Are You True to Your Brand?
High tech companies still have a lot to learn from consumer companies when it comes to branding. A few weeks ago I was visiting Ibex who is a customer of ours. What struck me was how thoroughly their brand permeated the entire organization. The foundation of the company is producing high quality, natural wool-based outdoor clothing. As I spoke to various employees and toured their facilities, their brand was engrained through the culture. What made me feel this way? Every aspect of how they operated and worked, but to name a few: employees can bring their dogs to work, they are based in Vermont with a view of the mountains, they are moving more of their sourcing to the US to use local suppliers. They clearly know their target customer and their culture embodies their brand to support their success.
So isn’t this true for high tech companies? More often than not high tech companies try to claim “we are innovators”, “we are customer focused”, etc. While these are worthy goals, they re only worth claiming if your customers agree. I love the simplicity of killianbranding’s comparison of branding and an elevator pitch.
All companies have a brand – it is how your customers perceive you. Are you true to your brand? It should be visible throughout every dimension of your company. If you are innovative, that should not end in engineering, customer focus means every person thinks of the customer first. Are these behaviors rewarded, re-enforced?
Are You a Fox or a Hedgehog?
This week I heard a story on NPR about politicians and how their changes on position impacts the public’s perception of them. One point they made was that there are two types of politicians: foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes tend to change their position, Although they are very good at adapting to changing environment, the theory is they actually are better executives, but they can be perceived as flip-floppers. Whereas hedgehogs have a grand vision and stay on message much better. If they succeed it is in a big way, similarly if they are wrong failure is complete.
In reflecting on how this relates to marketing and sales, it seems you need a mix of fox and hedgehog skills. Your branding and messaging has to be hedgehog-like. No customers like an inconsistent brand. Similarly, when your sales executives are working with customers, being hedge hog like will give them confidence. However, with markets changing so rapidly, and customers priorities shifting, you need fox skills to execute and succeed. How do you execute your marketing campaigns when half way through your budge gets cut, or the results exceed expectations and you need to find additional resources to ramp up? Similarly, once you close the customer, how do you deal with new requirements that come up?
Review your team and assess. Do you need more foxes or more hedgehogs? Just do not keep any SBFs.
What Happens After DARC
A couple of weeks ago I was as a VP of Marketing executive breakfast put on by Corporate Ink. At the session Mike Volpe outlined his DARC framework for recruiting. In addition to DARC, Mike said he looks for people with ability to GSD – Get Stuff Done.
This got me thinking about what happens beyond the hire, and while we all strive to build great teams, what happens when the team needs “coaching.” Below is a framework that categorizes employees into 4 quadrants.
The dimensions should be pretty straight forward. On the vertical axis what is the employee’s initiative: Do they create new projects? Come up with imaginative ideas? Do they push the boundaries of their jobs and strive to make everyone around them better? On the horizontal axis I measure ability to deliver: Do they complete projects? What kind of revisions or rework is required? How much supervision do they need?
This results in the 4 types of employees:
- Top Right – GSD: Get Stuff Done. Clearly we all want our teams in this category. For the most part these employees need minimal guidance and when you go to them with an initiative, they have often already started, or they “get it” immediately. As a manager, the best thing you can do is help them by removing obstacles.
- Bottom Left – SBF: Should be Fired. Although this seems obvious too often these employees are left to flounder. Maybe they are transferred to another department. My experience is these people can actually make everyone else less productive. Worse than adding no value they actually consume energy from the team.
- Top Left – EPD: Enthusiastic Puppy Dog. These are the people who are always coming up with big thoughts, telling you they will pick up the extra project and that your ideas are brilliant. However, their follow though leaves a lot to be desired. Unfortunately, in some organizations these people rise up quite well.
- Bottom Right – EBD: Eeyore But Delivers. This is the person who sighs ever time you ask them something, or rolls their eyes when you kick off a new initiative. However, once you leave their office they plug away, buy into your request and deliver what you asked for – on time!
OK, so these are a bit exaggerated. Given that – I always struggle between team members who with all good intention take on tasks they do not quite do, versus the energy of overcoming the Eeyores, who are always pushing back.
How do you do performance management of your team?
What is the Headline?
One of the best questions a VC asked me when looking to invest was, “What is the headline for the next release?” I cannot remember my answer and they ended up investing, so I guess it was good enough. What I do remember is what I thought: (1) Cleaning up some technology mess we did not get right last few releases, (2) Some features that probably should already be in, (3) some new capabilities that would actually create value for the customers. Well 1/3 was value add…
So how we get in such places and how to avoid this? Here are the guidelines I give product managers and the rest of the stakeholders:
(1) Before scoping and requirements, declare the business objectives of the release. These may include opening new geographies, new segments, it may be simply something that demos well. Internal requirements like technology updates or cutting implementation hours are also important, but should be justified just like any other investment.
(2) Separate features that help sell versus actually help create value for the customer. Many times the features that help sell and are most memorable in the sales cycle are not the ones that get used day-in and day-out.
(3) Create a positioning document before the release development really gets going. This helps frame the context for the rest of the organization. From this you can drive messaging, sales training, press release, etc.
I realize the above can be “101”, but since I was asked the question, I have posed it many times and found an equally cautious answer.
Kindle Customer Service – Battling for Brand Loyalty
A long time ago when I was a product manager, the CEO brought into a new VP of Marketing, who on day 1 declared, “I am here to build our brand.” He subsequently, when on to hire a creative firm and spent a lot of money on a new logo. In the mean time we went and won new customers, delivered value and serviced them exceptionally well. You can guess what built the brand. Building your brand takes all departments, understanding your position, value proposition, and executing on it. Brands are built on how to deal with customers, Killian Branding has an excellent, succinct post on this. There is also an comprehensive article from Marketing Profs on spreading customer experience through a company’s “performance chain.”
Last week I had an outstanding customer experience with Amazon. My recently purchased Kindle had an issue with its screen freezing. First I checked numerous web sites, and the support pages at Amazon, trying to fix it myself. Finally I phoned the customer support line. Unfortunately, when I phoned the rep wanted me to step through some diagnostics , however, I did not have it with me. He offered to call me back later – huh? When does a call center offer to call you back? Furthermore he asked what time would be good. Sure enough later that evening I got a call, and after some tests, told me he would ship out a replacement. He took the initiative to call me back. In almost every other situation, they would tell ME to call THEM back.
It fits with Amazon’s overall value proposition – convenience, online shopping, personalized purchase suggestions…
Emotion and Engineering
When I combine the terms “Emotion” and “Engineering” with marketing people it usually starts conversations and frustration about how to get more out of engineering. Rarely do marketers look for engineering to provide the key ideas and value add for marketing. I mean that is our job! We are supposed to tell engineering what to do…
With the passing of Steve Jobs, there has been a lot of discussion on the importance of design. As I look back in my career I can think of two companies where the engineering team had outstanding design and in each case I can point to multimillion dollar deals we won, where the design played a key factor. The design was part of our competitive advantage.
Creating emotion in the sales cycle is THE most important thing sales and marketing can do. Despite all the discussion around lead scoring, sales funnels, creating ROI, value-based selling; emotion still plays a huge role in customers buying. Are you using product design to win new deals?
A few thoughts on leveraging great design:
- Does your product user interface create excitement in your sales process?
- Does the ergonomics of your user experience drive frenzied loyalty in your customer base?
- Do you sales tools (PowerPoints, Collateral, etc.) reflect your brand? (I am not talking about colors)
Have you defined the emotion of your brand? Are you cool? Cutting edge? Industrial? Buttoned-Up? People buy from people, and it is expected that the basics will be covered in terms of value, ROI, etc. It is the emotion that you create that can separate you. Some of the most successful companies actually built momentum around arrogance (Oracle, Ariba, Siebel, etc.). Strange as this sounds – the emotion created was “we are going to be the winner, want to come with us?” Not surprisingly no one likes to be left behind.
Defining and Winning a New Market
It is always impressive when an innovative company can carve out a new market segment and dominate it with double or even triple digit growth. Many more companies fail trying to evangelize “new emerging markets” that never have enough compelling value.
When it comes to marketing, my absolute favorite technology company is Salesforce.com. We use it, and the other day I went to log in and came across the following banner.
Forgive me for not knowing before, but although I had not heard of “the social enterprise”, I got it right away. Not only that a couple of days later I saw Gartner’s magic quadrant for Social CRM. Here is a market that in theory didn’t exist a couple of years ago and it is now projected to be a $1B market. Now that is great marketing.
So what separates the market makers from the market fakers? Here are my top factors
- It has to make sense, keep it simple
- Most likely it evolved from an earlier market, for the biggest winners there a game changer that cripples the older market.
- It should be differentiated but meaningful
- There has to be competition; no competition, no market
More often than not the big winner is not an incumbent. For example look at the CRM market. Siebel essentially defined the market by taking what companies like Goldmine did and “going enterprise.” Salesforce.com came along and went “On Demand”. Much less common is the incumbent reinventing themselves. However, Salesforce.com is now promoting Social Enterprise along with numerous smaller entrepreneurial firms. Apple is another obvious incredible incumbent. Microsoft and Yahoo are examples of companies that cannot seem to innovate “the next big thing.” What will happen to other one time market makers: Nokia, Motorola, RIM, etc.?
Should You Strive To Be Like Apple?
A few weeks ago I was in a board meeting reviewing a strategic initiative. I am always struck by simple questions that drive constructive discussion. In this case the board member asked, “Using Michael Treacy’s Model, do you think Kewill is product oriented, customer oriented, or efficiency oriented?” The answers were relatively consistent, but there were differences based on each person’s perspective. The views also included, where we have been, where we are today, and where we are going.
Yesterday, I came across the WSJ story talking about “How to Be Like Apple”, which discussed how to create an environment that fosters creativity and innovation. Of course emotionally everyone “wants to be like apple” – the question is what does it take? More broadly going back to Michael Treacy’s work is one area of focus better for high technology?
In my opinion it comes down your people and the passion. Emotionally, my experience in high tech is successful companies are either product or customer focused. This often gets defined by the founders or subsequent senior team. Did they come out of engineering or sales & marketing? Either side can create energetic, entrepreneurial environments. “Efficient” high technology companies tend to be pretty boring, although I will admit medium and long term may be quite successful financially.
Where is your company? Are you where you need to be?
Segmentation Versus Fragmentation
I was recently at the Gartner Supply Chain conference and was discussing market strategy with some analysts and colleagues. The topic of markets and market segmentation came up, and I realized that many marketers (and others) get confused or are too rigid in how they segment markets.
Market segmentation should be fundamental skill of every marketer, although there are many lenses at which one needs to view their customers. The first question to ask is “are you segmenting one market or are there multiple markets?” Even this has degrees of gray. I characterize a market as a group of people/companies that have the following traits in common:
1) Pains points to be solved. These need to be relevant and specific. They not “aspirations” such as “save costs or “improve customer service”
2) Processes that run their business: this could be the way the market, distribute, buy goods, etc. Obviously they also need to be relevant to your offering.
3) Roles that use your solution and gain benefit. Examples would include common titles, departments, etc.
4) Competitive landscape. If in each “segment” you have different competitors changes are you are in different markets.
5) Do the customers talk and collaborate with each other? Read common trade journals, go to common events, are there industry associations, etc.
Once the market is defined, there is a multitude of ways to segment it. Some are traditional such as company size, geography, vertical, some are more subtle:
1) Innovative versus laggards
2) IT focused versus business focused, who has power when buying technology
3) Home grown versus off the shelf
Segmentation is as much art as science, since one company’s market could be a segment to someone else. The most important element of segmentation is to relate the above factors to your solution and the problems it solves.
Growth – Buying In
This past week we saw a couple of big news stories about technology companies making acquisitions. HP & Dell are battling over 3PAR, and earlier Intel announced a $7.7B acquisition of McAfee. Will these be successful and create additional value? A study by KPMG in 1999 showed that 83% of mergers either created no additional value or actually destroyed value. I am not sure the success rate has increased much since then.
In my career I have been involved in many acquisitions, albeit much smaller, typically in the $10M’s range. My experience is that while acquisitions can be a successful way to enter new markets and grow, executing them successfully can be fun but it is a lot of hard work.
Growth through acquisition can be done with a number of strategies. For example, buying:
- a brand new product to speed time to market with customers you already have.
- a customer base and revenue stream to consolidate market share
- complementary solutions and customer bases which enable cross selling, and bundling products
Depending on the objective, the criteria assessing targets is vastly different. Almost everyone would agree the most critical factor for success is people: culture, organization, and communication. Given executives know this – why are successful acquisitions so hard? I would suggest the main factor is unrealistic expectations. For example,
- The product we are buying only needs 10% more development to take to market
- We can grow their business faster with our sales and marketing
- Customers will migrate to this new platform
- We will be able to leverage common components reducing engineering costs
- Etc.
Sometimes the expectations are not even outlined and employees’ perceived goals are not what management has identified. Accomplishing aggressive growth is typically hard without an acquisition, which is why we call it work. You need the best people, healthy culture and the right organization, but adding unrealistic expectations simply sets you up for failure.
