market with what looks like a comprehensive offering delivered using an on-demand model. But that isn’t what made this talk interesting.

I’ve seen Hasso speak many times, at Sapphire and other industry events. This speech was a little odd. He was not his usual gregarious self, full of bluster and proclamations. Rather, he seemed almost timid and perhaps a little distracted. Someone commented that he might not have been presenting his own material. I think it was something else. I think he was uncomfortable talking about a product that is not close to release. It was almost as if he lost the argument about waiting for this announcement (outside of the safe Sapphire environment) until closer to launch. My guess is that the executive team felt the company needed to proactively address the future, given the abrupt departure of Shai Agassi, who many believed held the technological vision for the company.

The result was a little bizarre. While the room was clearly interested in the material (aided by a unique reversed whiteboard PowerPoint template — see below), I doubt that anyone in the room was moved to action. I spoke with Judith Hurwitz after the talk who shared my perspective about the strangeness of the keynote. She felt the whole pitch was bizarre: SAP midmarket? SOA? On-demand model? Community-based development? She made me think that perhaps Hasso’s apparent discomfort was with the strategy, not the material. Time will tell on this one.

I’m looking forward to sharing my thoughts and observations about high tech marketing.