Technology marketing
Advice about the marketing of enterprise technology, based on 30+ years of experience, and most particularly upon our flagship Monash Advantage program.
Marketing communication essentials
I’m often asked how early-stage IT vendors should prioritize their marketing communications, and specifically their investment in collateral. They don’t have nearly the budget or management bandwidth to do everything; so what should they do first?
Most commonly, my answer is a variant on:
- Of course you need basic website content. For starters, your website should at least feature:
- Answers of one paragraph or less to the top four strategic worksheet questions.
- A several-paragraph description of your product/technology.
- Management bios, contact information, and other obvious stuff.
- You also need a fairly technical company white paper. At some point in your sales cycle, there will be a technical evaluation. A white paper can answer a lot of early questions. What’s more, many of your early sales will be driven by people who think new technology is cool. Make it easy and appealing for them to learn about your cool new tech.
- Many people like videos. Whether it’s a link to a conference presentation or a white board talk or whatever, it’s good to have some kind of video. Some people, however — I’m one of them — don’t like videos, so don’t do anything essential in your videos you don’t also convey in writing.
- I further favor having a low-post-count blog. Notes on that include:
- Almost nobody has the time to do a lot of blogging.
- Even so, a blog is the most flexible and best way to communicate things that seem harder to say in other formats.
- In particular, this can be a “poor man’s” way to make up for what is surely a distressing lack of resources in pre-sales support personnel, other collateral, and so on.
- The goal isn’t to build a consistent readership. (You’re not going to invest enough effort for that.) The goal is to put up a few posts, then call influencers’ and prospects’ attention to them by email.
Beyond that, I’d say:
- Of course you want to generate leads. I don’t have strong opinions as to whether to make some of the items mentioned above require registration. But beware of the absurdly extreme position that says marketing serves solely to feed the sales pipeline.
- Supervise your PR very closely. Do much of it yourself. Indeed, strongly consider doing without a PR firm altogether.
Where, by way of contrast, do I favor being frugal? Read more
Sizzle vs. smoke
All marketing communications attempt to cast their subject in a favorable light. I get that. But when your claim is obvious nonsense, you’re just doing yourself harm.
My best example this week (it’s only Tuesday morning) is an email from Vitria, which reads in part:
The world’s first Operational Intelligence (OI) app …
While it seems like everyone is jumping on the big data bandwagon, only OI can claim to be purposely built for tackling big data in motion …
That’s utter nonsense. We’ve had a CEP/stream processing industry for years. We’ve had stock-quote and network-monitoring systems for decades. Maybe Vitria has a good story, but the core claims in their email are obviously false. If you think I’m overreacting, it’s only because so many other companies also pitch blatantly untrue claims.
So do I want to talk with them? Well, their email suggests that if I do, they’re likely to start out by emphatically saying untrue things. Blech. I think most serious reporters, bloggers and analysts would feel much as I do on the matter. Even the ones who do take a briefing are likely to go in with a more negative attitude than they might if the pitch email had been more closely based on reality.
And if I do ever talk with Vitria anyway, they’ll need to start by climbing out of a credibility hole.
| Categories: Analyst relations, Marketing communications, Public relations, Technology marketing | 27 Comments |
Marketing to current and future employees
Usually, when one thinks about marketing, the target audience is actual or potential customers. Fairly often, two other audiences come to mind:
- Actual or potential investors.
- Influencers.
More rarely mentioned is a fourth audience — actual or potential employees. That’s a pity, in that marketing to them is a Really Big Deal. This should be obvious as soon as you consider:
- Recruiting is a hugely important form of sales.
- Where there are sales, there also is (or should be) marketing.
| Categories: Technology marketing | 27 Comments |
The marketing of performance
Much of the technology I consult about boils down to performance. There are many sub-categories — parallelization, scalability, low latency, interactive response, price/performance, and more. But basically it’s about computers operating faster, within realistic resource constraints.
There are three kinds of benefits performance can offer:
- It can allow you to do things more simply and/or cost-effectively (e.g., with less hardware or less tuning).
- It can allow you to do things better.Examples include:
- Faster-loading web pages for your customers.
- Faster-responding queries for your business analysts.
- Better prices on your algorithmic trading.
- Better analytic results, perhaps from:
- Using more data.
- Running more queries.
- It can allow you to do something that would be impractical otherwise (usually because of expense).
These benefits are easily confused. When a prospect says “I can’t do X with existing technology”, what she really means is often “I can’t afford to do X well enough to matter.” When a vendor says “We make it cheap and easy to do Y”, what prospects hear is commonly “Great! Now we’ll be able to do Y within our resources and budget.”
Given the breadth of the subject, it’s hard to generalize comprehensively about the marketing of performance claims. But my observations include: Read more
| Categories: Layered messaging models, Technology marketing | 20 Comments |
Core beliefs
The most insightful political-marketing observations I’ve seen in some time come from a New York Times article by Jonathan Haidt that, unsurprisingly, turns out to be excerpted/adapted from a whole book on the point. It argues that an essential aspect to political belief are the stories tribes tell themselves.
When I put it like that, it sounds straight out of Seth Godin. But Haidt says it in a different — and to me more compelling — way (emphasis mine): Read more
| Categories: Political marketing, Technology marketing | Leave a Comment |
Execution for IT vendors: a worksheet
It seems that my IT vendor strategy worksheet was well-received, by companies at different stages of development, clients and non-clients alike.* So here’s the promised sequel — a similar worksheet with more of an execution orientation. If your answers to these questions don’t dovetail well with your strategy responses, you have some serious rethinking to do.
*Those who’ve worked it through include a multi-billion dollar powerhouse, a two-person lifestyle business, and some pre-revenue start-ups.
For the strategy worksheet, I took the extreme position that every employee of every IT vendor should have at least some idea of the answers. In this case, I won’t go quite that far. But I will say that most IT vendors will find most of these questions to be of great importance. So no matter what your role in the organization, you might find it helpful to see how much of this stuff you actually know.
And if you’re the CEO, you should score 100%.
Once again, for reasons of length, I’ll summarize up top and comment on each question below.
Read more
Strategy for IT vendors: a worksheet
Much of what I do for a living* boils down to critiquing IT vendors’ strategy — for sub-10-person startups, for the largest companies in the IT industry, and for companies at all stages in-between. In the hope of making strategy analysis simpler, I’ve compiled a list of questions that every enterprise IT vendor has to answer, if it is to understand its own business. They’re posted below. If you can’t answer these questions, you don’t really have a strategy.
*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. Read more
| Categories: Layered messaging models, Startups, Technology marketing | 56 Comments |
Company metrics you have to disclose
IT buyers and other industry observers like to know about a company’s or product’s financial heft, for at least two reasons:
- To get a sense of how much investment there has been in its development.
- To judge how much “skin” the vendor has in the game, as a clue to how committed the vendor (and, if relevant, investors) are to future development.
People further like to know how much success a product has had — both for social proof and also as a clue to the product’s financial status.
Indeed, such social proof is a key aspect of one version of the layered messaging model.
And if you don’t disclose information in line with people’s minimum expectations, they:
- Suspect you of hiding something,
- Tend to assume the worst about you, and
- Generally get annoyed with the unnecessary hassle you put them through when they have to get the information the hard way.
| Categories: Marketing communications, Technology marketing | 24 Comments |
No, companies are NOT entitled to manage news about themselves
Michael Arrington is in another flap, this time for asserting TechCrunch’s right to blindside companies with news. To disagree with him, you almost have to take the stance that companies have some sort of right to manage news about themselves, which I see as pretty ridiculous.
Recently, I got into a flap with EMC Greenplum. I blindsided them on a story; they retaliated for the story by, among other things, screwing me over business-wise. Why did I blindside them in the first place? Because I believed that if I didn’t, they’d put me under intense pressure not to publicize news I’d obtained. (Given the punishment they dished out for my running it, I imagine my belief was quite correct.)
Meanwhile, here are excerpts from a post I drafted last year, but never ran: Read more
Quotees should be briefed before quoters
I just blogged about a company pre-launch because the news wasn’t actually embargoed (their website was up) and the press was asking me for comment. Those details are unusual, but I’d guess that the majority of quotes I give to the press are about news I haven’t been briefed on.
When news is minor enough, that’s unavoidable. But in this case and others I would have willingly been briefed (scheduling just got a bit awkward this time). The two lessons here are:
- Brief the people who will be called for quotes before you brief the press, and therefore …
- … know who the press is likely to ask for quotes.