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:
- Figure out which stories you are telling (the complete list, if you please).
- Make sure that you’re telling each of them well.
Reasons the multiple-stories situation is so common include:
- Products are, unavoidably, positioned along many attributes each. If you’re trying to get a prospect or influencer to think well of a product, you may need to address multiple important concerns.
- A product release typically introduces multiple new features in a product.
- People only pay attention to you sporadically. Thus:
- When you’re pitching them about something new, you generally also should reinforce the belief that your product in fact has been great all along, because your historical greatness may not be at the top of their minds.
- Similarly, they may need to be reminded — i.e. informed — of your evidence for company momentum.
- Customer momentum stories typically include quotes as to why the customers so liked your product. Product feature stories often include customer momentum validation.
- The layered messaging model inherently calls for several linked stories. What’s more, there are several kinds of support on its bottom tier, and you may not restrict yourself to just one.
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
| Categories: Layered messaging models, Marketing communications | 31 Comments |
PR (or AR) pitch emails
I believe:
- When attempting to impress influencers, press and analysts alike, pitch emails are much more important than actual press releases. By that I mean, among other things:
- The old cliché that your first few seconds of impression-making are much more important than all the rest applies in this case.
- Unless the pitch email succeeds, your press release won’t even be looked at.
- Unless the pitch email succeeds, you won’t get to have a verbal conversation with the influencer.
- Pitch emails can, just by themselves, harm somebody’s impression of you, in two overlapping ways:
- They can damage your credibility.
- They can insult the recipient, by giving the impression that you think he’s dumb enough to be fooled.
- Few companies act as if this is true.
My support for these views includes:
- My own reactions as an influencer.
- My conversations with other influencers.
- My knowledge of how PR and AR work get done.
- Common sense.
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
| Categories: Analyst relations, Public relations | Leave a Comment |
Third-party quotes in press releases
I’m generally a skeptic about the value of press releases. However:
- The IT trade press is increasingly understaffed, and hence press releases can in some cases serve as a draft of the article you hope folks will write. (Whether articles of that form have any influence or credibility is a whole other matter.)
- Press releases are collateral support for whatever higher-class outreach you do.
So my current opinion is:
- You should write press releases primarily for a general online audience, but …
- … secondarily for the reporters at whom they are ostensibly aimed.
That fits with my general view that press releases:
- Should tell your story.
- Should read well.
- Shouldn’t do anything to actively embarrass you.
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
| Categories: Public relations, Technology marketing | Leave a Comment |
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:
- Even more than for larger companies, the essence of messaging is to achieve the contradictory goals of excitement and credibility.
- If one of those must be sacrificed, sacrifice excitement. It is by far the easier of the two to regain.
- Note: Both your product and your company need to be credible. When your company is new, both parts of that are formidable challenges.
- Notwithstanding how limited your resources are, don’t rely too much on outside PR. You need to control messaging and key influencer relations yourself.
- Notwithstanding how limited your resources are, you need to address multiple audiences, at least:
- Investors.
- Prospective employees.
- Knowledgeable influencers.
- Not-so-knowledgeable influencers.
- Sales prospects (business folks).
- Sales prospects (technical folks).
Of course, these subjects are much discussed in this blog. The top three overview posts for young companies are probably: Read more
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:
- Presentations for small audiences (August, 2014)
- Short lists of concise claims (July, 2014)
- Faith, hope and clarity (May, 2013)
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:
- If you’re big enough to have validation as a market leader, of course offer that. Analyst firms (industry or stock) are generally the providers of such validation, either directly (those stupid quadrant graphs) or indirectly (via market share numbers and the like).
- Customer logos are great.
- Also great are strong aggregate claims about customers, e.g. “over 70 of the Fortune 100”.
- Financial or fund-raising success is solid validation, and has the second benefit of suggesting you have the resources to deliver on your promises.
- Mere influencer mentions are a weak validation. Also, beware of insulting influencers by quoting competitive influencers at them.
- Founder resumes are validation only for companies so small they can’t be expected to have stronger kinds.
| Categories: Marketing communications, Technology marketing | 6 Comments |
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:
- All messaging needs to be Clear, Compelling, and Credible.
- Credibility depends upon, among other factors, Consistency.
- All collateral should be Cleanly Copy-edited.
- A presentation should always be tailored for the specific audience and purpose (it’s not a crazy stretch to call that Context).
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
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:
- Individual claims should be concise, clear, credible and compelling. This is a very tough standard to meet.
- Ideally, lists of claims would both be fairly complete and tell a coherent story. That’s a difficult challenge as well.
- Different parts of your audience respond well to different things. No one set of words will please, interest or convince everybody.
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
- “Who are we trying to persuade …
- … of what?”
and also to check resources by assessing:
- “What proof points do we have to support our case?”
In the case of a product upgrade, answers often resemble: Read more
| Categories: Marketing communications, Technology marketing | 26 Comments |
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:
- Recruit employees.
- Prime the pump for post-stealth marketing.
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”?
The core of strategy
This blog is based on two precepts that also guide my consulting:
- In enterprise software and similar businesses, messaging is the core of strategy.
- Messages must be robust enough to withstand deliberate competitive attack.
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:
- Selling boils down to two main processes, one of which is delivering sales messages. (The other, of course, is managing prospect relationships.)
- Marketing is mainly about developing and delivering messages. (Most of the rest is lead generation.)
- Development’s job is to make great sales and marketing messages be true.
If we add another level of complexity, the story changes only a little. Read more
| Categories: About this blog, Marketing communications, Marketing theory, Technology marketing | 4 Comments |
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:
- If we call it something entirely new, nobody will know what we’re talking about, or why they should care …
- … but if we say it fits in an old category, then how do we differentiate it?
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:
- ClearStory Data emphatically does not want its service called “business intelligence”, as doing so might denigrate the novelty of ClearStory’s innovations. A big part of how ClearStory beats traditional BI is in the intelligence of its data handling. Voila! With a nice bit of double-meaning, ClearStory’s secret sauce is now described as “data intelligence“. Edit (May 2014): “Data intelligence” has held up as ClearStory’s top message.
- Platfora’s latest release focused on data sets that — after Platfora assembles them for you — are sort of like time series but also somewhat like event streams. “Event series” was the winning name. Edit (May 2014): Platfora reports that that choice worked out well.
- Tokutek, whose main differentiation is performance, makes storage engines for MySQL and quasi-storage-engines for MongoDB. What should we call them? “Performance engines” fits the bill, at least for the “not exactly a storage engine” MongoDB case. Edit (May 2014): Tokutek hasn’t really stuck with that term.
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
| Categories: Marketing communications, Technology marketing | 371 Comments |