February 21, 2016

Telling multiple stories

Much of this blog gives advice about how to tell a story. But that’s actually an oversimplification. In fact, you’re almost always in the situation where you want to tell multiple stories at once. The main messages of this post are:

Reasons the multiple-stories situation is so common include:

The first way to deal with all this is via modularization. In some cases, that’s easy. (E.g. websites can make different points on different pages.) Sometimes it’s harder, but worth doing anyway. E.g., in my recent post on influencer pitches, I said:  Read more

January 15, 2016

PR (or AR) pitch emails

I believe:

My support for these views includes:

My top tip for pitch emails is: Approve the pitch emails a PR firm writes before they are sent out!!!! There are two big reasons for this:  Read more

September 18, 2015

Third-party quotes in press releases

I’m generally a skeptic about the value of press releases. However:

So my current opinion is:

That fits with my general view that press releases:

That brings me to the subject of this post: third-party press release quotes. For starters, I think the following are pretty obvious: Read more

March 1, 2015

Marketing advice for young companies

Much of what I get paid for is advising early-stage companies, especially on messaging and marketing. So let’s try to pull some thoughts together.

For early-stage companies, I’d say:

Of course, these subjects are much discussed in this blog. The top three overview posts for young companies are probably:  Read more

October 30, 2014

How to start a presentation

I see many slide decks, a large fraction of which are screwed up right at the beginning. Here are some thoughts on doing better. This post goes together with others that relate to presentations or press releases, including:

In the first post linked above, I wrote:

The most generic and reusable part of a slide deck is its beginning — the “setting the table” part. A natural sequence is:

  • Whatever seems necessary to introduce and identify you.
  • Some validation as part of the introduction — company size, customer logos, whatever.
  • The big business problem/need you’re helping with.
  • A little validation about the problem/need.
  • Some common difficulties in satisfying the need, which are happily absent in your solution.
  • Specifically how you meet the need.

Let’s drill into some of those points.

Tips for company validation include:

Read more

August 24, 2014

Presentations for small audiences

My dislike of slide presentations is vehement and long-standing. Even so, my consulting duties often lead me to critique vendors’ slide decks, hoping to make them a little more tolerable. 🙂 Most of the precepts I rely on in these exercises can be encapsulated in “C” words:

And at the risk of drowning in excessive Cs, slide decks are a primary venue for a recent post topic: Short lists of Concise Claims.

Let’s talk a bit about that tailoring. Some things are shown only to very specific audiences. For example: Read more

July 27, 2014

Short lists of concise claims

It is often necessary to produce a short list of concise claims. A large fraction of all PowerPoint slides fit that model. So does the list of news in, for example, a typical product press release.

Making such lists is hard, for at least three unavoidable reasons:

Even so, many claims lists are yet worse than they need to be.

To create or improve a claims list, it helps to establish goals by asking

and also to check resources by assessing:

In the case of a product upgrade, answers often resemble: Read more

March 3, 2014

Marketing in stealth mode

I consult to ever more stealth-mode companies, so perhaps it’s time to pull together some common themes in my advice to them. Here by “stealth mode” I mean the period when new companies — rightly or wrongly — are unwilling to disclose any technological specifics, for fear that their ideas will be preempted by rival vendors’ engineering teams (unlikely) or just by their marketing departments (a more realistic concern).

To some extent, “stealth-mode marketing” is an oxymoron.* Still, there are two genuine stealth-mode marketing tasks:

Further, I’d divide the second task into two parts — messaging and outreach. Let’s talk a bit about both.

*I am reminded of my late friend Richard “Rick” Neustadt, Jr., whose dream job — notwithstanding his father’s famous book on presidential power — was to be a US Senator. So he needed to punch his military duty ticket, and got a billet doing PR for the Coast Guard. (One of his training classmates was Dan Quayle.) His posting was to a classified base, and so his PR duties consisted essentially of media-mention prevention. But I digress …

Stealth-mode messaging

As I wrote in a collection of marcom tips, the pitch style

“We’re an awesomely well-suited company to do X.”

is advantageous

  • In stealth mode, when you don’t have anything else to say …
  • … but not at first product launch, when you finally do.

For small start-up companies, this message is most easily communicated through highlights of the founders’ awesome resumes, for example:

Our CTO personally stuffed and dyed the yellow elephant for which the Hadoop project is named.

But that still begs a central question — how do you describe what your stealth-mode company is planning to do? I.e. — in the quote above, what is the “X”?

Read more

December 29, 2013

The core of strategy

This blog is based on two precepts that also guide my consulting:

Let’s spell that out.

Messaging is the core of strategy

The enterprise software business, in simplest terms, is about the building, marketing and selling of software. Messaging is central to all of those activities! In particular:

If we add another level of complexity, the story changes only a little. Read more

November 3, 2013

Rules for names

A common subject of my consulting is naming, and specifically naming the category of product or technology something goes in. Clients are well aware that no market categorization is ever precise. Still, words must be chosen, collateral must be prepared, and talks must be given to rapturous* audiences. Here are some of my go-to techniques.

*One hopes.

1. My most precise tip starts from a classic naming dilemma:

Increasingly, my advice is to pick a name that’s “half new”, usually in the form of a two-word phrase that overlaps partially with the name of an old product category the new thing sort of resembles.

In some examples from my own work:

2. A principle underlying that tip is that connotation is as important as denotation. The reactions that category names evoke can be as important as their literal meanings, especially since those literal meanings aren’t very precise anyway.

Returning to the examples above:  Read more

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