Going Old School

  Ok, this picture is part of a practical joke.  We don’t really use an overhead projector at Sonatype.  I am, however, old enough to recall using one,  and to remember the painful process of creating “foils.” And painful it was.  Time consuming and painful. But it did get me thinking.   Was anything better …

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The Content Factory

Content is (once again) king. Everywhere you look, the marketing discussion centers around using “content” to drive marketing results.  For all the buzz, two key facts are consistently overlooked: Building effective content is hard. Doing it consistently is very hard. I’m not going to pretend to have the all the answers to make it easy.   …

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Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit — Some Nuggets from the Trends in B2B Panel

I had a great time yesterday at the Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit yesterday.  It’s always invigorating to step away from the day-to-day and see what others are doing, and how they’re thinking about their work. I was fortunate enough to be asked to sit on the ‘Newest Trends in B2B Marketing’ panel along with some very …

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5 Things I Learned About Business from my Dad

My Dad would have been 83 today.  He died eight years ago and I still think about him frequently. My father and I chose very different paths career-wise.  He was an accomplished academic who stayed in school into his 30s.  I went to work right after college, returned for an an MBA, then went back …

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Oh no, not the wall of words — anything but that

Remember when you were 6 years old and just starting to read chapter books?  If you were anything like me, you preferred books  that had a nice mix of words and pictures.  It’s not that I was lazy, I was just  overwhelmed by a mega-sized serving of words without visual interruption.    I had to …

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Going Old SchoolThe Content FactoryMid-Atlantic Marketing Summit — Some Nuggets from the Trends in B2B Panel5 Things I Learned About Business from my DadOh no, not the wall of words — anything but that

Jan
02

My (Marketing) New Year’s Resolutions

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I’m generally of the school that says January 1st is just a day like any other.   If I need to make a change,  I should just get on with it.  Why wait for some arbitrary number on a calendar?   That said, it’s a nice to reflect and January 1st is as good a time as any.  So here’s my top 10 things I plan to do better in the coming year.

Simplify. Everything.

In 2012, I will focus on simplifying everything I can.   Tech is too complicated — our products, our messaging, our marketing.  It could all be simplified.  In 2012, I will advocate for simplicity and elegance.  I will insist upon it from myself and my team.

Get Closer to the Market

At heart, I’m a product marketer.  Developing a deep appreciation for customer needs is the fastest path to developing great messaging, content, and programs.   In 2012, I will get closer to the market.  I will see more customers and  listen more intently.

Work More Closely with Sales

This one is a gimme; it’s always the priority.  This year I will I will push even harder to align Marketing and Sales.   I will develop shared metrics and communicate more effectively.  I will ensure programs are rolled out clearly and with precision.

Write More Often

In 2011 I rediscovered how much I enjoy writing.  Blogging has been fun.   But even more fun has been crafting the words we use at Sonatype — our positioning, our  content, all of it.  This year I will write more often, both here and at work.

Write Less Words

Be brief, be bright, be gone.  Part of writing more is learning to say the thing in less words.    I’m good at this, but I want to be great.  Sometimes this means creating will take longer.  But the result will be better — clearer, more accessible, sharper.   Better.

Borrow from Elsewhere

Maybe it’s just me, but b2b tech marketing seems to be looking more and more like other types of marketing every day.  But compared to b2c, tech marketing is just plain  primitive.  This year, I’m going to school.  I will learn more from non-tech b2c marketers — and then I will borrow some great ideas.  After all, we’re all marketing to human beings — regardless of the product.

Teach Where I Can

I’ve been a tech marketing exec for nearly 20 years.  Generally this means that I’m among the more experienced (seasoned?  old?) people in the (marketing) room.  Over the years, I’ve benefited tremendously from the experience of others.  In 2012, I will do a better job, when it’s appropriate, of helping more junior marketers to develop their skills

Speak More Plain English (and Demand it of Others)

This kind of goes along with ‘write less words’ — but it’s important enough to call out separately.   In 2012, I will purge more buzzwords and communicate more clearly.   I will demand this of others. If an idea is coated in all sorts of business-speak or techno-babble, I will insist on clarity.

Communicate Visually

In a world of short attention spans, pictures work well — if they’re good.  In 2012, I will use more images to communicate.  And I will ensure that the images I use are powerful and meaningful.

Take Time to Recharge

In 2012, I will take the time to unplug and spend time with those who mean the most.

Happy New Year, everyone!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Dec
13

Why Marketers Should Love Open Source

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Why would I suggest that marketers should love something which is generally free, widely available, and highly disruptive?

It’s simple.  Open source simplifies commercialization.   Here’s why:

1.  Open Source Validates a Need   — Open source answers the ginormous  question that keeps us marketers up at night:  who cares?   As in — it seems like a good idea, but who really cares?  Open source businesses are built around a community of users.  Rational users only use products that solve their problems.    So by definition, someone cares.  Of course, lots of questions remain in terms of a business model and commercialization strategy — but  the most fundamental question is off the table.  Here is the typical commercial open source route to market:

There is a significant gestation period before a business venture is attempted.  Ideas are refined, product are polished.  A need is validated.   In the wild.  By the actual people who will use the finished product.

Contrast this with the more traditional commercialization process.  Note that the product never really gets stress tested until the prototype phase.  And it doesn’t get a real workout until the launch.  At this point, you’ve got a ton of sunk costs — and more than likely, a ton wasted effort.

 

2.  Open Source Defines a Route to Market — I’ve argued recently that a modern go-to-market strategy engages users early and by offering them limited, but meaningful value before attempting to sell them anything.  It then let’s them buy small increments of functionality and then ‘step-up’ their purchases over time as their needs dictate.  For convenience, here’s the diagram from my earlier post:

 

In this case, the ‘free or trial’ version is the open source version.  It’s incumbent upon us as product developers to create enough added value in our commercial versions to encourage a meaningful percentage of open source users to step up.   Or to encourage their organizations to do so.

3.  Open Source Stimulates Commercial Demand — Provided you’ve got a large community AND provided you’ve built a commercial product with sufficient (and truly valuable) differentiation from your open source version, you have two key (and non-trivial) ingredients for commercialization.     But in any market, you still need to know who to target.  A massive amount of resources are wasted trying to figure out the who.   Open source gives marketers a huge leg up in the who department.  You already have users. 

By providing easy ways for users to see/try/understand value-added commercial functionality, some numbers of users will raise their hands.  They’ll try it.  If it meets their needs, they’ll get their companies to pay for it.   They’ll make suggestions.  They will tell you the type of functionality that they need to justify a purchase.

To make things even more interesting, open source almost always grows organically within a buying organization.  A few people start using a technology, then more, then more, then it becomes a candidate for to become an organizational standard.  This all stimulates demand for commercial versions.  This creates a phenomenon some people call BFM, or black f#@ng magic.  This is where out of the blue, you get an email or a phone call from someone to the effect of:  “we love your open source product and we’d like to buy 1,000 seats of your commercial product.”    It doesn’t happen every day, or even every week, but it does happen.   And when it does, it’s pretty cool.

It’s Not Perfect.  It Doesn’t Work All the Time.   But It’s Pretty Compelling.

Don’t get me wrong — there are tons of challenges and pitfalls with commercial open source businesses.  Leaving aside the gargantuan hurdle of creating a popular OSS project (just look at the number of dying or dead  projects on SourceForge), commercialization takes a ton of creativity, hard work, and more than a little luck.  Your commercial product has to be well differentiated.  Your users most likely aren’t buyers, so you have to turn them into advocates.  You can’t market too aggressively.  And so on.  And on.

But the market efficiency benefits trumps all the challenges. By a long shot.

PS:   This isn’t some new-found found fascination based on my current gig at Sonatype.  I’ve worked with several open source companies.  I’m currently the CMO at Sonatype,  which makes open source management products and plays an active role in huge projects like Apache Maven, Hudson, Nexus, and Eclipse.   I worked for Akopia, an open source e-commerce software vendor, later acquired by Red Hat.  I stuck around there after the acquisition and and ran product marketing for them.  I currently serve as an advisor to Zenoss, an open source systems management company.

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Dec
10

Story Sells. An Email Experiment.

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We recently tested  two emails to recruit for a survey we’re doing.  Which one do you think performed better?

 Email A: Generic Offer

Email B: ‘Story’ Based Offer

In email A, we used a generic offer (Fill out this survey for a chance to win a Macbook Air).  In email B, we added some back-story (you could win Jason’s Macbook Air).  Jason is a well known guy in our industry, and a somewhat polarizing figure.

So what happened?

Email B crushed email A — over 3:1.  Although the open rate was about the same, the click-through rate on email B was 1.27% versus .37%.

Story sells.  And with this simple A/B test behind us, we’re continuing the ‘take Jason’s laptop’ story throughout the rest of our recruitment.

And as of right now, we have nearly 1,100 survey responses with a full month left until we close it down.  I’m betting we hit our goal of 2,012.

 

 

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Dec
04

Thinking Different. In Support of the Countertactic.

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A colleague recently told me that she does her grocery shopping  on Friday nights. Why?  Because the supermarket is empty and she can shop quickly and hassle-free.  Makes sense, right?

Sure.  But what does this have to do with marketing?  Turns out, quite a bit.

The marketing discipline has undergone radical change over the past 5 years.  Marketing 2.0:  Social media, SEO, web analytics, inbound marketing, blah blah blah.   I just heard someone pitching a concept called Marketing 3.0 — I think I might already be behind.

I’m not saying I’m not a fan of these tactics.  I am.  A huge fan.  Never before have we had the ability to do so much, so quickly, at so little cost.  And never before have we been able to test vehicles and messages so easily.  It’s great.  And everyone’s doing it.

Wait, what?  Everyone is doing it?  That phrase should set off a giant flashing warning sign.   It sure does for me.  When everyone is doing it, it’s time to think differently.  It’s our job as marketers to break through the clutter, not to contribute to it (though too often we do).

How often do you get a letter or package at work these days?  Almost never, right?  Me too.  And when I do get one, I’m far more likely to check it out  than I was 10 years ago when my mailbox bulged with various crap.  My email inbox is filled to overflowing all week.  I ignore a lot of email.   It looks to me like physical direct mail might be a good tactic to break through the clutter every now and again.

But direct mail?   Might work.  Might not.   It’s really just an example.  The point is bigger — we don’t have to do what everyone else does.  We can (must!) experiment with new tactics.  Some of what’s new might actually be “old.”  Who cares?  The point is to break through.

I’m not saying you should give up Twitter or stop blogging, or even that you shouldn’t get excited about Marketing 3.0 (though that one does seem a bit questionable).  What I’m saying, to quote Apple, is this:  think different.  Break through.    Try some experiments.   Test.  Riff.

This is the fun stuff.  And frankly, it’s a lot of fun to beat the clones who are just doing it because “everyone is.”

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Dec
02

Going Blue to Support Sales

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Some days you work on strategy.  Other days it’s all about tactics and execution.  And some days, it’s just about supporting your Sales team.

 

Me (left) with our SVP of Sales (middle) and CFO (right) celebrating a November bookings milestone by dying our hair blue.

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Nov
20

Getting Wonky. About economics, waste, and software products.

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Call me a geek, but I dig economics.   Always have.  In particular, microeconomics and its intersection with buyer behavior,  incentives, and choice.

To get (more than a little) wonky, I always thought ‘dead weight loss’  — the notional loss of value based on inefficient delivery of goods or services — was pretty interesting.   OK, maybe that’s a lot wonky.   Maybe it’s better to think of it as waste caused by bad choices.  And those bad choices are everywhere.

My favorite is in software product design.  In most products, we add a lot of features, options, and bells and whistles that are simply not necessary.  At best,  all that bit-bloat goes unused.  More probably, users get confused.  Perhaps even pissed off.  Why do we do this?  Typically because some executive, some product manager, or (usually) some committee of executives or product managers gets so enamored with the idea of solving everyone’s problems, that they end up solving no one’s problems elegantly.

Let’s take a simple example.  Let’s say we’re designing a new product (or a new release of a current one).  We figure out that there are three valid target use cases for our release and we start planning what we’re going to build.  We wind up with three different delivery options (A, B, and C below).  The obvious choice is either B or C, right?  Of course.  But what really happens?  People argue and eventually we compromise on A.

Going back to wonky-land, if we plot functionality versus the potential target market, the graph would look something like this:

This is fine, provided we don’t overbuild.  But in most cases (think Microsoft Excel — how much functionality do you really use?).   Depending on how much you overbuild, the graph looks more like this:

In other words, we’re wasting time building stuff that only a small segment of our target markets care about.  That shaded area under the curve is more than just theoretical.  It’s a ton of money.  And maybe more importantly, it’s opportunity cost.  We could have put those resources to work elsewhere.

As products mature, it becomes very tempting to add features that move you slightly down the demand curve and add a few more potential users.  I’d argue (I have argued), that these resources might be better placed on improving user experience.

Bringing it back from jagged edge of economics to practical marketing reality — the point is quite simple (in theory).  Let’s focus our time and attention on a few things that make a difference for a large swath of our target market.  Let’s aim for elegance and strive to solve our users’ hard problems in simple ways.

 

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Nov
08

The Age of ME (It’s About the Users, Dummy)

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I’ve been wrestling with this post for a few weeks now.   What I want to talk about is user-centricity.  But that sounds like  pop-business BS or some MBA-ish clinical term.

The kernel of my thought is we need to make all of our marketing efforts more about the human beings who will use our products and influence or make buying decisions. By “marketing”  I mean Marketing (from strategy to tactics) and by “all” I mean all.  Product, pricing, promotion, distribution.

I’ve written recently about the future of enterprise sales.  But it’s about much more than how we sell.  It’s about what we sell, how it’s packaged, and how we talk about it.

In the beginning there was technology.  We talked about features (it’s got an x-57 flux interface!).  Then there were benefits (tastes great, and it’s less filling!).  We’re now in the Age of Me.  People want products that specifically talk to their needs, and they want to be talked to as human beings. In the Age of Me, our b2b life is heavily shaped by our b2c experiences.

Humbly submitted, here’s my manifesto for the new age, the Age of Me.    To dominate this new era, we must:

Show Empathy

  • Talk about our products in terms familiar to the problems our users are facing.
  • Be relentlessly goal-oriented in our product design.  Solve actual problems, not theoretical ones.
  • Delight users.  Seriously. People have to be emotionally gratified by your product, not just functionally appeased.  Elegant  aesthetically pleasing products usually outsell functionally superior but uglier, more confusing competitors
  • Whatever it is, make it easy. Reduce clicks.  Make next steps obvious.
  • Be forgiving.  People make mistakes.  Allow for user error and let errors help teach users how to get the most from your product.

Minimize the ‘Time to Aha’

  • Let prospects try our products and get meaningful value for free  before purchasing to prove it for themselves.
  • Find ways to delight users quickly — let them have their own epiphanies. Quickly.
  • Push yourself to remove unnecessary steps or options.
  • Help them share their successes with colleagues and friends socially.

Support the Buying Process

  • Focus  sales and SE teams on facilitating departmental purchasing and  ‘connecting the dots’ across larger organizations.
  • Where possible, enable self-service purchasing to let adoption grow organically.
  • Offer self-service support and educational resources.
  • Take the complete view — examine the customer adoption process from desire (search) to initial interaction (your website) to trial to purchase to upgrade.

Talk to Human Beings

  • Speak in familiar, conversational language (no one wants to buy an end-to-end integrated multivariate widget)
  • Engage with prospects where they are — blogs, Twitter, user groups, etc.
  • Acknowledge short attention spans.  Write for brevity.  Entertain where possible.  Use graphics and videos.
  • Solicit feedback and admit when you’re wrong.  Humans, being human, don’t always get it right.  Other humans appreciate when you admit this.

Let the Product do (some of) The Work

  • Marketing requirements must drive product design.  If the product itself does not help sell, then you’re in for a long, tough slog.  Align marketing and product design and engineering.
  • Enable self-service trials and upgrades from within the product where possible.

Become a Quant

  • Instrument your customer experience to enable A/B and multivariate testing.
  • Develop a culture of experimentation.  Test messaging, UI, pricing, packaging, etc.
  • Track metrics publicly so that everyone in your organization can see where and how things are working (or not).

Without being melodramatic, I honestly feel that the software industry is in the midst of a user-driven revolution.  Lots of factors are driving it:  open source, cloud-based infrastructure, social services like Facebook,  demographic shifts that put more ‘digital natives’ in positions of power, an economy that has slowed traditional enterprise procurement processes, etc.   Whatever.  There are probably 20 factors I’m missing.    But the reality is the world has changed.  And it’s not going back.

Embrace the Age of Me.  It’s fun. And you’ll probably disrupt some existing, stale businesses in the process.

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Nov
06

Mistakes, I’ve Made A Few (aka Dumb Stuff I’ve Done and What I Learned)

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When I was the youngest guy in the room, I didn’t want to admit when I screwed up.  In my mind, I must have thought by admitting my mistakes, I was at risk for exposing myself for what I (obviously) was —   the most inexperienced guy in the room.

Now that I’m, well, not the youngest guy in the room, I’m a lot more comfortable with my mistakes.   Here are  a few of the lessons I’ve learned the hard way.

Success is Situational — Because someone was successful at one thing (company, product, role, whatever) does not necessarily mean that they’ll knock it out of the park somewhere else.   Markets, resources, politics, and a myriad of other factors make every challenge unique.

The Answer Isn’t Inside — Early in my career, I just knew we could figure it all out with a whiteboard and a spreadsheet.  The story makes sense, yes?  The model looks great, right?  Yup.  But  prospects  didn’t care.  So guess what?  The product didn’t work.

If Sales Doesn’t Buy, No One Will  — No matter what you do, if your Sales team doesn’t believe, you’re facing an uphill battle.  I used to think we could show up at a sales meeting with a slick  Powerpoint and they’d run off and make my product a winner.  Nope.   Your first sale has to be to Sales.  When they believe, then the magic can happen.

Group-think is Real — and it Kills — Many times I’ve followed the siren-song of hiring people who don’t challenge the status quo.  Or ignoring people who with an inconvenient view.  I’ve learned differences of opinion, when constructive and open, lead to polish.

Sometimes Convincing Takes Time — I used to think that the power of my idea, combined with well crafted words or slides, would let me turn the tide of an organizations.  Nope.  Especially in larger organizations, but even in smaller ones, acceptance takes time.   I’ve learned to invest the time to “sell” my ideas (and be open to differences of opinion).  I figured out that if I discussed my ideas openly and frequently, that they became “our” ideas — and things worked much better.

Sometimes the Good Stuff is Badly Packaged — It’s often been easy for me to dismiss someone’s view if I didn’t like the way they said it.  Or, quite honestly, if I didn’t like the person very much.  But sometimes the kernel of something great is in there.   I’m learning to try to parse the words, separate the emotion, and see if there is something I can learn.

My Opinion, While Mildly Interesting, Doesn’t Matter – I’ve learned it’s always better to describe facts and market feedback than to express my opinion.  In the end, my opinion is only a hypothesis in an experiment.  Prospects are ultimately the arbiters of the results.

Politics Matter — I used to think that ideas could categorically overcome organizational politics.  Turns out organizations are made of humans and humans have agendas.   When I take the time to understand others’ true motivations — including those under the surface,  things generally go more smoothly.

Turns Out, I Have a “Gut” –  Not the kind I’m trying to work off by running, the intuition kind.   Early in my career I drove  back from a big meeting about a big deal with my boss.  He asked me what my gut told me about the deal.  I hemmed and hawed about internal rate of return and cash flow and a bunch of other MBA bullshit.  What I was (poorly) attempting to mask is that I didn’t have a “gut.”   Now that I’ve seen a lot more successes, failures, and just plain odd things in business, I definitely have a gut.  Generally, when I trust it, things go reasonably well. When I don’t, I later find out why I had a bad feeling to begin with.

When You Screw Up, Don’t Bury It — Man, it’s tempting to hide that misstep.  Or to paper over it.  Turns out, mistakes are human.   I’ve learned it’s much better to admit it, figure out what I learned from it, and move on.

 

 

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Oct
30

The 95 and the 5

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Anyone who has worked with me for more than 10 minutes knows that one of my favorite topics is what I call the 95 and the 5.   It’s pretty simple really — most marketer’s efforts are spent on the planning and execution of our marketing programs.  All too often, we consume ourselves with important details, and then toss our programs (or collateral or positioning, or web pages, or whatever) over the wall to the larger organization.  It looks something like this:

 

Guess what?  We leave tons of value on the table —   I’d argue most of it.  Unless our programs are properly rolled out, our colleagues (in particular in Sales) cannot leverage our work to drive business opportunity.   I’ve reached the conclusion that the value looks more like this:

 

Unless we roll out our programs with precision and clear communications, the perceived value of our efforts is very low.  Reps don’t follow up on leads.  Collateral goes unused.  Positioning goes unused — and unchallenged.   In short, we’re wasting our time.

Experience tells me that many marketers believe themselves too busy take the time to think through, plan, and execute their rollout plans.  They’re busy as hell.  But the fruit of their efforts are under utilized.  This is a classic case of mistaking activity for results.  And it leads to the under-valuing of the marketing function.

So let’s stop, take a deep breath, and give some serious thought to how we roll out our programs.  Do we just send an email or post something in Salesforce.com?  Or do we develop program briefs and measurable goals?  Do we schedule  solicit feedback from sales management and hold calls to present the program and discuss follow-up strategies?

I’d argue that when we take the time on the ’5′ we’ll see the full value from our ’95.’

 

 

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Oct
24

Enterprise Sales is Dead. Long Live Enterprise Sales.

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The demise of the traditional enterprise software sales model is widely reported. And widely, and joyously, celebrated.  

And for good reason.  The model has bugs.  Lots of them.  It’s expensive (personnel, travel).  It’s time consuming.  Picking good reps is hard; many fail.  Finding good sales engineers is incredibly hard — often even good reps fail if they have bad SEs.

But this biggest bug is this — it takes too long to achieve uncertain results.  Typically it looks like this.

You invest a lot of time (and money) up front in hopes of a big payoff down the road.  You’re solving a big problem, building consensus, evangelizing your approach, de-positioning competitors, meeting with executives and on and on.  It all takes time.

The problem isn’t that this approach doesn’t work.  It does.  Ask any big software company.

The problem is that it’s inefficient.  All that convincing takes time, skill, and a ton of hard work.  Much has been written (Solution Selling, Customer Centric Selling, etc.) about how to make this process more efficient and its outcomes more predictable.  But these books, as good as they are (and they are great) are about improving an existing, and fundamentally flawed, process.

But the real game changer is a new approach.  What if the timeline looked more like this:

In other words, what if you could deliver bite-size chunks of value and get paid along the way?  How would this change things?

  • You could sell at lower levels in your target organization
  • Customers could convince themselves of the value of your offering
  • When you go to sell a larger deal, you would already have proved your value
  • You would have user advocates within your customer base
  • Your sales reps would not just get leads from Marketing, they would get customers with whom they could build relationships (and sell more).
  • You’d have many more (albeit smaller) customers.
  • And so on…

In short, the whole machine is more efficient.  Sounds great, right?  Probably don’t even need any sales reps, right?

Wrong.  At least wrong in some cases.

If your product solves an enterprise level problem, you’re going to need elements of a traditional enterprise go-to-market plan.  You’re going to need to be able to meet with senior executives, on their turf, and convince them that your approach solves a problem they care about.  You’re going to need SEs.  You’re going to need to build consensus.  All that enterprise sales stuff.  And the enterprise marketing stuff to grease the skids.

But wouldn’t it be easier if the people you were talking to were already customers?  Wouldn’t the conversations be smoother if you already had internal advocates?  Don’t you think you might close big deals faster if you already had a commercial relationship?

And wouldn’t it be nice to get paid along the way?

In part fueled by the consumerization of b2b software, this is where the world is going.  Companies that can deliver incremental value for incremental dollars will have real and sustainable business model advantages over those in the the ‘all or nothing’ camp.

All of this has real impact on how you design your products.   In part, your product must become an integral part of your sales and marketing machine.  For this  to work, you products must be flat simple to use.  They must be set up to deliver incremental value.  Ideally, they’ll have a social or viral aspect to them.

Below is a (very) simple diagram describing how this might work product wise.

At each step, the product is proving its worth and adoption is expanding in the organization.

This type of product design enables a far simpler
initial engagement with the customer — many times this first
transaction can be closed online with no human contact.  In other cases,
an inside sales function (less expensive, no travel costs) can drive
early and secondary sales.  From a go-to-market standpoint, this might look more like this:

In short, the old model isn’t dead.  It’s just becoming (much) more leveraged.  And this benefits both vendors and customers.

As a vendor, the the imperative is clear: Find ways to efficiently deliver incremental value and collect incremental dollars.  In the process, you’ll transform your sales process by adding tremendous leverage.

 

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