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
Extending the layered messaging model
Some time ago, I introduced the layered messaging model for enterprise IT marketing, to address the challenge:
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: Read more
| Categories: Layered messaging models | 7 Comments |
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.
The fatal fallacy of modern technology marketing
In what is basically a great set of advice, David Skok evidently dropped the line
If a marketing activity does not create a lead for you, then it doesn’t belong in your marketing machine.
Or to rephrase that: Storytelling doesn’t matter.
Well, if you believe and execute on that, your company will die (at least if it’s in some area such as enterprise technology). I really mean that. Read more
| Categories: Marketing theory, Technology marketing | 5 Comments |
A PR choice
- You can pitch a story that isn’t really news, for example calling attention to the success of a product you’d been shipping for a while.
- You can pitch a story with an embargo.
Choose one.
Asking for an embargo on information already in the public domain is really lame.
Public and analyst relations: An example of epic fail
I post from time to time about stupid PR tricks, but last night I had an experience that was a whole different level of appalling, for reasons of ethics and general incompetence alike. Within hours, the vendor’s CEO had emailed me that the offending PR person would be terminated this morning.*
*By the way, that means an intriguing New England startup needs a new PR firm. By tomorrow it should be obvious who I mean.
It started as an ordinary kind of bad pitch. The PR rep emailed offering a briefing with a mystery company. I immediately deduced that the company was one I was in fact set up to talk with today, and had indeed been writing about since 2009. Besides being annoyed that I’d had to scramble to set up my own last-moment briefing with a company I’d led the way in writing about, I also bristled at the fact that the pitch included quotes from a couple of my competitors, whom I shall unimaginatively refer to as Dave and Merv.* So far, no big deal.
*Both personally and professionally, they’re two of my favorites. Even so, I dislike being told that I should use them as authority figures to be copied in my own view formation.
But then it occurred to me that those quotes probably weren’t approved, but instead were just lifted in an unauthorized manner from conversations, and indeed probably didn’t reflect the analysts’ precise views. So I messaged Dave and Merv. Shortly thereafter, the PR rep emailed me:
Neither David or Merv have authorized the quote for publication. It was sent in error to you, as I had believed you had agreed to the sharing of confidential information.
The bulk of my response to that — and the essence of this post — was: Read more
| Categories: Analyst relations, Ethics, Marketing communications, Public relations, Startups, Technology marketing | 31 Comments |
No market categorization is ever precise
I’ve been on a terminology binge recently, defining terms such as machine-generated data, analytic platform, internet request processing, and transparent sharding. So perhaps this is a good time to introduce
Monash’s Third Law of Commercial Semantics
No market categorization is ever precise.
The reasons this is true may be flippantly summarized as:
- Bad jargon drives out good. That, of course, is Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics.
- Hard cases make bad jargon. I borrowed that one from the law dictum “hard cases make bad law.” Replace “hard cases” with “edge cases” and “make” with “lead to,” and you should see the point.
- Nothing concise is ever precise. This principle applies far beyond the marketing domain — for example, it’s why reasonable judges can reasonably disagree.
A more sedate set of reasons goes something like this. Read more
| Categories: Technology marketing | 35 Comments |
Quotes from analysts in vendor press releases
For the second straight post, I’m mixing the general and the personal. Sorry!
I jumped into an #ARchat on Twitter Tuesday, and set off a discussion about the subject of analyst quotes in press releases. Since that chat has been blogged, starting with a partly accurate* paraphrase of my views, I figure I may as well state those myself. Read more
| Categories: Analyst relations, Ethics, Public relations | 6 Comments |