Making it Stick

Take a look the way most software companies tell their stories.   Most of them, frankly, suck.  The messaging is tired, it lacks meaning, and doesn’t communicate differentiation.  And worst of all, it requires prospects to do a translation exercise to understand the value. One good reason for this is that communicating a technical message …

View full post

Five New Year’s (Un) Resolutions

‘m one of those guys who believes in New Year’s resolutions.  There’s something about taking the time to reflect, envisioning a better version of ourselves, and making plans. This year, I’d like to propose some marketing un-resolutions—that is, things that we should be careful to avoid in 2013.  These are all traps that I know …

View full post

From Sales Push to Demand Pull

Sales take place when a buyer has convinced him or herself of the value of a purchase — and generally not until then. And in a connected, social, and content rich world, much of the buying process takes place before the prospect has even engaged with us.  It’s now generally accepted that in B2B, more …

View full post

Ice Ice Baby

(This post was originally run on the Marketing Executives Network Group (MENG) blog on June 27th, 2012. Nope.  This post isn’t about rapper Vanilla Ice.  And it’s not about 80s pop music in general.  With apologies to fans of both, it’s about Initial Customer Experience, or ICE. Initial Customer Experience describes how our prospects first …

View full post

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 …

View full post
Making it StickFive New Year’s (Un) ResolutionsFrom Sales Push to Demand PullIce Ice BabyGoing Old School

Feb 27

The Innovation We Need

Categories:

Product Management, Product Marketing, Strategy

by

I’m in tech.  In tech, we market innovation.  We let you do something you couldn’t do before.   We have a better way, a faster way, a cheaper way.  We are, therefore we innovate.

But here’s a secret, I’m sick of innovation.  Now before you start labeling me some sort of Luddite,  let me explain — I’m sick of technical innovation.    And I don’t think I’m the only one.   Here’s why:

Mostly, our prospective customers aren’t looking to be on the bleeding edge of anything, they’re looking for an easier way to solve their problems. They want to be more efficient and more effective in their jobs.  They want the information they need, when they need it.   They want what we all want:   simple.

And if ‘simple’ is the goal, there are two areas of innovation where we should be focused.

User Experience Innovation

Are our products really as easy to use as they could be?  Is the interface completely intuitive?  Are our product easy to try?  Can prospects see the value for themselves when they try our product?  Are there easy ways for them to share their successes with our products?

For most of us, the answers to these questions are somewhere between ‘no’ and ‘not really’ — and herein lies the innovation opportunity.

I’ve written before about the dawn of Age of Me where b2b customers carry their b2c expectations with them to work.   And when they do, they expect a streamlined, elegant, and simple user experience.   I would submit that the future of the software industry belongs to those companies who make user experience a core competency and a competitive differentiator.

This may will require culture in most tech organizations.  Fine.  To win, we must prioritize user experience — from first touch to first purchase to upgrade.  This is, in many cases, more valuable than adding additional features.

And given the user experience in most b2b software, there is ample space for some really cool innovation.

Business Model Innovation

But it goes even further – innovation doesn’t need to involve bits at all.  It could be in our go to market strategy or in the way we monetize our technologies.  As I’ve noted before, the traditional b2b software sales model is dying.   The ‘sales’ model is being replaced by a ‘buying’ model where the customer drives the process.

The new winners will acknowledge how prospective customers consume technology and devise innovative ways to grease the process.  This might involve a ‘freemium’ product strategy or a SaaS based delivery strategy that minimizes time-to-value.  Regardless of the strategy employed, the point is that there is significant scope for innovation in how prospects engage with your products and your company.

As with our product definition and our positioning, it all starts with the target customer.   What is their current process for evaluating and acquiring software to solve the problem we solve?  Where are the bugs in this process?  How could it be better?  What do they hate about doing business with the incumbents?   What would it take for them to love their vendor?

 

Now, all of this might seem obvious.  But if it’s obvious, why aren’t more of us investing more time and money in user experience and business model innovation?

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Feb 19

All Marketing is An Interruption — Thinking Outside In

Categories:

Content Marketing, Marketing Programs

by

Some co-workers recently gave me a copy of  Mike Tennant’s The Age of Persuasion — a great book about how we ended up in such a message saturated, marketing-is-everywhere world.  Great book, loaded with fascinating anecdotes from the history of marketing.

One point from the book stuck with me.  He says, “all advertising is an interruption” — meaning that very few of us seek out advertisements.  They interrupt us doing whatever it is that we were intending to to.

The same is true of all of types of marketing.  When’s the last time you woke up thinking,  “today is the day I hope someone will try to convince me to buy a new widget” or “I sure do hope that Company X will email me today.”

 

The answer is, of course, never.  But the implications are significant — and largely ignored.   While most of us don’t generally go around looking for interruptions, we will tolerate them under two conditions:

1)  We’re interrupted by something that entertains us.

2) The interruption contains valuable information — that is, it teaches us something useful that we didn’t know.

And yet, most of the marketing we see does neither.  Instead, it asks us to care about what some vendor wants us to care about.  And guess what?   We respond with apathy.  This shows up as low click-through rates, poor webinar attendance, flat web traffic, low numbers of product trials, etc.

So let’s think about it differently.  If we want our message to be absorbed, let’s first start with something interesting enough for our prospects to listen.  In other words,  ‘outside-in.’      Have we done something compelling, funny, or interesting enough to justify the interruption?  If not, let’s rethink.

Outside-in is the only way to cut through the clutter.

Start today. Are the programs you have slated for this week going to entertain?  Inform?

 

 

 

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Feb 04

Learning OTJ — What Most Marketers Studied (an unscientific study)

Categories:

Fun Stuff, Personal Development

by

Marketing is learned mostly on the job — at least for tech marketing execs (CMOs, VPs, Directors).   A simple survey shows that most of us didn’t study much marketing in school.

Here’s what my completely unscientific study uncovered:

1) Literally no one studied marketing as an undergrad.  Zero. Zippy.  None.

What did top marketers study in college?

 2) Almost 3/4 went to grad school.

Did top marketers go to grad school?

3) But most of those who went to grad school didn’t study marketing there either.

What top marketers studied in grad school

 

I’m not totally sure what to make of this –  but the facts are the facts: to get to the top spot in a tech firm, you certainly don’t need to have formal marketing education.

For the record, my undergraduate degree is in economics (minor in psych).   In business school my concentration was finance.  Go figure.

 

 

 

 

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Jan 15

Learning from our B2C Cousins

Categories:

Branding, Strategy

by

Marketing has changed tremendously in the past 10 years (social, online, blogs, analytics).  Well covered territory.  In all the hubbub, it’s easy to miss the fact the the software market itself is growing up.

Our market is becoming more consumer-like.  We should too.

I was flattered when MENG (the Marketing Executives Networking Group — an outstanding organization which I highly recommend) asked me to guest blog.  I wrote about what B2B tech marketers can learn from those who’ve already seen their markets mature — our cousins in B2c.

I won’t rerun the full article, because you can read it all here (along with a ton of other really good MENG blogs).  But here’s my top  5 list of things we can learn from b2c:

  • Brand is Critical –  A strong brand greases the skids for product marketing.
  • Quantitative Analysis — Consumer marketers are experts here. We should be too.
  • Segmentation –  We talk about it. But we don’t really do it.
  • Elegance and Ease of Use — Have you tried to set  up a software product recently?  ‘Nuff said.
  • Speaking Clearly — Lose the buzzwords.  Speak plainly.

I delve into each of these topics a bit deeper in the article.  Check it out — am I nuts?  Or is this how we should be thinking?

 

This post has no tag

Comments off

Jan 02

My (Marketing) New Year’s Resolutions

Categories:

Personal Development

by

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!

 

 

 

 

 

 

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Dec 13

Why Marketers Should Love Open Source

Categories:

Open Source, Product Management, Strategy

by

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.

This post has no tag

1 comment

Dec 10

Story Sells. An Email Experiment.

Categories:

Experiments, Market Research, Metrics & Measurement

by

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.

 

 

This post has no tag

1 comment

Dec 04

Thinking Different. In Support of the Countertactic.

Categories:

Launches, Marketing Programs, Social

by

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.”

Tags:

Leave comment

Dec 02

Going Blue to Support Sales

Categories:

Sales

by

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.

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Nov 20

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

Categories:

Product Management, Product Marketing

by

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.

 

This post has no tag

Leave comment

Older posts «

» Newer posts