In the traditional model of IT analysis, vendors and users alike buy subscriptions to published research that are bundled with a certain level of retainer-like consulting. You can also buy additional consulting from analysts on an ala-carte basis. Indeed, analyst relations gurus suggest it’s a best practice to do so, both because you might learn something and because the process of your doing so might strengthen your relationship with them, in reality and euphemism alike.

In the 1990s I subverted that model somewhat. Anybody could buy my subscription newsletter for $347/copy/year. Only two vendors that I recall (Oracle and Informix) ever bought > 10 subscriptions at once. In addition, I had some faxed published product that frankly didn’t add all that much to the newsletter. But it was part of a $15,000/year service – almost always sold to vendors only — that also included a day of consulting and related prep and follow-up, a price point I stumbled into and later in various ways validated.* Big companies like Oracle and Microsoft were encouraged to buy, say, one unit of service each for the DBMS and application development tools groups. If one group wanted more service, they could pay 2X as much, while getting the same faxed reports. Thus, in most ways but not all, I separated out my subscription business ($347/seat/year) from my consulting business ($15,000/episode for vendors, custom-priced for users) even then.

*Institutional investors got their own price points, and a truly retainer-like service model. But as my old customers in that area fell off through usual turnover-related churn, I got almost no new ones, and it eventually became a minor part of my business.

In the blog-friendly 21^st Century, I’ve taken those principles further. Substantially all my research is free-to-the-public. Most of what I sell is directly packaged as some form of consulting. (The exceptions would be sponsorship for the research and its distribution, most commonly in the form of paid speaking engagements). For vendors this is retainer consulting only. For users it is project consulting only. For investors I would be flexible on retainer vs. project, if I had any remaining investor clients. But one way or the other, it’s all consulting. In my “freemium” analyst business model,

the research is the “free” and the consulting is the “ium”

But enough about me! While the market opportunity for hard-core analysts is fairly limited (there isn’t much point in trying unless you think you can become acknowledged as a top expert in one or more fields), it’s in fact a business best practice for almost any consultant to show off expertise by blogging or some other kind of publication. Now, not all of this expertise-parading need be on subjects general enough that we’d recognize it as being a form of what we generally call “IT analysis.” But much could be or is. Therefore,

many consultants are or should be part-time analysts

If you go back to my tentative taxonomy of influencers, I’m looking at people who fit into Bucket #4 (minor bloggers or forum posters), but might transcend that to seep into Buckets #1 or 3 (two groups of “analysts”). Obviously, these aren’t the only kind of rising influencers. For example, a top blogger in my sphere is Daniel Abadi – he’s a professor, but if you can get him to take the time to behave as an analyst vis-a-vis you, something he only rarely does, you probably should. And then there’s Dave Kellogg, CEO of a vendor, on the board of others, and clearly not always objective – but usually interesting and insightful even so. More common in the future, I think, will be examples like Todd Hoff – a consulting programmer with an excellent and widely read blog.

Today, if a user or other techie tells me I have “one” of the best blogs in the (database or perhaps unspecified) field, and I ask them what the other top ones are, the answers I expect to get back are Hoff’s and Abadi’s. Of the two, Hoff’s sends more visitors to my blogs, so I’m guessing it’s the better-read. Vendor business types might cite Dave Kellogg’s or Merv Adrian’s instead.

The implications of all this for influencer outreach efforts should be pretty clear. I’m still trying to think through what it means for analyst business models. Stay tuned.

]]> http://www.strategicmessaging.com/blurring-analyst-consultant-line/2010/07/28/feed/ 1 http://www.strategicmessaging.com/so-what-is-an-analyst-anyway/2010/07/25/ http://www.strategicmessaging.com/so-what-is-an-analyst-anyway/2010/07/25/#comments Mon, 26 Jul 2010 04:42:50 +0000 Curt Monash http://www.strategicmessaging.com/?p=98 Recently, there have been several high-profile (at least within the independent analyst community) posts and initiatives relating to analyst business models. Each at least implicitly suggests a definition of what an “analyst” is. Interestingly, no two of the definitions seem exactly the same – even though similar people are involved in several of the efforts. Notwithstanding my well-documented skepticism about category definitions, I think it might be interesting to pull some of these ideas together in one place.

The post that kicked this all off, by Gideon Gartner and Barbara French, basically asking whether and how small analyst firms could rise to challenge the big ones like Gartner Group and Forrester Research. An extremely rich comment thread ensued. Implicit in the original post was a definition of “analyst” work that seemed to include both proprietary published research and quick-hit advisory services, fitting the traditional big-firm subscription model. More diversity, however, was shown in the post comments.

Long ago, Gideon probably based his model on his prior career at stock research firms, which to this day model their business somewhat like big IT analyst firms. Some of the main differences are:

• Payment levels and services provided sort of just happen, rather than being precisely negotiated.
• Payment style is wonky, mainly consisting of a certain share of a client’s high-margin rather-commodity-service stock trading business.
• SEC regulations insist that you not say anything material in personal advisory services you haven’t first put out in writing (there’s been decades-long uncertainty as to just what is or isn’t “material”).

Note: I used to be a stock analyst myself. Indeed, I once was ranked #1 on the Institutional Investor All-Star Team. This may be only the 3^rd year in the past 29 that I get $0 revenue from investment research – and it’s not over yet.

My immediate reason for writing this post is that Ray Wang of Altimeter Group asked me to retweet his post on the best way to set up a new analyst firm, broken down into “7 Tenets”. The implicit model he’s using of analyst firm seems to be one that does a lot of advisory services, probably sells subscriptions, has “proprietary IP”, and gives a lot of research away via blogs and other public outlets. I.e., it’s similar to Gartner/Forrester, but not quite as rigid. Anyhow, I know Ray isn’t really that dogmatic, because – as he tweeted recently – he’s exploring a possible “trade association” of independent analyst firms, and I’ve talked with him about who might be in or out.

In my own business, I follow a more extreme form of the “freemium” model. In line with my stock analyst background, I feel anything I know that’s sufficiently important should be published openly, technology insight and general methodology alike. Advisory services are for:

• Teaching people how to use the information.
• Being the middleman for 1-to-1 NDA vendor/user discussion.

I’ve figured out how to offer quasi-subscription retainer vendor services even so, but find it easier to sell user services on a project basis.

Of course, I don’t really publish EVERYTHING openly, for three main reasons:

• Nobody has time to write up everything they know.
• Much of what I know is NDAed.
• My best advice is reserved for my paying customers.

But that held-back advice is not apt to be a market trend or analytic methodology. Rather, it is likely to be a more specific “Due to threat, opportunity or trend X, you should do Y,” where X is something I’ve actually been writing about publicly for a while.

Jonny Bentwood, meanwhile, goes to the opposite extreme from Gideon et al., defining an analyst by

if someone is independent and directly influences technology procurement then they are an analyst

That leads, for example, to him ranking Dennis Moore as a top-100 analyst tweeter. Now, I have no problem with mentioning “Dennis Moore” and “top-100 analyst” in the same sentence. But if Dennis has any analyst business model at all, it’s one of the stealthiest ones in the whole IT industry.

Finally, there was a webinar by French, Bentwood, Ray’s partner Jeremiah Owyang (who’s #1 on most of Bentwood’s lists, except for the ones Ray’s #1 on), and Carter Lusher on analysts’ use of social media. I haven’t listened to the recording, but two of the four bullet points listed below it say analysts can or should:

Develop personal networks, career brands, that carry with them further than reports under an umbrella brand.

Finally realize they are also media in addition to their traditional roles.

I agree, and in fact believe analysts are a huge part of the media ecosystem, already now and even more going forward.

So what are the implications? If you’re a vendor, I think:

• Analysts (defined broadly) are an increasingly important part of the overall set of influencers. In particular, as traditional media business models collapse, we’re playing some of the role trade press reporters used to.
• You need flexibility in how you deal with influencers. Everybody is different. (Quick worst-practice story: Oracle tells me it won’t give analyst-relations support to anybody who doesn’t let it see what they write before it goes out – a process they use both for fact-checking and general last-ditch opinion-lobbying. But I know they enforce that rule selectively. And I’m not getting good PR support from Oracle these days either.)
• Understand that different analysts can give you good advice in different ways. E.g., numerous clients tell me that they go to Gartner to find out what mainstream enterprises are saying, and to me for actual marketing or strategy advice. (Conveniently, that lets them also be giving money to and getting attention from what they judge to be two of the top influencers in their area.) Other analysts might assist them in yet other ways, even beyond general influencer-relations value.

If you’re a user, please note that:

• There are numerous good providers of free information and insight.
• Many (not all) providers of free information can also be hired as consultants.

Sorry if those bullet points at the end — or for that matter the rest of the post –  sound a bit self-serving, but this overview is in fact informed by thinking about my own business.

Or, to put it another way:

• What I think about the analyst business in general
• How I structure my own business in particular

are, for rather obvious reasons, closely in alignment.

• As a consultant to the technology industry
• As a target of public relations myself

Sometimes these discussions are very fruitful. But other times they are “Head, meet brick wall.” Perhaps this post will help.

This post actually started as a set of specific tips, the biggest of which is uncouple your PR from your press releases. I’ll put the others below — but first, I’d like to cover a little theory.

There are (at least) five different things you can try to do via public relations:

• “Sell” to the press (and bloggers and so on), by which I mean that you try to induce stories, and you probably measure success by a count of stories written (presumably weighted by the quality of the publication, the favorableness of the mention, and so on), and your activities are focused on contacting the press in pursuit of that goal.
• “Market” to the press, by which I mean that you try to create a favorable disposition toward having them say what you’d want them to. This can be measured in the same ways as “selling” success, but usually on a more long-term basis.
• Market through influencers to your end customers and prospects. Here I’m saying “influencers” rather than “press”, because social media, pure word of mouth, and so on can also contribute to success.
• Market through influencers to other influencers. It is now a regular consulting exercise for me to walk clients through the whole chain of which influencers listen to which other influencers. (If you want to work that kind of thing out for yourself, social media observation is a good way to start.)
• Market to potential buyers directly. This has become increasingly realistic as the internet has matured.

In my capacity as a target of PR, I can tell you that clumsy or excessive “selling” of stories creates a backlash. There are a number of us who are LESS likely to write favorably about companies that waste our attention and time pitching inconsequential stories.  You may get ignored (especially in the traditional press or if you’re a larger company).  You may get mocked (especially in blogs and if you’re smaller outfit). Either way, you probably won’t be happy about the result.

In my capacity as a consultant, I can tell you why you should have realized this all along — unless carefully managed, most salespeople will burn their employer’s long-term interests in order to show short-term results. Outside PR agencies on short-term contracts are particularly guilty of this. What’s more, when they are honorable or astute enough to push back against unrealistic management expectations — as is fairly often the case, or at least so they claim — outside PR folks are commonly ordered to produce-or-else nonetheless. The consequences of such bullheadedness are sad.

One of the top trade press reporters covering enterprise technology keeps telling me that he fears for our country if people seriously think that the trivialities he’s hard-pitched are news. Less hyperbolically, he’s given me names of VERY big companies who get less coverage from him than they would if they sent fewer lame press releases. And when he gives me examples of what he hates, I generally agree, except in cases when I can tell him that a terribly-written press release has obscured what is actually an interesting announcement.

A great selling-style PR person can be invaluable, just as a great salesperson is. Those are the ones who know a few target “customers” really well, who are trusted by those “customers,” and/or who know how to listen to what the “customers’” preferences or needs are. Some people like that can be found inside companies.* But they’re almost nonexistent at agencies these days, at least among those folks who pitch me.

*See, for example, Dian Terry’s organization at Teradata. Ditto Rita Shoor, who despite technically being independent might as well have been an Intersystems employee for the past decade-plus.

If most pure “selling” is bad, then what should you do in PR? The answer is “market”. This post will be long enough without me trying to distinguish among the various kinds of marketing — awareness-building, positioning, competitive de-positioning, lead generation, and so on. But I would like to at least point out that there are different categories of people to market to.

In an earlier post, I distinguished among eight different kinds of influencers. For the purpose of this one, it should suffice to highlight three different categories of PR-centric marketing:

• Marketing to generalist influencers in the hopes they will in turn influence the broad market. E.g., instead of nagging a reporter to write a specific story, you can just focus on building up their opinion of you and your technology, in the hopes they will write favorably about you when it fits their needs to do so. When you do this, your end goal should be quality of mentions, with a secondary emphasis on quantity. I put quality ahead of quantity because ever more buyers don’t focus on news streams at all. Rather, they go out and search for information when they feel they need it, and when they’re doing that you want them to see a reasonable quantity of highly favorable commentary, even more than you want them to find a large number of decent mentions.
• Marketing to specialist influencers in the hopes they will influence other influencers, as well as influencing the general market. When addressing specialized “expert” influencers, you should have two end goals — quality of online mention and quality of word-of-mouth mention. This area is even more skewed to quality than the prior one for multiple reasons, including:
  • Specialist/expert influencers have a wider good-to-bad spectrum of commentary than theoretically unbiased reporters do.
  • Even if you don’t see that in print, it certainly happens in private conversation.
  • Their followers are apt to be focused enough to notice what tone the commentary takes.
  • If they have a high opinion of you, quantity will often take care of itself.
  • You probably couldn’t measure word-of-mouth quantity if you tried (although mass consumer markets may be an exception to that rule).
• Reaching out to the broad market directly.  Google News and other aggregators tend to carry press releases right alongside traditional news articles. And a significant fraction of the top search results on your company name are likely to be your own press releases. For that reason alone, I wouldn’t forgo issuing press releases, especially ones with informative headlines and first paragraphs.

With all that as background, let me now turn to the specific tips that started this all off.

• Press, bloggers, analysts, and other influencers can no longer be neatly separated from each other. Only use PR people who can be trusted with all those constituencies.
• If you must use PR people as glorified appointment secretaries, for a conversation that BOTH sides want to have, that’s OK. It’s not ideal, but it’s less likely to actually damage you than some of the alternative approaches to PR are.
• Using PR people to sell a story that the target doesn’t care about is a VERY bad idea. Indeed, it’s commonly worse than using a salesman to sell a product the prospect doesn’t care about. Why? Because there’s more chance you’ll later regret burning the relationship.
• Compensating PR people based on press mentions almost guarantees they will oversell and burn your relationships, unless they are confident they have a long-term relationship with you.  (On your payroll or otherwise.) Otherwise, their short-term motivations are not at all in your best interest.
• The higher your volume of press releases, the clearer your headlines and other writing need to be. The more attention you ask for from each target, the more responsible with that attention you need to be.
• Review pitch emails just as you review press releases. If you do a sufficiently great job of clear headline and topic-paragraph writing, maybe the pitch email writes itself. Otherwise, it’s apt to be botched. A bad pitch email can piss off an influencer even more than a bad press release does, because it often consumes more of their attention. (Vendors really fall down on this point.)
• The worse the press release, the more you need to supervise the pitch process. This is an extension of the previous point. If somebody micromanaged you into a bad release, then you need to micromanage your minions into pitching as if the release had been better.
• And here’s what I REALLY think: Just treat press releases as documents your post online. Press releases get picked up in various places online.  And sometimes they even appear in venues (mainly online) where they look like they’re press articles. So you’re not actually going to stop issuing them. (Sigh.) But the writing you do for your generic online audience is very different from what you should do for reporters and other influencers.

To reach the latter group, the right model is something that’s at least quasi-personal, quasi-straightforward, and quasi-in-depth. In other words, it’s a lot like a blog — or else like a series of truly personal email correspondences. But, given how long this has already become, that’s a subject for another post.

*There actually are a couple of vendors who drown me in press releases without pissing me off. Why? Because those press releases have instantly comprehensible headlines and topic paragraphs. (Typically they’re user success stories without breathless fluff.) I know what I’m ignoring, without having any work to do to ignore it. The reason I mentioned Rita Shoor’s work for Intersystems above is that she’s great at that kind of thing. (Look around my blogs; you’ll see that it’s really rare that I write a story like this one that Rita induced.)

Grrr!! Any suggestion that there’s one right way to communicate rubs me the wrong way.  Indeed, I’ve been arguing that there’s an evolving information ecosystem that will ever more depend upon there being healthy occupants of many different niches.  Most particularly — and few vendors have yet wrapped their minds about this — it will increasingly be the case that primary news sources are analysts with NDA obligations. And yes — every once in a while it is important to be the one who breaks the story.

I don’t even like the idea that there be rules about fact-checking, error-correction and the like, for a couple of reasons.  First, that kind of thing can lead minimum standards to also be regarded as sufficient care. Second, such things can easily be framed in a way that sets up vendors as arbiters of who does a “proper” job of writing about them and, even worse, who will be given enough information to be able to write about them.

Oracle once evaded my requests for information about app servers for 18 months and then called me “unprofessional” for writing about Oracle’s app server without a recent briefing.  Unsurprisingly, I was eventually proved right.

But all my caveats notwithstanding, I highly recommend that pair of posts to at least be skimmed through.

With mainstream media dwindling at the same time the number citizen publishers is rising, it’s not surprising that individual influencers are becoming a promising target. Even professional editors and reporters are increasingly turning their attention to the blogosphere and Twittersphere as a source of expertise and even news. The first place a reporter goes when looking for sources these days is Google. As a result, popular bloggers are suddenly inundated with media inquiries. This is an opportunity for marketers. Some publications are going even recruiting bloggers to contribute to their branded sites. These financially driven actions are having the effect of amplifying the volume of individual voices.

That’s all very true in the technology world in general, in the enterprise IT world in particular, and very particularly in my own experience. For example:

• I blog for pay for two of the three major tech publishing groups, IDG and TechWeb.
• I am quoted quite a bit by some of the remaining true tech reporters.
• Those quotes can be delivered on the phone (least likely), by email, or just in one of my blogs (usually DBMS2).

To [bloggers and the like], their online outpost is a display of their passion for the topic that they cover.  They care deeply about the subject matter and they usually know at least as much as the PR person who contacts them.  Often they know quite a bit more.

In the longer form of that, Paul lumps in analysts with overworked and necessarily-superficial journalists rather than thoughtful, reviewer-like bloggers.   I wouldn’t wholly endorse that, in that I think the best analysts can combine large aspects of the old-style analyst and new-style blogger worlds.  But otherwise, I agree with what he’s saying.

You’d better come prepared to this engagement, because some influencers will take lack of knowledge on your part as an insult.  This can capsize junior agency people who aren’t prepared for the depth of questions they will get or the scorn they may endure if they can’t answer.

I’d say that a mouthpiece who pretends more depth than he has — whatever level that may be — is the one who’s in trouble. If you use PR people as glorified appointment secretaries, that’s fine.  And if you go into a call or meeting unaware of how the influencer wants to to engage — which, realistically, happens a much larger fraction of the time than it ideally should — you’d better be prepared to adapt quickly.

While journalists are expected not to share any biases, bloggers often do what they do precisely because they have opinions to share.  Fortunately, a little advance reading can often clue you in to someone’s agenda and even help you decide if they’re worth contacting all.  You don’t want to come in with a strong Windows pitch, for example, to a blogger who’s passionate about the Mac.  You also don’t want to be blindsided by someone who has made his or her opinions clear and who is offended by the fact that you don’t know them.  Again, 15 to 20 minutes of reading can save you a lot of aggravation.

Amen! Worst is when somebody insistently tries to “educate” me on something I already — often visibly — know, or even disagree with. or perhaps just don’t care about.

Unlike journalists, [influencers are] probably not interested in analyst quotes or customer case studies.  It’s more likely they’ll want to talk to the VP of engineering or the CEO than to the head of marketing.

Paul overstates that point a bit.  However:

• Few things companies do annoy me more than when they present quotes from my competitors as some sort of authority or, worse, suggest I call those competitors to be educated.
• I absolutely want to talk to somebody who actually understands the technology, rather than being relegated to people who are in “Well, this is what I’m told by the techies” mode. (Ditto “I’ll check on that and get back to you” — that’s a guarantee of obfuscation and lack of opportunity for follow-up.)

The right influencers have as much credibility in their community as product reviewers or analysts.

I’m not sure analyst-vs.-influencer is even a meaningful distinction any more.

Related link

• An example-laden interview with Paul Gillin

Enterprise IT product (sustainable-lead messaging stack)

• Tangible benefits
• Technical connection
• Features and metrics
• Technical connection
• Fundamental product architecture

because it’s a pretty good representation of how I think. But what about other influencers? Do they view things in somewhat the same way?

Well, I’m clearly at one extreme in my focus on careful, detailed analysis. At the other extreme is that portion of the trade press (and it’s not a small one) accurately described in Dave Kellogg’s rant

most of the IT trade press had degenerated to the following formula:

• Hire 20-something English majors as IT trade journalists
• Have them filter vendor press releases deciding which to cover
• Write stories based on the press releases, one live analyst interview, and one to two customer interviews
• Make money by selling advertising to the vendors
• Don’t rock the journalistic boat too much because of the prior point

Net: they didn’t add much value.

But most analysts, bloggers, and journalists are somewhere in between.

Sure, there’s a school of thought that goes “Oh, it works? Customers say so? Then it must be great stuff.” But many observers really do try to do serious analysis. I talk all the time to journalists who ask “Is this for real?”, and they’re not just looking for customer stories. Gartner Magic Quadrants and Forrester Waves, whatever their faults, do respectively have categories for “Completeness of vision” and “Strategy.” And while some Gartner or Forrester analysts may be dumb enough to accept any kind of incoherent fairy story as credible future plans, most do at least some critical thinking as to whether those stories could realistically come true.

Among bloggers there’s a similar mix. Some – including some of the most famous – are surely at the “Oooh – shiny!” level of credulity. But the blogosphere, especially when discussing enterprise or other highly-scaled IT, also contains a lot of in-depth, carefully-reasoned technical analysis.

So far I’ve argued that influencers perform more or less careful logical analysis, including of vendors’ forward-looking technology strategies. But I’ve begged the question as to whether such analysis closely matches the specific models I’ve laid out. Let me now address that head-on.

It seems beyond dispute that many influencers use at least the more simplified layered model

Enterprise IT product

• Tangible benefits
• Technical connection
• Features and metrics

The top layer answers the question “Is this good for buyers?”, and the other two layers answer the question “Is this better for buyers than the alternatives?” No other common template seems to do as good a job.

But how do influencers decide whether products really have the features and metrics claimed? Demos, hands-on use, publicly-validated benchmarks, and general vendor claims only go so far. In most cases, influencers have to look further for support. The influencers I talk with are much more likely to believe something if they hear it from customers than if the vendor is the only one saying it. They’re also more likely to believe something if it grows out of a clear technical differentiation – e.g., “MPP/grid” or “columnar” or “FPGA” — that if it arises from no clear technical source that they can understand.*

*These specific examples are all taken from the red-hot market for specialty data warehouse appliances and DBMS.

Bottom line: The two enterprise IT layered messaging templates I laid out really do describe a significant part of how influencers form and support their opinions.

• Do people believe you?
• Do they care?

It’s easy to meet one or the other of those criteria. What’s tricky is satisfying both at once.

Many marketing consultants, me included, would phrase the core messaging challenge in terms such as:

What’s the most compelling claim you can make that people will actually find credible?

But what I think many marketing experts overlook is that you don’t just have to make a claim – you need a whole marketing argument.

Marketing theorists love to point out all the different ways decision-making is non-rational. But even so, a market messaging strategy winds up taking the form of one or more rational or pseudo-rational arguments. For example, “Barack Obama went to an Islamic school for a few years, therefore he hates America” isn’t very logical. But its form resembles that of a rational argument, and adherents to the argument may indeed think it makes logical sense.

In particular, enterprise IT purchasing has huge elements of rationality. It is done by (formal or informal) committee. Many participants in the decision are trained in rather rational disciplines, such as programming or accounting. And there often are fairly objective grounds for analyzing what the results of any particular purchase decision are likely to be.

So what does it meant to construct a marketing argument? To a first approximation, the template looks like this:

Yummy product

• Tasty claims
• Persuasive connection
• Proof points

For example, in the enterprise IT market I consult to, that takes two main forms. The first is simply:

Enterprise IT product

• Tangible benefits
• Compelling stories
• Great references

But that by itself is rarely enough, either because your competitors have references too, or because you’re so new that you don’t. So there usually also needs to be a second kind of argument, claiming that your customer-pleasing product is better than the alternative customer-pleasing products. This usually takes a form like:

Enterprise IT product

• Tangible benefits
• Technical connection
• Features and metrics

But it’s not quite that simple either.

If you can write a feature list that supports a benefit list, your competitors can write exactly the same things. What’s more, you’ve already conceded that anybody who offers the right features will, ipso facto, convey all the great benefits. So the sales/marketing battle often comes down to convincing prospects that your feature list is credible, while your competition’s very similar feature lists are not.

How do you do that? Well, the traditional way is through one or both of two other three-layer templates:

Enterprise IT product

• Features and metrics
• Persuasive details
• Convincing references (yep – those references again!), other evidence of customer traction, or proof-of-concept tests

or

Enterprise IT product

• Features and metrics
• Technical connection
• Fundamental product architecture

References are particularly good at proving you have the features now. Proofs-of-concept are also great for validating your current product, especially in terms of performance metrics. Architecture is how you show that you’ll keep a feature lead in the future.

Putting this together, we have the two fundamental templates of layered technology marketing:

Enterprise IT product (proof-today messaging stack)

• Tangible benefits
• Technical connection
• Features and metrics
• Persuasive details
• Customer traction or proof-of-concept tests

and

Enterprise IT product (sustainable-lead messaging stack)

• Tangible benefits
• Technical connection
• Features and metrics
• Technical connection
• Fundamental product architecture

In companion posts, I will:

• Generalize the layered messaging model and apply it to political campaigns
• Test the layered messaging model against specific enterprise IT examples such as Netezza and Attensity
• Discuss the extent to which the layered marketing model actually matches how influencers analyze enterprise IT products and vendors

Note:

For most of the past year, I’ve based my consulting on a particular model of strategic marketing and messaging. This weekend, in a series of posts, I’m beginning to spell it out. It’s just in the early stages; indeed, I haven’t even settled on a final name, the main candidates for which are layered messaging, which seems to make more sense in context, and layered marketing, which seems to be clearer if the subject is raised from a standing start. I certainly don’t have any crisp definitions yet. But I do have a whole lot of marketing consulting and analysis experience that suggests I’m going in more or less the right direction. Comments, criticism, and questions are warmly encouraged.

Also, I apologize for there not being supporting graphics right out of the gate. Such things are not — to put it mildly — one of my areas of strength. But anyhow, these models are meant to be read in, er, layers, with higher ones resting on the foundation of lower. The role of the layers depicted in italics is primarily to draw strong connections between the layers above and below.

QlikTech … has … adopted “seeing is believing” as their strategy: rather than try to convince people how good they are, they show them with Webinars, pre-built demonstrations, detailed tutorials, documentation, and, most important, a fully-functional trial version. What they barely do is discuss the technology itself.

This is an effective strategy with early adopters, who like to get their hands dirty and are seeking a “game changing” improvement in capabilities. But while it creates evangelists, it doesn’t give them anything beyond than own personal experience to testify to the product’s value. So most QlikTech users find themselves making exactly the sort of generic claims about speed and ease of use that are so easily discounted by those unfamiliar with the product. If the individual making the claims has personal credibility, or better still independent decision-making authority, this is good enough to sell the product. But if QlikTech is competing against other solutions that are better known and perhaps more compatible with existing staff skills, a single enthusiastic advocate may not win out—even though they happen to be backed by the truth.

What they need is a story: a convincing explanation of WHY QlikTech is better. Maybe this is only important for certain types of decision-makers—call them skeptics or analytical or rationalists or whatever. But this is a pretty common sort of person in IT departments. Some of them are almost physically uncomfortable with the raving enthusiasm that QlikView can produce.

And in what was basically a highly favorable write-up of QlikTech/QlikView, I grew so frustrated as to finally say in the comment thread:

Thank you for admitting that clearly!!! It wastes a fair amount of analysts’ time when your company pretends otherwise.

Obviously, QlikTech is doing fine to date. Even so, this secrecy — which verges on deception — is hurting them, and is apt to do so at an increasing rate unless they get over it soon.

• Companies insist that news should be embargoed until press releases hit “the wire,” then don’t live up to their planned schedules as to when the releases will actually hit.
• Embargoes are commonly broken by bloggers working from home, online trade press working in non-US time zones, and the like.
• Companies are often maddeningly indecisive vague as to what parts of a briefing are or aren’t embargoed.

Basically, a custom that worked fairly well in the age of heavily staffed weekly and monthly print media has not been adapted well to the up-to-the-minute, fragmented online age.  Here’s what I propose to at least partially fix things.

1. Abolish indefinite embargoes; all embargoes should have a date (and time) certain. Effective immediately, I’m going to insist on that one. I will no longer agree to embargoes that last “Until we get the press release out, which we estimate will be two weeks from Monday some time in the morning.” If you can’t give me an exact all-clear time, I don’t want the information. I have lots of reasons for that, but here’s a key one: I’m willing to write a blog post and schedule it for automatic publication at some future time. I’m not willing to hover over Google News all morning to see whether you finally got your press release out. If you notify me of a delay by the night before, I’ll probably be able to accomodate you. But if you release the news early and I’m still stuck in embargo, I’m going to be mightily angry.
2. If anybody breaks the embargo, it’s completely off. That’s another new rule for briefing me — if anybody breaks the embargo and I see it, I’m publishing too.  If you can’t live with that, don’t brief me.  I’m not obsessed with racing other bloggers to get news out — but nor am I willing to passively bring up the rear just because some vendor asked me to hamstring myself.
3. Be clear about what is and isn’t confidential-indefinitely, confidential-until-embargo-end, or public information. Mark Logic just briefed me today and left hard copy of the slides behind. Certain pages had red stop-sign icons with “NDA” on them. That’s the way to do it. Too many presenters just put a fine-print footer saying “Confidential” on every page, not excepting the one that simply gives the name and logo of their company.

Let me hasten to point out that you shouldn’t just follow these rules with me; you should follow them with everybody. Professional journalists can write acceptably-styled news reports in tight, predetermined time frames. Analysts and bloggers, however, may not have that skill. If you want the best, most detailed, and friendliest coverage, you should encourage people to write in whichever way they most feel comfortable, rather than trying to confine and manipulate them into specific confines whose benefit to you is anyway unclear at best.

Here’s another reason to follow my advice: If you set up a burdensome embargo that’s then broken, you’re in a mess. Indeed, you have little recourse other than to yell at whoever broke it — and almost by definition, that will be one of the most enthusiastic people covering you. Congratulations; you just pissed off one of your biggest supporters. I hope I don’t have to tell you that that’s not a good outcome.