*E.g., consulting via the Monash Advantage and predecessor services. Every question on the list below has arisen recently in the course of my work, most of them many times over.

If you run an IT vendor, help run one, or aspire to do so, then I encourage you to give these questions a whirl. If you don’t think the answers are all knowable — either now or for the foreseeable future — it’s still advisable to make working guesses. Flexibility is a virtue — but even so, having a tentative strategy is far better than having no strategy at all. Strategy is to execution as design is to coding. The best time to fix software bugs is before you start coding; the best time to fix a bad strategy is before you’ve committed yourself to executing it. Yes, both the design and the strategy will need to be changed over time; but a smart, internally-consistent strategy is a lot better than a contradictory one, than an obviously hopeless one, or than no strategy at all.

This is a really long post, so I’ll summarize it up here. Explanations of each point follow below.

Positioning, messaging (and product)

Category: We make a _________________________________________.

Core value proposition: It is especially good at/for ___________________.

Architecture/commitment: It achieves this excellence because (we) ____.

Markets and use cases: If you ____________________, you should buy it.

Buyer universe: We sell to ____________________________________.

Competition: They perceive their alternatives as _____________________.

Competitive strengths: Our stuff is superior with respect to their alternatives in terms of _______________________________________.

Competitive weaknesses: Our stuff is inferior with respect to their alternatives in terms of _______________________________________.

Influencer perception: Influencers perceive us as ___________________.

Investor perception: Investors perceive us as ______________________.

Sales

Difficulty of adoption: To use our stuff, buyers also have to ___________.

Pricing: Buyers willingly pay us ________________________________.

Sales process: Our sales cycles are managed and closed on our behalf by _______________________________________________________.

Deal-breakers: In some accounts, _______________________________ will prevent us from winning, almost no matter what.

Team

Personnel: We hire people with the characteristics ___________________.

Competition for personnel: People join us because __________________.

Location: They are located _____________________________________.

Technical allegiance: Our offerings are dependent upon ______________.

I’ll explain some of what I mean.

Positioning, messaging (and product)

Category: We make a _________________________________________.

As I’ve described via the layered messaging model, a company actually needs and has multiple marketing messages. Still, there are times you also need a one-sentence description of what you do or make, imprecise though it necessarily will be. If you don’t have this, there will be many situations in which you can’t communicate well, or in which influencers of various kinds can’t pass your story onwards.

Core value proposition: It is especially good at/for ___________________.

This corresponds to the middle level of the layered messaging model. You need to envision generic situations or use cases in which your product excels, perhaps due to its superior features or performance metrics. If you don’t have that kind of excellence, how can you compete at all?

Architecture/commitment: It achieves this excellence because (we) ____.

This corresponds to the bottom level of the layered messaging model. You need to have an idea as to why you’ll have a sustained advantage in meeting your core value proposition. If you don’t have a sustainable advantage, why will you succeed?

Markets and use cases: If you ____________________, you should buy it.

This corresponds to the top level of the layered messaging model. You need to identify specific use cases in which your core value proposition has obvious benefits.

The most natural form these can take is by application; hopefully you can identify applications at which you shine and also particular vertical markets in which those applications are important. Specific, sharply-defined technical use cases can work too. (“If you need to do many-way joins scanning large parts of a 50+ terabyte database, our system rocks!”) But without some kind of easily-identifiable target use case, how can you have effective sales, sales qualification, or marketing?

Buyer universe: We sell to ____________________________________.

To sell effectively, you need to know who will buy. That means types of company or other organization, and it also means job descriptions (even if not titles) within those enterprises. Within the customer enterprise, “who will buy” includes at least who will want to buy, who will pay for the purchase, and who else will have to approve or not-veto it.

Competition: They perceive their alternatives as _____________________.

If you don’t know who or what you’re competing against, how can you be sure you’re doing anything right? Competition can include any or all of:

• Reasonable marketplace alternatives.
• In-house solutions.
• No decision/action at all.

Often your top competitor, especially in the early days, is a combination of all three, as your target customers make do by hacking around existing technology as best they can.

Competitive strengths: Our stuff is superior with respect to their alternatives in terms of _______________________________________.

Be realistic here, or you’ll lead yourself astray. Note that the answers you provide may have different force in different use cases, markets, etc.; that may provide a good guide as to where you have the best competitive chances.

Competitive weaknesses: Our stuff is inferior with respect to their alternatives in terms of _______________________________________.

Be realistic here too, or you’ll lead yourself astray even faster. Once again, note that the answers you provide may have different force in different use cases, markets, etc.; that may provide an even better guide as to where you should focus your efforts.

Influencer perception: Influencers perceive us as ___________________.

Hopefully, the way you describe yourself and the way you are perceived are aligned. Even so, what people think of you is likely to be only a subset of what you think of yourself. The part of your messaging that other people accept is the part that actually aids your business success.

Few people get their impressions about you directly, mainly:

• Core influencers with whom you maintain significant personal relationships.
• Existing customers whose impression of you comes almost solely from how you perform in their account.

Almost everybody else gets their impression of you refracted through influencers, where by “everybody else” I mean prospects, the people who originally bring you into customer accounts, other influencers, and more. Even those whom you talk with directly, such as sales prospects and press, can be strongly affected by what other press and analysts (or at an earlier stage angels and venture capitalists) have to say.

Investor perception: Investors perceive us as ______________________.

At a minimum, investors (including VCs) and stock analysts are influencers. If you like to have money, they may be more important than that. Different kinds of investor and investor-influencer are most important at different stages of your company’s life.

I’ve seen companies get literally destroyed because the strategy they felt they had to pitch to VCs was different from the strategy they actually believed in executing. Don’t go there. Find the investors that match your strategy, not the other way around.

But the need to get investment can add a degree of difficulty to your messaging and your influencer outreach. And if you can’t figure out what kind of investor would believe in your strategy — well, maybe the whole investing world is correct, and your strategy isn’t really that good after all.

Sales

Difficulty of adoption: To use our stuff, buyers also have to ___________.

If you sell a $10 product that costs $1 million to use, your selling costs are likely to reflect the $1,000,010 total cost of adoption. No doubt they will be a lot more than $10/deal. This is not good.

Cash cost of adoption isn’t the only issue, of course; there’s also time, risk of failure, need for buy-in from other departments, and occasionally even regulatory approval. But in any case, you should:

• Think about what is truly being bought when your customer decides to buy from you.
• Make sure your sales and marketing resources are in line with the magnitude of the true sale.
• Make sure your revenue expectations from a sale are in line with its cost and difficulty.

That you may need to get some of your initial customers and references by selling at a pittance doesn’t undermine this general point; eventually, you do want to make a profit.

Pricing: Buyers willingly pay us ________________________________.

So what can you charge? The answer depends on, among other factors:

• The value your buyers believe they will get from using something like your product.
• Your product’s differentiation versus alternatives.
• The total costs of adopting and owning your product.
• Your customers’ general attitudes toward paying for stuff.

Also, it’s important to consider how customers are used to paying for products they’ll regard as analogous: Purchase? Subscription? Priced per user? Priced per terabyte? You want pricing to appear to them as sufficiently simple, fair, and free of risk or surprise.

Sales process: Our sales cycles are managed and closed on our behalf by _______________________________________________________.

If you can’t describe a workable and repeatable sales model, you don’t have a strategy. Please note that “we’ll sell through the channel” is very rarely a complete answer, at least in enterprise IT. Almost always, you’ll need something that resembles a direct sales force, field or inside as the case may be. Even if you have partners who are collecting leads, managing sales cycles, and signing contracts, nobody else cares as much about selling your product as you do. Nobody else knows as much about how to sell it either.

And the partners who are exceptions to that general rule? They’re typically market specialists — such as vertical market application providers — to whom you have to sell much as you might to traditional enterprises.

Deal-breakers: In some accounts, _______________________________ will prevent us from winning, almost no matter what.

Enterprise IT buyers typically go into a product selection process with certain rules or strong inclinations, in areas such as:

• How proven a product or vendor must be in the market (references, financial strength, etc.).
• Which platforms or architectures they want to support.
• What kinds of vendor lock-in they will or won’t tolerate.
• Which specific features they absolutely insist on having.

If there’s something — company size, product features, architectural philosophy, whatever — that dooms you in certain accounts, then you’re not in the business of selling to those accounts until you get the objection addressed. (At some accounts, you never will.)

Team

Personnel: We hire people with the characteristics ___________________.

If you don’t know who you’re trying to hire, and why, you’re unlikely to build a winning team. The answer to “Who?” should always come in at least three parts:

• Character, personality, and approach to work.
• Skills and knowledge.
• Resume demonstrating tests of the skills and knowledge in situations like your own.

All three areas are important, but they’re listed in declining order. If you’re very sure of a match in the first two, the third is unnecessary; if the third area is critical (and it often is), it’s mainly to validate what you think or hope in the first two respects.

Competition for personnel: People join us because __________________.

You don’t just need to know who to hire; you have to be able to hire them. Part of that is telling an inspiring story, and one they think will lead to project and corporate success. Part is corporate culture. Part is terms and conditions of employment. Part, of course, is just finding them in the first place.

Hiring people is every bit as important and difficult a sales job as selling product is.

Location: They are located _____________________________________.

Yes, this really is a core strategic issue. Building your company in the wrong place can doom it.

Some kinds of people are extremely hard to find outside certain geographical areas. For example, a large fraction of the people in the world who’ve done DBMS marketing over the past 20 years did it in the San Francisco area. To a lesser extent, that’s true of DBMS development as well, especially if you add Boston to SF.

Of course, you can operate in a distributed manner — but that puts its own kinds of constraints on the people you can hire and expect to be productive and effective.

Technical allegiance: Our offerings are dependent upon ______________.

Your team doesn’t just consist of your employees and outsider advisers. Even more important may be the outside vendors and projects upon whom you choose to become dependent. If your stuff doesn’t work unless your customers buy a specific other vendor’s stuff too, then that vendor’s strategy — in terms of technology, pricing, positioning, and everything else — pretty much becomes your strategy as well.

OK. That was long. I have an equally long list of more execution-oriented questions outlined as well, but for now I’ll defer turning them into an actual post. Of course, if you’re a client and would like to see my rough notes, I’d be happy to share them.

Meanwhile, as long as this list is, I’m sure there are still other worthy items I left out. What did I miss?

Two things matter about marketing messages:

• 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.

My essential recommendation was:

… the two fundamental templates of layered technology marketing:

Enterprise IT product (proof-today messaging stack)

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

and

Enterprise IT product (sustainable-lead messaging stack)

• Tangible benefits
• Technical connection
• Features (and perhaps metrics)*
• Technical connection
• Fundamental product architecture
  

The lower parts of the stack demonstrate differentiation, most directly addressing the “Why should I believe you?” question. The upper parts demonstrate value, answering “Why should I care?” But ultimately, credibility rests on the whole flow of the story, and is no stronger than the weakest of the five layers.

*In the original form I just said “features and metrics”. But truth be told, metrics — speeds/feeds/scale/whatever — are only as important as features in a minority of market segments.

Since then, consulting engagements have shown me there’s actually a third template; happily, it’s synergistic with either or both of the other two. That one goes: 

Enterprise IT product (focus and commitment messaging stack)

• Tangible benefits
• Technical connection
• Features (and perhaps metrics)*
• Dedication
• Focus on a specific set of use cases
  

Here “Focus on a specific set of use cases” is a lot like “Commitment to a specific market or class of users.”

Extreme examples of what I mean include:

• “We manage and serve content.” (MarkLogic’s classical positioning, perhaps to be changed going forward.)
• “Our technology does nothing except manage and analyze poly-structured data, and we’ve been doing that for years.” (One possibility for the change. )
• Same thing, but for machine-generated data. (That’s pretty much the Splunk story.)
• “Technology T focused on vertical market V, where our founders previously worked,” where “T” might be business intelligence or predictive analytics or CRM.

Less extreme forms include many vertical market strategies, many “we’re t-shirted coders just like you” messages, and McCormack & Dodge’s long-ago pitch “Buy our financial software because we have lots of Certified Public Accountants on our staff.”

The point of such a story is that, if you’re dedicated to solving a particular set of problems, it stands to reason that you’ll put a lot of things into your product to address them that somebody less dedicated might not bother with. Often, that’s actually true, and perhaps to a greater extent than a simple feature list could easily convey. Sometimes, you can even say that your competitors’ features that benefit other use cases show they aren’t as committed as you are, but usually that crosses the line into overhype.*

*It’s rare that having additional capabilities is truly a bad thing.

Variants of the focus-and-commitment argument include:

• “This is all we do.”
• “Everybody in the company is focused on doing this.”
• (Synergy with the proof-today stack) “This is the kind of user we talk to and try to please every day.”
• (Synergy with the sustainable-lead stack) “We made whichever architectural decisions we thought best to meet these needs, even if they wouldn’t be good choices in some other market we aren’t pursuing anyway.”

So why wouldn’t you use a focus-and-commitment argument? First, it might not be true. Second, it might haunt you when you later claim to be competent in other use cases as well. So in some cases you might want to suggest the argument rather than say it explicitly, or at least confine it to individual sales presentations that are unlikely to be quoted later. But despite those limitations, focus-and-commitment can be an important part of a credible and differentiated messaging strategy.

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.

General layered marketing template

• Tangible benefits
• Credible causal connection
• Measurable characteristics
• Credible causal connection
• Fundamental nature

Clearly, the second of my the two enterprise IT layered messaging templates I proposed,

Enterprise IT product (sustainable-lead messaging stack)

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

is just a special case of that more general model.

Another special case seems to work well for the other market I tend to write about in this blog, namely US politics. Namely, the template

Political candidates

• Tangible benefits
• Credible effect
• Promised actions in office
• Logical and/or emotional connection
• Biography, character, and values

seems to cover a lot of today’s campaign marketing.

For example, by applying this model to some of this year’s presidential candidates, we could get

John McCain (general election)

• Safe country, economic growth, lower taxes, less corruption, return to good ol’ American values
• Conservative political theories say you’ll get the desired outcomes
• Hawkish policies, low taxes, corruption-fighting, conservative judges
• He’s done it all his life, it’s what he’s all about
• Country-loving pugnacious Republican war hero

Barack Obama (general election)

• Peace, fewer enemies around the world, better times for the poor and middle class, sane public policies, social freedoms, progress on global warming, general change
• Liberal/moderate political theories say you’ll get the desired outcomes
• Dovish policies, leadership-through-inspiration, logic-based policies, liberal judges
• He’s done it all his life, it’s what he’s all about
• People-serving high-IQ Democrat from an outsider background who’s a brilliant orator

Ron Paul

• More money in your pocketbook, more personal freedom, less war
• Libertarian policies would surely deliver what they promise. And libertarian theories say the side effects wouldn’t be nearly as bad as conventional thinking claims.
• Radical reductions in spending, taxes, international involvement, and miscellaneous impingements on freedom.
• He sure sounds sincere. Besides, he’s not really going to get elected anyway, so only his ideas matter, not his actual competence.
• Congressman and doctor who talks a pure libertarian line.

Hillary Clinton (late in her campaign)

• Better times for the poor and middle class, sane & non-naive public policies at home and abroad, gender equality
• Clintonian policy-wonkiness in the 1990s gave us our best times in half a century
• Moderate but firm foreign policy, health-care reform, other smart public policies, liberal judges
• She’s done it all her life, it’s what she’s all about
• Long-time liberal/populist/moderate, policy wonk, health-care specialist, woman, fairly experienced

All of these templates seem to be well-accepted by a large group of supporters. “Large” is of course a somewhat relative term, with Ron Paul’s story ringing true with a lot fewer people than Obama’s, McCain’s, or Clinton. But then, not as many people believe in Paul’s libertarian dogma as accept general US right-wing, left-wing, or centrist political approaches. By way of contrast, it’s hard to come up with a layered messaging stack for Rudy Giuliani that would impress many voters; “Subject-Verb-9/11” was never fleshed out in a detailed way that very many people bought. And the same goes for presidential candidate Joe Biden’s “I’m a working-class guy like you, except that I’m smart about foreign policy.”

Much of what has happened in the campaign could be explained starting from templates like these. Not all, of course. For example, field organization – and particularly Obama’s huge advantage in same in most states, and Clinton’s advantage in a few – goes a long way toward explaining the Democratic primary outcome. But on the whole, I think it’s not too inaccurate to say that candidates tend to do well to the extent voters and influencers buy into all the layers of their messaging pitch, but not so well to the extent one or more layers are seen as being seriously lacking.

• 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