As President Obama's motorcade made its way through the San Francisco Peninsula yesterday, the first fundraising stop was at the Atherton home of Douglas and Lisa Goldman, who are very well known and respected philanthropists. I was a bit curious. With very minimal effort, I learned that M. Goldman is actually Dr. Goldman, a retired physician, apparently a big Obama backer, and most interestingly an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune.
With my 4th grade daughter deep into the California Gold Rush unit at school, I found it fascinating that the President was NOT visiting a miner's house, but was visiting the home of their tailor! If there are two fortunes and legacies that I associate with the Gold rush, they are Stanford and Levi's, railroads and blue jeans. I quickly went to see if I could find the legacy of the people who actually mined the gold, but the only trail I could find are the 49ers, the football mascot, not the people still living in mansions. I am sure they exist, but they are not easy to find.
This made me think of today's "Cloud Rush", and where the winners will be 5, 10 and even 30 years from now. Not who will be the next Mark Z and Facebook, who have certainly hit a vein of rich gold, but who is the next Larry Ellison and Oracle. For 35 yrs (yes check that number out!) Oracle has been providing the technological equivalent of railroads and blue jeans to 3+ waves of technology disruption, minicomputer, client server, Web and maybe cloud.
I LOVE infrastructure solutions because while not sexy like gold, they work everyday like blue jeans and railroads, and are often some of the most overlooked opportunities by the strike it rich miners. In today's "Cloud rush", there is a LOT of money to be made by enabling the mining of Cloud gold, scaling, managing, securing, enabling, optimizing, that's where I want to work!!!! So let the 20 somethings pull on their new jeans, fire up their Amazon
instances and pan for gold. May many of them strike it rich Give me a great infrastructure idea that I can sell to all of them any day
and I'll put my money there.
When my daughter writes about the 54th president visiting the home of someone 30 years from now, which legacy will that harken back to?
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Thursday, May 17, 2012
The Demise of Marketers, the Rise of Coders - Eh, I think NOT!
Andrew Chen's recent blog post entitled - Growth Hacker is the New VP of Marketing certainly got my attention and was one of the most intriguing post I've read in months. Andrew essentially writes an obituary for Marketers, saying they are going the way of the dinosaur to be replaced by a new and more evolved species he calls the Growth Hacker. Do I agree, NO! But that doesn't mean that this isn't a very important post that bears attention and response.
I recently spent an hour with my daughter's 4th grade class teaching them - "What is Marketing" for a business simulation unit they are doing. In it I told them that "Marketing is fun, because you get to be part artist, part scientist and part poet." Andrew argues that I was wrong on 2.5 of these, and that Marketing is now fun because you get to be part Coder and part Data Scientist. Andrew says,
The major problem I have with Andrew's post is toward the end. After walking through an integration between AirBnB and Craigslist, Andrew states rather pejoratively,
As I've argued extensively, in today's overloaded information market, getting attention is still about context and communications. The argument that coders and data scientists will be the only flavors of marketers in the future is just a leap beyond logic and reality. Marketing, taken in its broader sense, is the understanding of markets, buyers, communication and value exchange. It doesn't require a coder to do this, it requires a business person, albeit, a pretty technically savvy one in many organizations. In addition, it may be the romantic in me, but I think the artists and poets will continue to play an important but changing role in marketing success. If you want one compelling argument for this, I'd point you right to the Apple Product Design team. So, as much as some would like to pronounce the VP of Marketing as dead or dying, as Mark Twain famously said, "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated".
I recently spent an hour with my daughter's 4th grade class teaching them - "What is Marketing" for a business simulation unit they are doing. In it I told them that "Marketing is fun, because you get to be part artist, part scientist and part poet." Andrew argues that I was wrong on 2.5 of these, and that Marketing is now fun because you get to be part Coder and part Data Scientist. Andrew says,
"The fastest way to spread your product is by distributing it on a platform using APIs, not MBAs. Business development is now API-centric, not people-centric. Whereas PR and press used to be the drivers of customer acquisition, instead it’s now a lagging indicator that your Facebook integration is working. The role of the VP of Marketing, long thought to be a non-technical role, is rapidly fading and in its place, a new breed of marketer/coder hybrids have emerged"Do I agree, yes and no. Marketing, especially direct marketing, has always been part science, and business development has always been about partnering and distribution. So in that sense Andrew is both right and wrong. There has definitely been a continued rise of analytics in marketing starting with Direct Marketing, moving to SEO/SEM, and continuing with the emerging fields of social analytics, A/B testing and other new techniques. In fact, to many CEOs marketing is no longer a "black art" , but is now a "black science."
The major problem I have with Andrew's post is toward the end. After walking through an integration between AirBnB and Craigslist, Andrew states rather pejoratively,
"No traditional marketer would have figured this outNot only is this totally unsubstantiated, it's insulting. Plenty of marketers, like myself, are pretty damn technical, they have to be. Do they code, maybe not, but can they spec and understand an integration like this, HELL YES. Secondly, who tasked the hypothetical engineer with doing this in the first place? So while this post is definitely interesting, at the end of the day I think it is wrong.
Let’s be honest, a traditional marketer would not even be close to imagining the integration above – there’s too many technical details needed for it to happen. As a result, it could only have come out of the mind of an engineer tasked with the problem of acquiring more users from Craigslist. "
As I've argued extensively, in today's overloaded information market, getting attention is still about context and communications. The argument that coders and data scientists will be the only flavors of marketers in the future is just a leap beyond logic and reality. Marketing, taken in its broader sense, is the understanding of markets, buyers, communication and value exchange. It doesn't require a coder to do this, it requires a business person, albeit, a pretty technically savvy one in many organizations. In addition, it may be the romantic in me, but I think the artists and poets will continue to play an important but changing role in marketing success. If you want one compelling argument for this, I'd point you right to the Apple Product Design team. So, as much as some would like to pronounce the VP of Marketing as dead or dying, as Mark Twain famously said, "The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated".
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Mind The Gaps - 3 Gaps to High Velocity Pipeline, and How to Bridge Them To Success
1) The "It's Not Your Time" gap
2) The "It's Not My Job" gap
3) The "Window Shopping" gap
Let's take a quick look at each of these gaps and see how we can minimize the risk of a potential customer "falling through the cracks", which while not bloody and gruesome, is costly and mostly avoidable.
1) It's Not Your Time - Sorry Ms. Vendor, you got me here and I was pretty interested, but you've failed in the 3 minutes I have to deliver relevant value once I arrived. I'm not ready for the trial, because you're not showing me any compelling reason to listen.
2) It's Not My Job - Oh shoot, I went to try your product but I realized I need the X (CTO, Network Admin, HR Manager, Salesforce.com implementer, ...) to configure, load or integrate something to try it. Can't I get see something now, maybe later...
3) I'm Just Window Shopping - Today's world is full of triers, but where are the buyers? If you can't tell them apart, it won't be the prospect falling through the cracks, but it will be your valuable sales and marketing resources...
Bridging the Gaps
How then can we bridge this gaps with our Go To Market approach?
Here's a few ideas...
1) Create the context - We compete not just with 4 or 5 other solutions that are close to ours, but hundreds or thousands of things on the buyers mind and agenda. Engage visitors with a unique and compelling viewpoint, and then keep them around by relating your value to their world. Zuora's "Subscription Economy" is a compelling and relevant viewpoint, check it out as a great example. Now it's YOUR TIME!
2) Reduce Experience Friction - Make sure it is EASY for buyers to experience the value you deliver. If an integration step is needed, make sure there is a way to simulate or demonstrate the result without the full commitment. GoodData does this by providing a myriad of example implementations of salesforce.com dashboards, so if a potential buyer doesn't want to or can't do the integration right then, they can still experience the value. Remember what your key buyers job and skills are and deliver experience to them NOW!
3) Find the Buyers - In try and buy and freemium models, it is absolutely possible to monitor and understand buying behavior vs. window shopping. Don't depend on inefficient sales methods to find the most likely buyers, watch and understand what their actions are, they speak louder than words. Tools like Totango offer powerful and easy platforms that let you do this. Let the Buyers find You!
So if your velocity isn't where it needs to be, take a quick look at these 3 Gaps found in many go to market plans. Mind the Gap, Find the Gap, and Fix the Gap to drive high velocity!!!
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Five Reasons We Overvalue Value!
Value Propositions and elevator pitches live in the rarefied air of marketing speak. They are almost seen as mystical accomplishments reachable by only the anointed among us. "But what's the elevator pitch" we hear time and time again....Give me the 30 second attention grabber, etc, etc.
While I agree that Value matters, and actually matters a lot, I think as sales and marketing professionals, we've worshiped at this alter for so long, we've lost sight of the end goal. We've become Value snobs. Here's are my top 5 reason's why we overvalue Value:
1) We are Product Narcissists...Who doesn't love their baby. Even when we clearly articulate customer benefit, we RARELY ask whether the benefit is truly valuable. We are often NOT in synch with out customers priorities, fears and aspirations. This might be the #1 thing that drives great sales people to say "The marketing guys are out of touch".
2) Content is a Commodity... What we write, our competitors can copy and paste with amazing speed, especially if it is good content. There are really only 2 benefits to products anyways, cost savings and revenue increase, and there are only so many ways to say these things. Good content is not cheap or easy... for the first guy, but is for the second! When we focus on the words that describe our Value, we lose to the second guy every time.
3) If Content is Dead, Context is the new King ... Value without context is like a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it. We spend so much time on Value we forget about Viewpoint. True impact happens when we paint our value in the Context of a Viewpoint that is aligned with our customers. We get out of our product narcissism (see point 1), and set the terrain to communicate in a meaningful way.
4) It all goes back to IBM...Need Feature Advantage Reaction, Wilson Sales Strategy, Powerselling... Most of what we do has its roots in a world of 1970-1990. A world of technocrats who lived in glass houses could be sold to like that. But today's buyer is self directed and really SMART, and has access to more information than ever. Buyers have shifted from evaluation to experience as the way they form opinions and make decisions. Many of us have not kept up...
5) Hard to experience = hard to use. High velocity sales requires high velocity value delivery. Set the context and then "show me the money". If it's so darn hard to DEMONSTRATE your value, then your product or service must be damn hard to buy, deploy and get value out of. The days of DESCRIBING value are over. Better to show me 60% of the value in a compelling experience, than describe it 100% in a long piece of text or video.
The real power of influence in sales and marketing has shifted from Content to Context, from Value to Viewpoint and from Evaluation to Experience. Don't lose sight of Value, but let's put it in its more appropriate role in our sales and marketing mix....
While I agree that Value matters, and actually matters a lot, I think as sales and marketing professionals, we've worshiped at this alter for so long, we've lost sight of the end goal. We've become Value snobs. Here's are my top 5 reason's why we overvalue Value:
1) We are Product Narcissists...Who doesn't love their baby. Even when we clearly articulate customer benefit, we RARELY ask whether the benefit is truly valuable. We are often NOT in synch with out customers priorities, fears and aspirations. This might be the #1 thing that drives great sales people to say "The marketing guys are out of touch".
2) Content is a Commodity... What we write, our competitors can copy and paste with amazing speed, especially if it is good content. There are really only 2 benefits to products anyways, cost savings and revenue increase, and there are only so many ways to say these things. Good content is not cheap or easy... for the first guy, but is for the second! When we focus on the words that describe our Value, we lose to the second guy every time.
3) If Content is Dead, Context is the new King ... Value without context is like a tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it. We spend so much time on Value we forget about Viewpoint. True impact happens when we paint our value in the Context of a Viewpoint that is aligned with our customers. We get out of our product narcissism (see point 1), and set the terrain to communicate in a meaningful way.
4) It all goes back to IBM...Need Feature Advantage Reaction, Wilson Sales Strategy, Powerselling... Most of what we do has its roots in a world of 1970-1990. A world of technocrats who lived in glass houses could be sold to like that. But today's buyer is self directed and really SMART, and has access to more information than ever. Buyers have shifted from evaluation to experience as the way they form opinions and make decisions. Many of us have not kept up...
5) Hard to experience = hard to use. High velocity sales requires high velocity value delivery. Set the context and then "show me the money". If it's so darn hard to DEMONSTRATE your value, then your product or service must be damn hard to buy, deploy and get value out of. The days of DESCRIBING value are over. Better to show me 60% of the value in a compelling experience, than describe it 100% in a long piece of text or video.
The real power of influence in sales and marketing has shifted from Content to Context, from Value to Viewpoint and from Evaluation to Experience. Don't lose sight of Value, but let's put it in its more appropriate role in our sales and marketing mix....
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Velocity Marketing Evolution - How to Achieve Extreme Marketing Breakthrough, Pipeline Velocity and ROI
Today's buyer is information overloaded, bandwidth constrained and fiercely independent. A recent survey by the Corporate Executive Board reported that 57% of the new B2B sales cycle is DONE before the buyer's first formal contact to the selected vendor. Understanding that simple fact requires a radical rethink of go to market strategies and tactics across sales and marketing. I call this new approach, "Velocity Marketing". Those who adopt Velocity Marketing approaches can see dramatic increases in Marketing ROI and significant compression of sales pipelines. This drops real dollars into the bottom line.
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| Figure 1, The Three Stages of Velocity Marketing Achievement |
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| Figure 2: Stagnant, Content and Benefit Centric Marketing |
In order to get to the next level of Impact, we must get our Viewpoint and Value aligned with our buyer's view of the world. We must create a Viewpoint that converges on the biggest business changes impacting our customer and the most disruptive response that our solution delivers in response to those changes. (Read more about Viewpoint here) Once we do that, we can then go on to articulating unique Value that is differentiated, meaningful and aligned with our Viewpoint. This state of Viewpoint and Value alignment get us to the Impact stage, driving significant effectiveness and efficiency in our in market communications, creating ROI and reducing sales cycles. (Read about Value and tilting the playing field with Viewpoint here) This is seen graphically in Figure 3.
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| Figure 3: Converged Viewpoint and Unique Value Creates Impact, The First Step to Breakthrough |
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| Figure 4: Increasing Velocity with Engagement and Experience Creates Breakthrough |
Where are you on the Velocity Marketing Evolution?
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Cirque Du Soleil and Setting the Stage - Viewpoint Abounds
(Note: Viewpoint is a critical part of my Breakthrough Marketing Framework, to learn more about how it fits with Value and Velocity to create impact and breakthrough, read this post...Ken )
Walking across the Santa Monica pier, my senses rose to an unusually high level. The misty cool evening woke me up after a dinner with great food, new friends and fine wine. As we approached the lit up big top, I was immediately transported to the thrilling milieu of the circus. Thoughts of lions, tigers, tight rope walkers and clowns immediately flashed through my mind. It was at once familiar as well as seductive.
Passing the ticket taker and entering the tent, the energy, anticipation and excitement was palpable. And while the concession and souvenir stands were not much different than what you would see at any circus, something in the air said different, something said Cirque Du Soleil. Maybe it was the accents and slightly exotic appearance of the servers, register clerks and program sellers. Maybe it was the colors and smells, maybe it was magic. I'm not sure, but that's OK, I'd already begun to move from the circus of my youth to the Cirque experience.
Entering and moving to our seats, we stared at a giant, translucent egg. Ova, the name of the show, was center stage. Next a team of exterminators entered the aisles...they began slowly pursuing butterfly and other assorted creatures. Exit the exterminators and enter into the aisles giant crickets as a few fleas and spiders began to climb 8 foot flower stems on the stage. All of this, while the big top was still less than full, and patrons continue to be seated. The stage still covered by the giant egg, remained a bit of a mystery
The stage was set, this was not your Ringling Brothers circus, it was a giant insect egg, hiding a new and exciting world yet to be discovered. The stage was set, I was ready to be amazed.
In its 25th year of thrilling audiences, Cirque has mastered the art, among many others, of creating a world view, or viewpoint, that transports audiences to new worlds, making them ready to be thrilled. By the time the show opens, you are already a raving fan.
Viewpoint sets the stage, and gets us ready to engage our hearts and minds in the experience to come. By building on the familiar, and transforming it into a new environment, Cirque Du Soleil does what ever marketer dreams of, it creates the perfect playing field from which to deliver against it promise to entertain and amaze.
Walking across the Santa Monica pier, my senses rose to an unusually high level. The misty cool evening woke me up after a dinner with great food, new friends and fine wine. As we approached the lit up big top, I was immediately transported to the thrilling milieu of the circus. Thoughts of lions, tigers, tight rope walkers and clowns immediately flashed through my mind. It was at once familiar as well as seductive.
Passing the ticket taker and entering the tent, the energy, anticipation and excitement was palpable. And while the concession and souvenir stands were not much different than what you would see at any circus, something in the air said different, something said Cirque Du Soleil. Maybe it was the accents and slightly exotic appearance of the servers, register clerks and program sellers. Maybe it was the colors and smells, maybe it was magic. I'm not sure, but that's OK, I'd already begun to move from the circus of my youth to the Cirque experience.
Entering and moving to our seats, we stared at a giant, translucent egg. Ova, the name of the show, was center stage. Next a team of exterminators entered the aisles...they began slowly pursuing butterfly and other assorted creatures. Exit the exterminators and enter into the aisles giant crickets as a few fleas and spiders began to climb 8 foot flower stems on the stage. All of this, while the big top was still less than full, and patrons continue to be seated. The stage still covered by the giant egg, remained a bit of a mystery
The stage was set, this was not your Ringling Brothers circus, it was a giant insect egg, hiding a new and exciting world yet to be discovered. The stage was set, I was ready to be amazed.
In its 25th year of thrilling audiences, Cirque has mastered the art, among many others, of creating a world view, or viewpoint, that transports audiences to new worlds, making them ready to be thrilled. By the time the show opens, you are already a raving fan.
Viewpoint sets the stage, and gets us ready to engage our hearts and minds in the experience to come. By building on the familiar, and transforming it into a new environment, Cirque Du Soleil does what ever marketer dreams of, it creates the perfect playing field from which to deliver against it promise to entertain and amaze.
Monday, March 12, 2012
Driving High Velocity Pipeline - Experience, Engagement and Delivery
It's been almost a year since I starting blogging about the role of Experience in the new Cloud Go To Market strategy. In my post on Bridging to SaaS Success; A Basic Blueprint, I said:
Today I want to add another layer of detail into my V3 High Impact Go To Market Model, on how to use Engagement and Experience to drive impact. Velocity is a function of Delivery, Engagement and Experience, simply V=D*Engagement*Experience.
The HIGHEST velocity go to market programs, tailor their delivery to channel of communication and buyers place in the buying cycle. Content Rules, a popular book in marketing circles today, spends a lot of time focused on just this, and for me it is necessary and recommended reading and very good stuff.
However, in my experience, Content Rules fails to take on the other 2 variables in the equation, Engagement and Experience. In order to drive Engagement, a strong Viewpoint and Value position must be staked out and communicated. Then, this must be married with Experience driven delivery.
For a long time, I've been calling most White Papers YAWNERS™, Yet Another White Paper Nobody Ever Reads. The reasons are two fold, first, the White Paper format and typical writing is simply not engaging, because in 99% of the cases it has no compelling viewpoint, it is, usually simply a LONG WINDED DATASHEET.
Secondly, as I've stated ad-nausea, products are evaluated, services are experienced. We have truly moved from a products to services marketplace, and low experience vehicles, even with good engagement are just not enough. If we put these together in a simple 2x2 matrix, we see the emergence of what are truly high velocity programs.
In the upper right we see high velocity programs such as Trials, live demo instances and the like. In the bottom left we see low velocity deliverables such as whitepapers and datasheets. And while there is a role for these low velocity deliverables, high velocity marketing spend will heavily weight high Engagement and high Experience programs and deliverables.
In my upcoming final post in this series, we will tie together Viewpoint, Value and Velocity with the traditional marketing and sales funnel, and see how this framework can create High Impact and growth.
Go To Market Tactics: E -> E: Evaluation to Experience. Today's go to market mix, pricing, channel and promotion is built to drive evaluation and transaction. Successful service go to market requires a shift to tactics that drive experience and satisfaction. Successful SaaS organizations shift their go to market tactics and investments and become experience, not product marketers.I then expanded on these thoughts with my post entitled SaaS Go To Market, Why Experience Rules:
"Today's customer has little patience for White Papers, datasheets, detailed feature function product specs and the like. They may attend a webinar, but the next step is experience. Even for large organizations with complex buying behavior, the expectation of SaaS is easy, accessible and meaningful experience of the service, either through demonstration instances, trial or freemium models."And while the proof continues to mount that this is the case, each additional post I do on the topic inevitably invites some heated Twitter and or blog comments. I've enjoyed debating the topic at conferences as varying as the Goldman Sachs Cloud Computing Conference and the Silicon Valley Cloud Computing Meet-up Group's Talk Cloudy to Me all day meetup.
Today I want to add another layer of detail into my V3 High Impact Go To Market Model, on how to use Engagement and Experience to drive impact. Velocity is a function of Delivery, Engagement and Experience, simply V=D*Engagement*Experience.
The HIGHEST velocity go to market programs, tailor their delivery to channel of communication and buyers place in the buying cycle. Content Rules, a popular book in marketing circles today, spends a lot of time focused on just this, and for me it is necessary and recommended reading and very good stuff.
However, in my experience, Content Rules fails to take on the other 2 variables in the equation, Engagement and Experience. In order to drive Engagement, a strong Viewpoint and Value position must be staked out and communicated. Then, this must be married with Experience driven delivery.
For a long time, I've been calling most White Papers YAWNERS™, Yet Another White Paper Nobody Ever Reads. The reasons are two fold, first, the White Paper format and typical writing is simply not engaging, because in 99% of the cases it has no compelling viewpoint, it is, usually simply a LONG WINDED DATASHEET.
Secondly, as I've stated ad-nausea, products are evaluated, services are experienced. We have truly moved from a products to services marketplace, and low experience vehicles, even with good engagement are just not enough. If we put these together in a simple 2x2 matrix, we see the emergence of what are truly high velocity programs.
In the upper right we see high velocity programs such as Trials, live demo instances and the like. In the bottom left we see low velocity deliverables such as whitepapers and datasheets. And while there is a role for these low velocity deliverables, high velocity marketing spend will heavily weight high Engagement and high Experience programs and deliverables.
In my upcoming final post in this series, we will tie together Viewpoint, Value and Velocity with the traditional marketing and sales funnel, and see how this framework can create High Impact and growth.
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