Technology marketing
Advice about the marketing of enterprise technology, based on 30+ years of experience, and most particularly upon our flagship Monash Advantage program.
Modifying beliefs
I assert:
- Even if it’s hard to completely change somebody’s beliefs …
- … it is often easier to modify them in some way …
- … especially by weakening or strengthening those convictions.
Indeed, there are at least two major ways to change the strength of people’s ongoing beliefs, namely by influencing:
- How sure people are that their belief is accurate — i.e., the confidence they hold in it.
- How sure they are that, even if accurate, their belief should contribute much to their decision making — i.e., the importance they ascribe to it.
I think this framework has considerable explanatory power.
| Categories: Marketing theory, Political marketing, Technology marketing | 6 Comments |
Five categories of persuasion
For multiple reasons, it is hard to change people’s minds. In particular:
- Nobody likes to admit — even to themselves — that they were wrong.
- Once a decision is made, it can be genuinely costly to change.
- Many views — especially political ones — are “tribal”. You believe what you believe because that’s what group membership requires you to believe.
- Analyzing things can be difficult and stressful. People like to make up their minds, resolve the uncertainty, and move on.
Yet tremendous resources are devoted to persuasion, meant to change or confirm people’s beliefs as the case may be. That’s the essence of such activities as marketing, religion, education, and political campaigns — not to mention blogging. I.e. — despite the difficulties, persuasion is widely (and of course correctly) believed to be possible. Let’s explore how that works.
Most persuasion and mind-changing, I believe, fits into five overlapping categories, which may be summarized as:
- Influencing people’s first impressions of or initial beliefs about a subject.
- Persuading somebody to narrow or otherwise change the scope of an ongoing belief.
- Influencing somebody’s level of confidence in an ongoing belief.
- Influencing the importance somebody ascribes to an ongoing belief.
- Actually changing somebody’s mind about something.
The first two are discussed below. The next two are discussed in a companion post. I’m still trying to figure out how the last one works. 🙂 Read more
Stoking a fear and promising a fix
I’ve been insistent that everybody needs to pay attention to politics now, which is being conducted with greater cynicism than technology marketing ever could be. But in this particular post, political and technology marketing (among other kinds) are compared on a more even basis.
Donald Trump:
- Articulated voters’ fears.
- Stoked those fears relentlessly.
- Claimed that he “alone” could fix things.
- Won the US presidency.
This is actually a time-honored pattern, pursued by (among others):
- Many other demagogues and authoritarian leaders.
- IBM in its industry-dominant heyday.
- Consumer marketing companies over many decades.
- Several of the world’s great religions.
While fear-and-fix is a powerful strategy, it’s not easy to pull off, because it involves establishing both sides of a partial contradiction:
- There is a terrible danger that is very hard to prevent.
- I can in fact prevent it.
Approaches to resolving this paradox typically fall into one or more of three buckets:
- Overstating (or entirely fabricating) the danger.
- Overstating (or entirely fabricating) the fix.
- Understating (or just downplaying) the costs of the solution.
Let’s consider some examples. Read more
| Categories: Political marketing, Technology marketing | 2 Comments |
Selling is complicated
It’s time for another of my quick primers on the enterprise IT business. This one is about sales. First I’ll run through some generalities; then I’ll link you to some previous posts; after that I’ll close with a collection of practical tips.
This is, to put it mildly, an important subject. In particular, there are only two kinds of enterprise IT CEOs:
- Those who need to understand sales because they don’t have anybody else to do it for them.
- Those who need to understand sales because they do have people to do it, who need to be managed and helped.
Every enterprise IT CEO needs to be heavily involved in sales.
Of course, a few tips do not a salesperson make. Selling is a complex process, with many steps. Worse, it’s tough for somebody to explain to you what the process is, in part because there’s a kind of recursion involved — a big part of what you do in the sales process is establish what the process is.
And that’s in both senses of “establish”, namely “figure out” and “bring into being”.
Other inherent difficulties in selling include:
- Selling involves getting money from people. People don’t like to part with money.
- Buying from you often involves a lot more commitment — and foreclosure of other options — than merely writing you a check.
- Usually, a sale involves getting agreement from multiple people. These people often have different views, biases, and motivations.
| Categories: Technology marketing | Leave a Comment |
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 |
Why pitching ability matters
Engineers used to wonder what the point of sales and marketing people was. If a product was good, wouldn’t customers make the correct decision to buy it?
Nobody I know seems that naive anymore, but I did just get a similar question, which may be paraphrased as:
Why do investors judge a startup on the CEO’s pitching ability? Shouldn’t they focus instead on the actual merits of the company?
Most of my answer boiled down to:
Investors’ top concern is management’s ability to execute, and pitching is — or simulates — a large part of execution.
In particular (and now I’m quoting my own email directly):
- A CEO is a company’s chief salesman in one-on-one (or one-on-few) selling situations.
- A CEO is a company’s chief promoter in public forums, or in one-on-one influencer marketing situations.
- A CEO is a company’s chief recruiter.
- A CEO needs to align a company behind a shared vision, and specifically a shared understanding of the vision.
- A CEO needs to persuade employees to do things they don’t feel like doing.
I finished with one other point that didn’t fit the template, namely:
If you can’t articulate a good pitch, why should we believe there’s a good story in there at all?
I think the entrepreneur who asked me the question was convinced. 🙂
Related link(s)
- I’ve posted a lot about how to pitch.
| Categories: Technology marketing | 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 |
Elevator pitches and other self-introductions
The concept of “elevator pitch” is ill-defined. Strictly speaking, it’s supposed to be how you’d describe your company or product in no more time than the length of an elevator ride. But if you ever actually are in such a situation, you will likely tailor your pitch to the specific listener. Ergo, you shouldn’t have one standard elevator pitch. So I’ll talk about “self-introductions” instead. Whatever we call it, the challenge “How do we introduce and summarize our story in the shortest possible time, or in the fewest possible words?” is a Really Big Deal.
Self-introductions occur at several different lengths, including but not limited to:
- Short enough to fit in the first paragraph of a press release without obscuring the main point.
- Short enough to fit into an elevator ride — 🙂 — or in the boilerplate at the end of a press release.
- The first few paragraphs of the About and/or Product sections of your website.
- The beginning of a typical slide-aided presentation.
Usually, it makes sense to view the shorter ones as being abbreviations of the longer, more complete forms.
| Categories: Technology marketing | 2 Comments |
The marketing of productivity
Most software technology benefits boil down to either:
- We help people be more effective. (Productivity)
- We help computers run faster. (Performance)
- We help people be more effective at making computers run faster. 🙂 (Performance via productivity, or vice-versa)
My views on the marketing of productivity benefits are similar to what I wrote about the marketing of performance: Read more
| Categories: Technology marketing | 17 Comments |
Your first customers
A couple of the raw startups I advise have recently asked me about a hugely important subject — dealing with their very first customers. The big deal here is that initial customers can offer three different kinds of valuable resources:
- Money, in forms such as:
- Ordinary licenses or sales.
- Custom product development.
- Equity investment.
- Credibility,* to audiences including:
- Press and analysts.
- Angel/seed/venture investors.
- Potential customers who are just reading/hearing about you.
- Potential customers who do detailed reference checks.
- Product feedback and advice.*
*Confusingly, both credibility and product feedback are sometimes called “validation”.
Questions of money are of course heavily influenced by how complete your product or service is. In particular:
- It is common not to get paid until your product works and is either in late beta or else early general availability.
- It is common for early customers to want big discounts even when they do pay you.
- Somewhat contradictorily, it is also not uncommon to get a lot of payment from your earliest customer(s). Reasons include:
- They’re getting technology that is, at the moment, unique.
- You’re willing to somewhat tailor the product to their needs, and to provide very high levels of attention and service.
Equity investment by your early customers and partners is problematic. In particular: Read more
| Categories: Startups, Technology marketing | 23 Comments |