Keep Your Eye on Solving the Problem

Whether you are selling to a customer, pitching a story to an editor, or writing a business plan, its key that you express what you do and how your technology works in the context of the business problem at hand.


In the case of sales – your customer has a problem, and is seeking an answer to his/her woes. So when a prospect visits your web site, picks up your literature at a tradeshow, or sees your ad online, they are quickly (within seconds) trying to determine what you do, and whether you have a solution that is right for them. It is therefore critical to always take the buyer’s perspective and keep their problems in mind when creating positioning statements or sales messaging.

When pitching your story to an editor, the objective and strategy is the same. You are still selling. The editor is the broker, and his/her readers are your customers. The best PR storylines are all about solving problems, and providing solid evidence (i.e. customer stories) to prove you’ve been successful in your mission.

This article in MIT Sloan Management review, takes the problem/solution sales paradigm to yet another level – business planning. The article covers business planning deal-killers and guides entrepreneurs on how to avoid these fatal mistakes. And the number one flaw of most technology start-up business plans? Failing to identify the problem and/or pain that your technology solves.

http://sloanreview.mit.edu/business-insight/articles/2009/2/5121/why-business-plans-dont-deliver/

I'm a convert

Word of mouth rocks. I've always been a believer in company's who leverage customer service and satisfaction as a differentiator. Its more rare than you think - especially in the technology sector, where there's a lot of emphasis on features and functionality as the company's unique value proposition. Just take a moment to think about the companies in your circle who provide over the top customer service. Probably not many. And when you do encounter them, you make a point of telling others. In today's world of social media and with the speed of technology at hand, a company's reputation and revenues streams can be build on word of mouth referrals. But that doesn't happen unless its a good quality product in the first place, and the company goes out of the way not just to talk about, but to live, breathe and embody customer service excellence.

Hands up if you are sick of hearing economy doom and gloom

I'm just plain tired of the negative media, and predictions of business failure that is a steady diet in the media today. Instead, being an optimist by nature, I'm perferring to hold onto a comment I saw on another blog; that people who found business in today's recesssion will be the millionaires of 2019.

Now, don't get me wrong. I have no delusions of millions in the bank. I am, however, choosing to move countertrend - establishing and growing my marketing business, Ignition, in a down economy.

My (Ignition's) focus is to provide my senior level marketing expertise to firms who may value marketing, but due to the economic conditions, elect not to invest in a heavy duty senior level marketing salary. What I'm able to do is plug into the company, triage their marketing, select a path appropriate for the stage of business, and work as that firm's "virtual vp of marketing" to pull in the resources to economy fill the need. Nothing gives me more pleasure than to have my clients refer to me as 'their marketing director."

Its working. I have a growing customer base, happy clients, and I get a kick out of giving smaller companies the benefit of a more mature, brand to help them rise above the fray, and attract customers, investors, and partners.

Many of my clients are also making good progress in a tough economy - one may have a record quarter; another has executed a financial turnaround that has them on the brink of profitability for the first time ever.

So don't lose faith folks. Stay focused and believe. I think the economy will rise again on the backs of small businesses and optimists, who'll say, to quote the movie Network's anchor Howard Beale, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore." Let's turn off the naysayers, roll up our sleeves to do great - nay greater work than ever before.

Hats off to Obama and his new media team

First, as a Canadian, I'd like to extend my good wishes to all my friends and colleagues in the US, who welcome into office today President Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States.

As a marketer, I'd also like to take my hat off to the President's new media team led by - who (probably before the President lowered his hand) launched a new and revolutionary WhiteHouse web site today - ushering in a true Government 2.o era. The site sets a new level for communication in the public sector, perpetuating and building on the the President's brilliant use of social media during his campaign. It looks and feels nothing like your average government communications vehicle. The site uses powerful messaging, dramatic imagery, video (promising weekly video addresses reminicent of FDR's famous radio fireside chats), blogs and other social media tools to deliver the President's agenda to the people and to solicit real time feedback from citizens of the US. In my estimation its a stroke of communications brilliance. If you haven't had a look at it yet - please do http://www.whitehouse.gov/

LinkedIn as a Guerilla Marketing Tool

Do you have a LinkedIn profile? If you don't, you may be missing one of the best and most targeted methods for building awareness for your business. Here are just a few ways small tech firms can use LinkedIn to marketing advantage. Some might take this as a shameless pitch for LinkedIn. I promise you there is not affiliation here - but I am a big fan of this "self-sustaining rolodex."

1. If you are looking to build your profile as an industry expert, build out and enhance your profile to the fullest extent, fleshing out content with links to blog postings and other thought leadership tools. Change it frequently and adapt the content to enhance and refresh it. Try googling on your own name - if you are building out your profile sufficiently you'll find your linkedin infomration will be right up there at the top.

2. Seeking to build relationships or prospect with buyers in a specific sector? Explore LinkedIn Groups. There are any number of targeted groups devoted to all forms of subject matter - joining these groups will give you visibility into other LinkedIn members with shared interest. The most challenging part of prospecting is finding people with specific and targeted interest in your products and services - LinkedIn groups can help point you to these individuals.

3. Do the upgrade - InMail, an upgraded form of LinkedIn gives you the ability to step outside of your "network" and reach members with whom you have no contact today. Great prospecting tool. But remember, lead with value - if you are cold calling (or cold emailing) the message should be about solving a problem -- not a blatant sales pitch.

4. Have a compelling article or whitepaper you think is of value to this community? Try posting a link to the piece to a relevant group for a bit of guerilla lead generation. One of my clients used this approach quite recently and drove hundreds of interested people back to their site and to their new paper.

5. Follow and respond to the discussion threads. Remember you are an expert in your field. Many of these groups have active discussion threads where members actively talk about their challenges and solicit answers. Providing insightful and rich responses will position you as a thought leader and your firm as a go-to expert in the industry.

Happy New Year All!

Getting Exposure for Your Company - PR Basics

• Exposure for your company and products in the media is a highly credible and lower cost form of marketing. A feature article referencing one of your customers, a product review, or a news coverage on your new product release help to build “buzz” about your brand name and can be transformed into highly effective tools for your sales force. In this blog posting, I’d like to impart some of the knowledge I’ve acquired over my 15+ years as a software marketing executive and closet PR pitchster.
  
  Press releases and news coverage
  
  Journalists receive a massive volume of press releases each day from companies seeking coverage for themselves or their products. There are some releases that will elicit coverage – the vast majority will fall on deaf ears – but still have value (more on this a bit later). Here are some general rule of thumb pieces of advice about press releases:

• If your press release is centered on a new product release, think hard about the news angle – what is fresh, different, a first for the market – this might be the release that catches a news editor’s attention. But even with a news angle, you need to package up your story to make it very easy for the editor – they are just too busy to chase down the details. Reach out and schedule briefings with key news editors at least a week in advance of issuing the release and offer them a draft version. Understand who you are targeting and what they are writing about and make sure you align. Have customers they can talk to (some product editors will insist on this before they will accept a briefing with you on your news), as well as industry analysts who will provide comment, screenshots of your product and if possible industry data points and research that can be wrapped into the story.
• If your release isn’t “picked up” by an editor, don’t despair. Inclusion of stock trading symbols if you are a public company will allow your release to be picked up by online vehicles such as Yahoo Finance so the ‘buzz’ reaches investors. Press release frequency also contributes to natural search engine optimization – helping your company to rise in the rankings on Google, MSN, Yahoo and other search engines. High rankings tend to put you at the top of a prospect’s search list so this is a very good thing.
• And finally, don't annoy editors by calling and asking them if they got the release. That'll guarantee you end up in Bin13.
  
  Feature article coverage
  
  Feature articles are lengthier stories that investigate a topic in depth, and may run multiple pages in a magazine or online. By monitoring editorial calendars of target publications you can get a general sense of topics the editor wishes to cover. The trick is then to develop a pitch for that story that offers the editor a fresh angle, or all the ingredients (customers, analyst research, access to an executive for an interview etc) to help figure you prominently in the story. Keep in mind this is not about you. Even the very best pitch and all the ingredients in the world do not guarantee you inclusion. You have to serve the editor better than any other contender. And feature stories – particularly in technology media will focus on the end user, not the vendor. So your customer will receive the exposure, and your technology hopefully is mentioned as the solution to a specific business challenge. R
  
  Submitted articles
  
  Technology and vertical industry publications are often very lean, have a small editorial staff, and depend freelancers for story writing, and even for conducting product reviews. By checking the editorial mast head online, you can often quickly determine if a publication is open to editorial submissions, and if this is the case, this offers you an opportunity to contribute a full article to that publication under a by-line of someone in your organization (CEO, VP Product Strategy etc). Once again, you develop a “pitch” to the editor for a story. The angle and subject matter must be topical, informative, and not a commercial for your company or technology. The exposure for you comes through the byline, and the thought leadership.
  
  Product reviews
  
  In the good old days (gee about ten years ago) most of the technology magazines employed a full staff, and maintained a large lab to perform testing on software products and hardware devices. They still do exist, but more often than not, your product review will be performed by a consultant outside of the publication who has offered to be a freelance ‘reviewer’. If you decide to pursue product reviews for your technology here are some words of advice. First, think about developing a reviewer’s guide, to help bring the reviewer up to speed quickly on your technology. This should outline the positioning for the product, list key features and functionality, offer installation and implementation instructions and contact points. I used to go one further step with my reviews as our product was quite technical and assign a dedicated support rep to the reviewer to assist with any necessary troubleshooting. Also if the reviewer is willing, coordinate a call with the product manager before the review begins to go through the reviewers guide and deal with questions up front.
  
  And a final word on targeting your message and plain old customer service
  
  Journalists are crazy busy people, with email in boxes bulging with press releases and phones ringing off the hook. First and foremost, invest in some serious targeting of your message. Do your homework. Has the journalist written on this subject before? How recently? How do they prefer to be contacted? Make sure your information is aligned to the and their publication’s focus. Think rifle shot, not carpet bombing. Next, invest in building a relationship. Not easy to do in a virtual world, but when given a opportunity for story participation over deliver on customer service. Have all the ingredients at hand before you reach out and be ready to stand and deliver. Go the extra mile, make the reporter’s life easy and you’ll become a valued source for future writing efforts.

Focus. Focus. Focus

I have been thinking and talking a lot about bowling alleys lately. And I’m not talking about ten pin and funny looking shoes, but rather the marketing and sales strategy set out in Geoffrey Moore’s book, Inside the Tornado. Moore’s theory is in my mind, one of the most compelling marketing strategies I have seen for small companies or start ups with limited resources, and I fully grant to him all the credit here for this thinking. Many of the clients I work with today are in these strata of development, and I often find myself coming back to Moore’s theories and recommending to my clients these three words – focus, focus, focus.

With great apologies to Mr. Moore, let me summarize in my own words my understanding of a bowling alley (or niche marketing strategy):

Take inventory of your customer successes and double down where you have had success. This requires (shock and awe!) listening to your customers (easy peasy – bet your competitors aren’t doing it). Interview them. Understand their business, their industry, their regulatory environment. Get a handle on the reasons they began looking for products like yours in the first place. Intelligent niche marketing is not about feature function wars, but about understanding the customer’s problem and uniquely solving it. This is the fodder for your marketing efforts and fuel for your sales team. Then look for prospects of similar profiles and show them you’ve done it before and how.

Position your product or service (my background is technology so I will use that frame of reference) as a unique solution to a business problem. This requires you to have a sound understanding of the challenges in a particular market segment, understand the consequences (financial, reputational or otherwise) of failure, and position your offering as something unique and better than your competitors. In my last company we had great success positioning our technology as a remedy for Sarbanes Oxley compliance. We took the time to understand the pain IT staff were experiencing in meeting SOX compliance, the regulatory requirements and kinds of IT controls necessary to meet COBIT standards, and then mapped the capabilities of our software as a remedy to this problem. We also understood the consequences of non-compliance. This background knowledge + positioning drove a lot of business to our door.

Aim your focus and messaging on a distinct market niche – in Moore’s words – a beach head segment. This might be a type of buyer – for instance IT operations groups, or a vertical market – financial services, or better yet, a combination of the two. In the example cited above, we learned all we could about the IT organization and the influencers surrounding SOX compliance. This led us to build messaging and positioning for CFOs, CEOs and CIOS as well as IT auditors, external audit firms, IT control advisors. We also leveraged our own CFO as a credible thought leader on this topic.

Play where you have experience. I see too many companies chase a segment because they think they can solve a problem there – or worse, spread themselves too thin trying to position themselves too broadly. Customer experience and reference accounts are absolutely critical in executing a bowling alley strategy. Enterprise buyers of software systems – especially IT shops -- tend to be pragmatic in their decision making and somewhere in the buying cycle they will want to speak to references. By focusing on a particular segment, you and your sales guys are given the opportunity to deeply understand the challenges and pressures of that sector. This allows your sales teams to lead a deep discovery with their prospects uncovering hidden business challenges beneath the surface. And finally focus on a particular niche is fertile soil for (the nirvana of marketing in my humble opinion) word of mouth marketing as happy users of your product migrate between companies, attend local networking meetings and generally talk amongst themselves. Can you hear the other bowling pins falling?

Critical mass has a fly wheel effect. You have established your company as a thought leader in a niche segment. And you have built up a solid base of customers and reference accounts. This in itself will create a gravitational force that will bring prospects to your door.

Don’t think this is a forever thing, or misunderstand this means you are only a vertical play. Nice marketing is about focus. It is about acquiring deep understanding and the development of expertise to enable true enterprise solution selling. It does not mean you cannot opportunistically sell into other segments or refuse business. It’s just about turning up the volume in one particular area. It’s about solving a clear and present problem that is acute in that nice better than your competitors. And it’s about building that reference arsenal and knowledge that drives leadership in a segment.