I've moved this blog - New posts are now at http://kenrutsky.com/velocity/

Thanks for reading my blog.  I've updated my infrastructure and am now blogging at http://kenrutsky.com/velocity/   I'll keep this blog up for historical access, but I've moved most of the last several years of entries to the new blog.  I won't be adding entries here...

Thanks again and hope to see you over there!!

AIM STEEP to Build Breakthrough Viewpoint - Part 2

Introduction:
In part 1 of this blog series on Viewpoint, we explored the Y axis of the KJR Viewpoint framework, repeated below and introduced here.

and discussed using the STEEP analysis method to label the Y-axis and defined point A, the "Trendspotting" Viewpoint.  In this blog, we will work on labeling the X-axis and look at how to describe point C, "the Better Mousetrap" viewpoint.    Then in the part 3, we will put these together to reach our point B,  " All Pain, No Gain" and our point D, "Brave New World" viewpoint.

Ready, AIM™, Viewpoint!
It might seem trivial and simple to express what is "re-imagined" and "unexpected" about our product or service.  In fact, that's why we love our product.  Some of the best products in the world are built by people who had a problem because of the the "Today's Reality and could not solve it with the "usual" solutions available.  So they built a "Better mousetrap" and then said, "Hey, if I could use this, I bet a lot of people could".  THE PROBLEM is, they tend to sound like this...

When I worked at Acme, we were faced with a situation where our protocol for X was incompatible with our current business solutions.  What we really needed was a feature that we call FOO that integrates the existing infrastructure with the emerging need for cross channel communication and is compatible with ...That why we built this new dweelybopper, obvious, right?

When they need to sound more like:

When I worked at Acme, we were faced with growing margin pressure, increased regulatory scrutiny and a process for Y that was not responsive and was too costly.  Not only that, it was totally isolated from our current process, leaving us with un-substainable cost and compliance trade-off.   What we really needed was a new approach that was people, not technology driven,  and started with a whole new mindset that we could increase compliance AND reduce cost.  Once we understood that, we knew if we only had an innovation like FOO that allowed us to ...  That's why we built this new dweelybopper ..

Notice the subtle difference, we are not just telling the what:

• The Foo enabled Dweelybopper" 

But we have been much more explicit about the why from our STEEP analysis

•  leaving us with un-substainable cost and compliance trade-off

And most importantly we are focused on the not just on one, but on the three hows:

•  The Approach - people, not technology driven
•  The Innovation - the foo
• The Mindset -  that we could increase compliance AND reduce cost

By crisply articulated the Approach, the Innovation and the Mindset, we not only create a context for our innovation, but we make it DRAMATICALLY more deep, compelling and interesting, exactly what we AIM to do!

We can think of this in a simple triangle framework:

KJR's AIM Framework Describes Solutions By Approach, Innovation and Mindset

By casting our innovation in multiple dimensions, we bring it to life, add memorability and create breakthrough.  Our innovation is no different, but by spending the time talking about our approach and mindset,  more and more people who will care and remember.  So, when we want to talk about our "Better Mousetrap", it's not enough to describe it technically, we MUST talk about the why and the other two hows of approach and mindset.

In the next blog, we will combine the STEEP and AIM axis of the Viewpoint framework, and find the powerful Viewpoints at points C and D of our framework, "All Pain, No Gain" and "The Brave New World".

AIM STEEP to Build Breakthrough Viewpoint - Part 1

Introduction
In my previous blog,  Standing out - 4 Types of Viewpoint That Can Get You Noticed I discussed how to find 4 spots on my Viewpoint Framework that can powerfully set you apart in the market and get you noticed.     The framework looks like this:

where we labeled point A "Trendspotting", point B "All Pain No Gain", point C "A Better Mousetrap" and point D "A Brave New World".  We then gave examples of each of these.  However to build a powerful Viewpoint, you need to be able to EFFECTIVELY describe the 4 axis labels on the chart.  On the Y-axis, we have "Yesterday's Reality"  and "Today's Reality"; and on the X-axis the usual and "Usual and Expect" vs. the "Re-imagined and Unexpected" solution.

In part 1 of this 3 part blog series, we will look using STEEP to build the Y-axis labels and the "Trendspotting" viewpoint.  In part 2 we will use KJRs AIM framework to build the the X-axis and "Better Mousetrap" viewpoint.  In part 3 we will put them together to create the "All Pain, No Gain" viewpoint and the "Brave New World" viewpoint. 

Getting STEEP

Most business people are well aware of the SWOT analysis framework to assess the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats of a company, product or strategy.  However far fewer have heard of STEEP (or its first cousins PEST, STEEPL, STEER, and PESTEL).   STEEP and its derivatives and excellent tools to scan an environment to understand it.  Perfect for our "Customer's World" axis to define "Today's Reality".

STEEP stands for Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental and Political.  To keep it simple, we will include Legal and Regulatory in the Political sphere.  (Now you see where the cousins come from!)

Most solution providers will focus on ONE of the STEEP factors when they think about their customer's world.  Bankers think about Economics, Environmental consultants think about Environment, Technology providers about well, duh, technology.   This myopic view of the customer's reality is self serving and self defeating.  STEEP is an excellent tool to open our eyes and find trends that we might otherwise miss.

STEEP is simple.

• We simply gather our customer experts, and even some friendly customers, and brainstorm a list of the top 3-4 issues or opportunities or  facing the customer in each of the  STEEP area. 

• We then rank order them by importance to the customer.  We define importance as the degree to which the item matters to either risk or opportunity to the overall business.   

• Once we have identified the top 10 of these items, we then rank order these factors into the top 5 that our solution can have positive impact on.   Such as E: Segment specialization P: Increased privacy regulation and T: Mobile device proliferation among customers

• We then define the "Old Reality" as the opposite set of points so we can make statements like, E: "It used to be that Our (customer's) industry players were 1 stop providers of broad solutions, however, there is a big move from consolidation to segment specialization" and P: "We are under ever increasing regulatory scrutiny on privacy of customer information, where we need to change from our standard of care and process oversight " and T: "Our customers are demanding self service support and renewals on mobile devices"

•  We then "add" these Statements together to form a Trendspotting label.  For example, Zuora added a compelling set of trends together (Economics: Advantage to buyers and seller of pay as you use models, Technology: SaaS and Cloud  Environmental: Ridesharing, etc...) and labelled them "The Subscription Economy"  They describe it at http://www.zuora.com/subscription-economy/  like this: 

Commerce has evolved. In the last 10 years, there's been a dramatic shift in the way both consumers and companies want to do business. Today, people would rather subscribe to services than to buy products. It's happening everywhere. And it will have a dramatic effect on your business

Stepping back and viewing the customer's reality through the lens of STEEP is an exercise that can pay off in many ways, including creating a powerful Trendspotting viewpoint.

In part 2 of this series we will take "AIM" (Approach, Innovation and Mindset)  at the x-axis of the framework to help create a more compelling articulation of our "Better Mousetrap" and then in part 3, we will look at the two powerful intersection between our STEEP and AIM analyses,  "All Pain No Gain" and "A Brave New World".

Standing out - 4 Types of Viewpoint That Can Get You Noticed

As I've blogged about extensively, today's information rich and overloaded environment combined with independent buyers, makes getting noticed harder than ever.   Customers live in their world, not the vendors.  When organizations struggle with filling the top of the funnel with engaged prospects, it is almost always a lack of getting themselves noticed. 

My Viewpoint framework, shown below and developed over the last 4 years in helping clients reach new speed and success in building top line growth and filling the top of the funnel, is based on the simple yet powerful observation that buyers notice when you align your context or Viewpoint with theirs.  This can be seen on the KJR 2x2 Viewpoint matrix here:

KJR's Viewpoint Framework Aligns Your Solution With The Customer's Reality

To create a compelling context for our marketing message to breakthrough, we must articultate a Viewpoint, a top of funnel message, that aligns with the customers world, by placing our bet on on of the four locations on the matrix, labeled below as A, B, C and D.  Let's take a look at each of these Viewpoint types, label them, and look at the characteristics of and an example of each.

There are Four Types of Viewpoints that Can be Effective

Viewpoint Type A: Trendspotting.  This articulation of a Viewpoint is powerful in that it names and frames a environmental shift that is either keeping the customer up at night or creating great opportunities for them.   Zuora coined "The Subscription Economy" effectively owning the name of the megatrend that was engulfing the business world, and have built a highly effective go to market strategy around this articulation.


Viewpoint Type B: All Pain No Gain:  This articulation focuses on the pain of trying to solve today's big problems with yesterday's solutions.  This works great when the pain is large enough to induce action, and is well recognized and acknowledged, yet unaddressed.  FireEye talks about the Advanced Malware Threats and the resultant risk to create a compelling context for a discussion of their solution.  They have experience explosive growth and are poised for an IPO according to their CEO.

Viewpoint Type C: A Better Mousetrap:  If customers know they have a problem, and  they are spending money to fix it, but either have not eliminated the problem, or can not sustain the costs of mitigating it, this Viewpoint works great. It leads with, "Hey, what you have sucks and I've got a better solution here."  This Viewpoint is especially powerful in mature replacement markets.  For example, Palo Alto Networks took their "Next Generation Firewall" viewpoint to the bank to the tune of a $3+B IPO right around the backs of Checkpoint, Fortinet and others.  And while arguably those others have caught up with feature sets,  Palo Alto is still viewed as the gold standard of the next generation of firewalls.

Viewpoint Type D: A Brave New World:  This type of Viewpoint describes the promised new state that the customer can arrive at if they implement your solution.  It is powerful because it talks about the intersection of the customer's world and the providers unique solution.  KJR client DMTI Spatial has established a new Viewpoint called "Location Economics".  DMTI is challenging their customers to find new opportunities to build business and reduce risk by recognizing the power of tapping into today's Mobile Society with DMTI's powerful transaction enablement services, re-awakening a staid and conservative data oriented market.

All four of these types of Viewpoints can make your stand out and get noticed, creating excellent context for your Go to market and content marketing activities.  My next blog will dive into how to pick the right one....

In Honor of Combat Post Keating - Three Lessons To Learn from The Afghanistan Front

In his haunting and inspiring book, "The Outpost - An Untold Story of American Valor", Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) tells the story of the brave soldiers who gave their lives and honor to defend Combat Outpost (COP) Keating in the remotest part of Afghanistan, near the Pakistani border.  COP Keating was originally envisioned as a Provincial Reconstruction Team base.  To quote wikipedia, PRTs in Afghanistan are:

" the primary civil-military relations tool in Afghanistan and Iraq and are described as “'a means to extend the reach and enhance the legitimacy of the central government'” "

Nestled in a remote valley in the Nuristan province, Keating was positioned on the marginally passable road to Kamdesh, providing a base of outreach to the surrounding villages.   The location however was quite vulnerable from a military perspective, surrounded on 3 sides by mountains, prompting just about every soldier who arrived to say, in I'm sure even more colorful language,  "are you *&*&ing kidding me". 

Through 600+ stirring pages, Tapper tells a story of individual bravery and institutional failure.   Under-resourced, understaffed and isolated, the mission of the PRT is abandoned and COP Keating becomes a mostly military operation.  Poorly located, it is an easy target for both ambushes on the supply lines and eventually direct attack.   However, for 3+ years, soldiers and commaders continued to try to build the relationships with local elders to root out insurgents and build critical infrasturcute like water pipelines.   In the end, hundreds of years of tribal conflict, a complicit Pakistani intelligence service, the Taliban and the geography fated the mission; and too many soldiers gave their lives in defense of the outpost, until it was eventually attacked, successfully and bloodily defended and finally intentionally abandoned and then flattened by US bombers in late 2009.

It most certainly trivializes the immense sacrifice of the COP Keating soldiers to find lessons that we might apply to marketing, and before I do so, I want to take a moment to honor and remember their valor, bravery and memory.  At the end of this blog, I've listed organizations that you can donate to if you so like. Tapper's book has moved me deeply, and I have an new found respect for our soldiers, and a renewed disgust with the brutal reality of war.  

So with that pause to reflect, I do find some interesting lessons to learn here.

1) When the mission changes, past decisions may no longer make sense -

 When it became clear that the PRT was not going to work, the location became a combat outpost.  In that role, it could not have been in a worse position.   Yet past decisions and senior leadership commitment kept Keating going in its location, despite the change in mission.

If you've changed your mission, or pivoted, are you clinging to business decisions that no longer make sense.  Whether key partnerships are no longer strategic, or pricing and packaging are wrong, or team members need to change, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to NOT adjust your tactics to your mission.

2) Surrounded, the position left no real room for maneuvering and defense.  -

If you find Google on one flank, Facebook on the other, and  Oracle on the third, you may NEED to seriously consider repositioning your offering.  You need to find higher ground, move to a local peak that you can own and defend.

3) Despite the urging of those on the ground, the generals were paralyzed by not wanting to change what was clearly a failing strategy.

Are you listening to your team and open to change, or are you stuck and committed to a course of action.  Your sales team and other customer facing parts of the organization are at the coal face.  Listen to the feedback from the front-line.  Do so formally and informally, and do so often.  Change is a must in fast moving markets.  

So, be clear on your mission, find higher ground to own and defend, and listen to the team and adjust quickly.  Seems pretty easy to say, but ain't so easy to do.

(In honor of and in memory of the Soldiers of COP Keating, if you are so moved, here's a few places you can make donations:  Army Emergency Relief, Defenders of Freedom, Fisher House Foundation Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors and the Wounded Warrior Project.

Charting the Customer Journey...

I've been thinking about maps a lot lately.   Not the maps you find on Google or Mapquest, but the kind you might find on the whiteboard of many successful or fledgling SaaS companies today, a map of the Customer Journey.

Customers today come in to services in many forms, freemium, trial or paid users.  But getting the sign up, long the purview of sales and now quickly become the territory of marketing, is only the first step in delivering and capturing value.  Customer must onboard, they must get value, and they must grow if the SaaS provider is to win and prosper.

It's so easy to try, buy and leave! services today, that we must totally rethink our model. Monthly recurring revenues only grow when customers successfully onboard, utilize and grow their usage of features and add-ons.

How can we manage this?  Well, have we mapped the customer journey?  Do we understand all the milestones of service adoption, from onboarding to first value to growth?  Have we thought about usage signals that can indicate customers likely to leave, or even better, ready to grow?  Have we put engagement programs in place that drive customer through the journey so we deliver and capture the most value possible?

I've been working with my partner Totango and we've built a new Customer Journey Mapping Workshop.  You can learn more here!

Chasm, What Chasm? Three Trends Collapsing the Technology Adoption Lifecycle

I've been wondering a lot lately about the Technology Adoption Lifecycle and Geoffry Moore's classic Crossing the Chasm.   I believe that we are seeing the Chasm obliterated by technology and cultural changes.    I see three inter-related trends that are driving this collapse, none of these in and of themselves will surprise any readers, but I think when taken together, there is a compelling argument that the Chasm is collapsing, and smart marketers can speed time to adoption by understanding this dynamic.   These trends are 1) The consumerization of technology and its impact on the speed of diffusion 2) the commoditization of the creation and distribution of content and 3) the lower barriers and risks of technology solution adoption.

Before I continue, I do want to note that Crossing the Chasm might be the most dog-eared book in my fairly extensive marketing library.  It is a CLASSIC, and has guided much of my thought and practice of marketing over the last 2 decades.   It still has tremendous value and incredible teaching and learning in it.  The concepts of bowling pins, whole product and positioning are beyond their worth in gold.  End of story.

But, I think we need to take a hard look at the chasm today.  On page xi of his revised edition of 1999, Moore states:  "The Chasm Model itself represents a pattern in market development that is based on the tendency of pragmatic people to adopt new technology when they see other people like them doing the same.  This causes them to band together as a group, and the groups initial reaction, like teenagers at a junior high dance,  is to hesitate and watch."   Let's take a little time and dissect this statement.

1) "the tendency of pragmatic people to adopt new technology when they see other people like them doing the same" - Since the Chasm was "discovered" by Moore, technology has infiltrated our lives, as  Marc Andreessen says, "software is eating the world."  Early adopters now surround everyone, kids and consumers often lead the way.   In addition, the technology continues to get hidden behind better and better and easier and easier user experience.  Today's professionals are more comfortable with and better and faster adopters of technology.  From the secretary, to the CEO, from the line worker to the general manager, adoption patterns have compressed and changed.  CIOs and Business Managers who wait for "the mainstream" to adopt a solution will quickly find themselves in the late 
majority, falling behind competitors.

2)  "... This causes them to band together as a group"  - Which group?  How many affiliations do you have on Linkedin? How many communities do you belong to?  What technology did the PTA just adopt that has you thinking, boy, why aren't we doing that?   It used to be information was held by vendors.   Customers and buyers depended on information brokers, such as Gartner, IDC and others to get aggregated views of this information.  Now they can go to Quora, or LinkedIn, or just plain Google.  Vendors now invest FORTUNES in content creation and distribution, because they must inform buyers now, or lose to competitors who do.  The group of peers has expanded dramatically and the information available to these groups has become free, available and subject to peer review.  One of the main reasons the group effect put brakes on mainstream adoption was the difficulty of obtaining and evaluating vendor claims.  We've entered the era of transparency and visibility, where the early adopters can more effectively share and make their informed views and experiences real to the mainstream.

3) "...and the groups initial reaction, like teenagers at a junior high dance,  is to hesitate and watch" The new reaction is to try at small scale, fail and scale successes.  The speed and cost dynamics of the cloud have fundamentally changed the economics of trial and the risk of failure.  The risk and fear of failure is now lower than the odds of success and upside. 


I still believe in vertical marketing, I still believe in delivering whole products, I still believe in the power of positioning, but I believe the Chasm is closing and will continue to do so.  I hope this posts is controversial, and creates a discussion, I expect it will do so!  What do you think???

Salesforce.com and Three Other Companies Getting Viewpoint Right!

When I talk about Viewpoint, the first question I usually get is, "well, who does this well?"

The godfather of Viewpoint in the new era of cloud computing is clearly Salesforce.com.   As I have written here,  SalesForce.com's "The End of Software" created a unique and compelling Viewpoint that aligned with the aspiration and frustrations of their target customers who needed faster and easier visibility into sales pipeline and performance.  As they and the market have matured, they have adeptly shifted to "The Social Enterprise", seeking to capitalize on the technology, environmental and business shift to social computing.   So far, this seems to be a big win again for Benioff and team as even conservative Gartner Group now calls this category "Social CRM" . 

But everyone calls out Salesforce, so I wanted to find a few maybe lesser know examples of companies who are staking out a Viewpoint which gets them attention, leads and business.  Here's a few:

Zuora - The Subscription Economy - By building the business around the Subscription Economy, Zuora has created a fertile ground for discussing their billing solutions in a context that matters.  Rather than simply an accounting solution for selling term licenses, Zuora has effectively planted a flag of leadership.  They've even committed a whole website to the discussion of this Viewpoint.

FireEye - Sometimes a Viewpoint is as simple as saying "the world around you has dramatically changed, have you responded?".  This is exactly what FireEye has done with their Next Generation Threat positioning.  By elegantly articulating what their clients already knew, that the bad guys were changing faster than their current defenses, FireEye positioned themselve as the expert to define and deliver what a next generation threat protection solution.

VirginAmerica -  Flying should be painful, crowded, stressful and miserable.  Right?  Wrong says VirginAmerica.  Experience the difference.  A great example of a Viewpoint which takes conventional wisdom and throws it out the window.  Backed by delivery of the promise of a new and differentiated service.  Cool!  Let's book today!

By creating a unique Viewpoint, we create the space or the context to deliver our unique value, creating impact, the first stage of accelerating to Velocity Marketing.  What's you Viewpoint?  (check out this blog for a starting framework... or join me for my Velocity Breakthrough Marketing Workshop in Boston on October 25th...)

Three Things You Should Forget about B2B Sales and Marketing

Sometimes the things we forget are as important as those we remember.  Well, here's 3 things I think we would all do to forget in our B2B go to market strategies...

1) Demo only when qualified - NO - Buyers come in MANY shapes and sizes, with MANY email addresses, and in MANY states of readiness.  In all cases, they have come to expect to be able to see the service or product experience.   Since so many sales cycles are now 'hidden', if you don't "show me the money" early, you could lose and not even know it...

2) Enterprise sales are top down, always - NO.  Just ask Yammer, Atlassian or even Salesforce.com and others.  Many enterprise sales cycles are now driven bottoms up by the line manager who has the problem to solve.  Now enterpise sales has ALWAYS been a combination of top down and bottom up selling, but today, the scales are tipping to the bottom up.  Velocity now requires trial, demo and value delivery EARLY and OFTEN.

3)Qualified leads matter most - NO, marketing must now deliver qualified buyers to sales.  Sales then must slam the door shut.  Marketing used to be the warm up act, and sales the concert giver.  Now it looks more like Marketing plays the first 2 acts and sales ends the show.   With hidden sales cycles and self directed buyers, marketing must not just find qualified leads, they must find the active buyers.

Each of these things to forget have broad and significant sales and marketing implications, on tactics, measurement, roles and org structutres...more of that to come in another blog...

Adopting a Cloud Mindset - Unleashing Enterprise Cloud Adoption

(This post was originally written as a contribute piece for Nimsoft's Modern IT Blog, but I thought it would fit well here too - Enjoy)

Much has been written here, and in many blogs, about Cloud Adoption. However, most of this has focused on the tangible and critical pieces like technical architecture and operational considerations. This can’t be minimized in the least. However, in my work with both vendors and end customers, I’ve identified what is another critical success factor across all organizations, and that is adopting a Cloud Mindset. And while mindset may seem “softer” than the other issues, if we don’t shift our mindset, we will continue to cling to ideas and assumptions that served us well in the past, but can get in the way of our future success.

The OPF™ Mindset Framework:

I’ve developed a model to both understand and manage mindset transitions. In the OPF framework, Mindset is composed of 3 components; orientation, perspective, and focus. Each of these has a very specific definition:

1. Orientation – My relationship and adjustment to the environment that I am in
2. Perspective – My way of regarding/judging and interpreting facts
3. Focus – Where I choose to concentrate my attention

In order to change, to bridge from one mindset to the next, it is often helpful to explicitly define, discuss and agree on an organization Mindset.

Let’s now apply this framework to the three transitions in question, ISV to SaaS, Service Provider to Cloud Service Provider, and Enterprise IT To a Cloud First Organization.

The SaaS Mindset

As I blogged earlier, ISV and new SaaS providers need to change their Mindset:

• Orientation: from Product to Service
• Perspective: from Spikey to Continuous
• Focus: from Transaction to Relationship

Without these changes, the incentive to drive the organizational requirements for success and the framework to make strategic choices will be flawed. I’ve seen many cases where ISVs have not succeeded with the transition to SaaS, not because of technical barriers, but because they failed to change mindset and therefore made poor organizational, resource and strategic choices.

The Cloud Service Provider Mindset

Service Providers, of course are in the business of selling services, not products, so they have a different challenge in transitioning. They must become more agile, like the technology they support. They must accept that they win not only by expanding their service catalog, but by making it more “open” to other cloud providers, and adding value in layers above their traditional service catalogs. Applying the OPF framework to this transition, we can summarize this transition like this:

• Orientation: from closed and control to open value add
• Perspective: from customer value from me to customer value through ecosystem leverage
• Focus: from Service expansion to Service agility

The more a service provider opens up and expands its catalog, business practices and value add to the Cloud ecosystem, the more opportunity opens and barriers to winning the Cloud melt away.

The Enterprise IT To a Cloud First Organization Mindset

Traditionally, IT has been the provider of services to the Enterprise. And while this is the role that they will continue to play, it is being transformed daily. First of all, with layers from IaaS to PaaS to SaaS being provided to IT, they must understand that they are no longer a buyer of services, but have in many cases become the consumer of these services. They must consume, add value and broker these services to their internal and external customers across web, mobile and other channels. They must move beyond exploring the cloud and drive to strategies that exploit it. In short, they are the beneficiaries of the work being done by ISVs and Cloud providers, but only if they learn to consume, exploit and effectively broker new and innovative services. In short, their mindset must shift like this:

• Orientation: from buyer to consumer
• Perspective: from exploration to exploitation
• Focus: Service delivery to service brokering

As we see, Cloud Adoption changes the role and mindset across the IT service delivery value chain. Has you organization changed or is it clinging to an old mindset? By explicitly thinking, discussing and agreeing on an organization’s mindset, it’s Orientation, Perspective and Focus, you can change the speed and effectiveness of your cloud adoption and success. Happy Bridging…

Eat this Dog Food - Experience Marketing, Dogfood, Stone Skipping and More

Jim Barksdale is a pretty quotable guy, work for him for a few years like I did at Netscape and you leave with a small library of "Barksdalisms" that just stick with you.  One of Jim's sayings was, "It ain't dogfood unless the dog comes off the porch to eat it...".

While Jim was making the point that you can love your product, but if the customers doesn't buy it it aint worth much, I never think Jim was intending to be taken literally.  German pet food manufacturer GranataPet did.  Watch this video of a mobile enabled dog food dispensing billboard.


Kinda gets you hungry doesn't it? OK, maybe not, but it will sure make your dog happy.

Ever feel like escaping the doldrums of your computer, sitting down by a mountain lake and skipping stones?  Sounds like fun.  That's exactly the experience that the SkipTown promo for Sun Valley created by San Francisco design firm 11 did.  And while Skippy has since retired, check out the video of the world's first (and maybe only?) web controlled stone skipping robot from Sun Valley Idaho. 

When I hear software, SaaS and other B2B companies hide their product or services experience behind a myriad of rationalizations and excuses I want to fire up these two videos.  If Sun Valley and Granata can do it, so can you! 

KJR client WhiteHat Security recently launched it's new RiskCheck program.  WhiteHat probably knows more about Website risk and attacks than anyone in the world.  But how do you give prospects a taste of that experience.  The RiskCheck, just launched last week is their answer.  Just complete this short web survey and receive a customized report comparing you to your industry and companies of your size. A small but highly valuable experience of the value that WhiteHat can deliver.

Experience and engagement create velocity.  So whether you are selling dog food, mountain vacations or website security, there's a way to accelerate your pipeline today.

 Now excuse me while I take Fido for a walk, skip some stones and futureproof my website.

5 Ways You Better Be Above Average – Winning Marketing in a Global, High Velocity Marketplace

Talking about his new book, “That Used to Be Us,” at a recent speech at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, best selling author Thomas Friedman said, “Average is over.  Everyone must define and develop their extra, that unique value add that justifies, in this world of rising curves why they should be hired or promoted.”   Friedman goes on to make a case that to win in the global market, American education must nurture students to become more creative and unique.

Friedman goes on to discuss the emergence of the “hyper-connected world” one where you cannot only outsource labor, but you can outsource “genius”.   This is clearly one of the driving forces that create the glut of solution providers in every imaginable niche in the market today.    While Friedman deals with macro nation level competitiveness issues, every day, the battle against average determines the micro level winners and losers in competitive markets.   The companies that win, rise above the mean because they don’t stop at average, they consistently go outside the mean in at several if not all of these key areas –

1)   Frame the problem in the customer's view

2)   Drive experience

3)   Execute with focus, data and speed

4)   Maximize Customer satisfaction

5)   Iterate rapidly and successfully

Let's take a quick look at why being above average matters, and how to achieve it.  

1)   Frame the Problem – With the dramatic overload and availability of content, Breakthrough is critical.  Winners do an above average job of setting the CONTEXT for the market conversation, or framing the problem.  One way to win, is to create a compelling Viewpoint as I discuss here.  Average companies look to ride trends, above average ones create them.

2)   Drive experience – Buyers are now driven by experience over evaluation.  Average companies have product or brand managers building screen capture or other quick hit videos.  Above average companies find ways to create highly engaging, real or near real product or service experiences.  Experience is the new selling reality, you better be great at this or you will never build a high velocity sales execution engine…

3)   Execute with focus, data and speed – Driving pipeline today, is all about execution and learning.  We’ve entered the era of A/B testing and we aren’t leaving.  Average companies understand basic data and use it to adjust execution, while above average companies drive operations and optimization from realtime data and analytics , using new and innovative tools and techniques like Totango’s Customer Engagement Management solution.

4)   Maximize Customer Satisfaction – We've left the world of purchase and support a long time ago, but many organizations have not adjusted their approaches and organizations.  Average companies measure customer satisfaction with survey and support metrics.  Above average companies have fundamentally changed their mindset and restructured their whole organization around the customer lifecycle, surrounding the customer and maximizing customer lifetime value.  

5)   Iterate rapidly and successfully – Average companies run on release cycles measure in quarter or longer.  Above average companies release features and cycle in weeks, days or even hours.  In the world of realtime data (see 3), the new rule is iterate or lose. 

Are you still average, if so, you need to invest or lose to the start up in Bangalore, Budapest, Sao Paolo or next door.  Friedman is right not just about people when he calls out to find that extra, but this is true of companies too.  What’s your strategy to be above average?

Clouds, Gold Rushes, Motorcades and Why I Love Infrastructure Technologies

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?

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 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 out
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.  "

Not 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.  

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". 

Mind The Gaps - 3 Gaps to High Velocity Pipeline, and How to Bridge Them To Success

When I used to go to London often and ride the Underground, the constant refrain seen was "Mind The Gap".   Mind the Gap or you could suffer some unmentionable and clearly gruesome fate.   As Online software service providers of all flavors try to create high velocity sales and marketing businesses, they would do well to mind these 3 gaps:

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!!!

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....

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.

Figure 1, The Three Stages of Velocity Marketing Achievement

There are 3 stages to moving to Velocity Marketing, depicted in Figure 1. In my experience, 90% of organizations are mucked and mired in the Status Quo stage, slugging out a content marketing battle based on features and benefits.   This is shown in Figure 2.  Viewpoint is diverged from the customer, Value is the usual and Velocity is low.

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.

Figure 3: Converged Viewpoint and Unique Value Creates Impact, The First Step to Breakthrough

However, if we can then drive to higher levels of Engagement and Experience as discussed here, we can move our marketing execution from low to high Velocity, we create Breakthrough as shown in Figure 4.  (Read more about Engagement, Experience and Velocity here.) Breakthrough Marketing can be seen when we have high levels of unique and compelling value communicated in high velocity, engaging and experiential ways. 

Figure 4: Increasing Velocity with Engagement and Experience Creates Breakthrough

Where are you on the Velocity Marketing Evolution?  

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.  

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:  

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 final post in this series, we tie together Viewpoint, Value and Velocity with the traditional marketing and sales funnel, and see how this framework can create High Impact and growth. 

Tilting to Abundance: Using Value to Outsmart Your Competition, And They Won’t Even Know It!

In his seminal work 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, Steven Covey introduces a concept of an Abundance Mindset, Wikipedia describes it like this:

Covey coined the idea of abundance mentality or abundance mindset, a concept in which a person believes there are enough resources and success to share with others. He contrasts it with the scarcity mindset (i.e., destructive and unnecessary competition), which is founded on the idea that, if someone else wins or is successful in a situation, that means you lose; not considering the possibility of all parties winning (in some way or another) in a given situation.

When we apply this idea to Go To Market Positioning, Messaging and execution, we begin to see our opportunities in a whole new way, and drive an execution that can surprise even our most optimistic expectations. 

In my Viewpoint, Value, Velocity or V3 High Impact Go To MarketModel,  Value is the articulation of our winning business benefits that we use to move potential customers from awareness to purchase ready.  Once we get their attention with our Viewpoint, we need to rapidly move to captivating them with our communication of our Unique Value. 

Value definition: The Business benefits that a solution delivers for which customers are will to pay both real and opportunity costs to acquire.  Unique Value is a value which only comes from us, not other alternatives in the market. 

So, what are the 3 steps to articulating Unique Value, and using it to sneak up on and beat our competitors without them even knowing it

1)   Adopt an abundance mindset.   The abundance mindset simply says that we view our market not as a competitive dog fight for a finite and scarce amount of business but as a unlimited landscape of opportunity.  When we do this, we change our perspective from one of battle to one of maneuver and our focus from better to different.  (You do need to know that I am a fiercely competitive person, but the when we adopt an abundance mindset, we compete more like a Judo master than a boxer)

2)   Invest the time and energy to do the mechanics of building out our Value and its articulation in powerful messaging and positioning.  We do this by starting with an honest assessment of our uniqueness and our Unique Value.  We do this by completing the Venn Diagram here and then using it to drive well documented and customer validated positioning and messaging.

Finding Unique Value

3)   We then tilt the playing field to our advantage by changing the terrain from the conventional  wisdom to our Viewpoint.  When our Viewpoint creates the context for the customer and market  conversation, the diagram magically changes to look more like this:

Viewpoint Can Tilt the Playing Field

A Quick Case Study:

Palo Alto Networks provides an excellent example of this Unique Value in action.  Security folks have long recognized that Firewalls were providing less and less protection as more and more network traffic went over the Web protocol (Nearly all Firewalls have allowed Web traffic through, it's as if you’re door to your office let anyone dressed in a business suit in without regards to their intent).  But it took Palo Alto Network's courage to step out and say, “The Firewall is Broken” (Viewpoint) and we can fix it with these 3 key protection features, etc, etc.   Did this anger customers who were writing hundreds of millions in checks to Checkpoint, McAfee, Juniper and Cisco, some yes, but others apparently not, as it soon becomes clear.

At the time of their initial launch, I was running Network Security marketing for Secure Computing, now part of McAfee.  I can remember the product manager telling me that “Palo Alto is nothing but a web filtering box, it’s not a real firewall”  Fast forward 4+ years and Palo Alto Networks has disrupted a stagnant market, grown from nothing to over $500M in revenues, and is expected to be one of the largest tech IPOs of 2012. 

So while McAfee, Checkpoint, and others fought over the percentage points  of share in the old Firewall market, Palo Alto titled the playing field, articulated their Unique Value and executed with excellence, and as we speak, they are eclipsing the the old market, being chased by the rest. Sure the others have noticed now, but it just may be too late.

As an aside, your best sales reps are usually the "canary in the coal mine" to tell you if the market is being tilted on you.  I vividly remember a sales manager in my office saying, “We need an answer to Palo Alto” and me saying, “Really, what are they,  $10M out of $3B right now, let's keep our on on the real competition?” Boy oh boy, I got that one wrong indeed!