Monday, March 30, 2009

Easing the Sales vs. Marketing Tension

Presenting to the board of directors, when I was VP of marketing at Calypto, I once mentioned how the product we were spec'ing was to be sold and how straightforward the value proposition and the sales process would be once it's developed and in the market (By the way, that product is now the biggest piece in Calypto's current revenue stream).  Right after my presentation, one of the more senior board members commented that once again there goes a marketer talking about how easy the sales process would be!

There is always tension between sales and marketing, but at that time I didn't realize what he was really saying.

I recently read a blog by Seth Godin which I'm paraphrasing: in a complex sales process (for example a B2B sales model) for every 10 people on the customer side, there are 8 that are there just to stall.  Their role is to keep vendors away from the main decision maker.  The remaining two persons include a nay-sayer whose job is to just say no if the offering is not to be purchased, and the actual decision maker who will give the final go-ahead.

A sales manager's job is to usher the sales process all the way from the first phone call, through the 8  stallers and the nay-sayer, to the decision maker and the close.  At the same time, a marketer's view of value proposition is most often only effective in working with the nay-sayer or the decision maker.  Valid or not, a sales manager always believes that she can come up with the value-proposition messaging on her own when she's ready to work with the nay-sayer and the decision maker.  What sales managers really need is help in dealing with the stallers - sales managers find it boring, time consuming, and it tends to be more detail oriented than they like it.  And as you can imagine most of the sales cycle is spent dealing with stallers.

What marketing managers fail to come up with proactively is tactics and campaigns to assist the sales managers with stallers and better yet speed up the process of dealing with them.  These tactics are after-thoughts and are mostly developed reactively as a response to customers stalling tactics.  The lack of these proactive measures to deal with stallers seeds the marketing vs. sales tension as sales views that as marketing's failure to deliver, while marketing's focus is on creating the feature/benefit and value-proposition collateral.  Furthermore, many marketing managers believe dealing with the stallers is really "sales' job", and hence sales' request for help in managing the stallers is viewed as sales' failure to deliver.

The comment made to me in the board meeting was a wake up call to re-evaluate my team's (marketing) role in the entire sales process and hence complete the entire roll-out strategy with tactics that cover stallers, in addition to the nay-sayers and decision makers.

Monday, March 23, 2009

Caution: Comfort Zone!

I had an article published in EE Times last week (see "EDA 3.0 - So you're an EDA startup").  It was one of the most popular articles of the EDA DesignLine publication.  I have received personally over 30 emails not only commenting on the article, but including a number of startup executives (friends, clients, etc.) asking me what they're doing "wrong"!

I won't steal the article's thunder (Read it on your own), but to build on the article, my response to these inquiries has been that it is only fear that we need to be afraid of.  In my opinion, surviving the recession requires conquering your fears and making the right choices.  Unfortunately many business owners won't do either.

In the EDA space, except for Synopsys, Cadence, possibly Mentor Graphics, and a few companies (startup and midsize) who are cash flow positive, all other companies are burning cash and don't have a strong market to see themselves raising future venture rounds.  So, want it or not, fear sets in: the fear of running out of cash and having to close doors.  With fear, most people turn back to their comfort zone.  So EDA companies go back to their comfort zone and focus their efforts on technology development.  And yes, they need to bring in dollars, so they focus the sales team on growing the pipeline.  As a results more features are being developed and more prospect are not happy with the state of the "product" -- in other words, the technology-to-product gap widens, accelerating the burn-rates.  [For difference between "technology" and "product, see the article.]

What's needed is conquering the fears, understanding that the only way to consistently close sales opportunities is to develop "products" (not technology).  To do this, as hard as it seems, startups should stay away from their comfort zone and develop less technology, and focus their investment on the technology-to-product transition, only working with a few key strategic customers.  Only this would provide the fastest possible way to get to a selling product and a movement towards positive cash flow.

Monday, March 16, 2009

Feature-driven product marketing: A sure way to get frog-leaped!

In 199_ (and I'm not mentioning which year) I got my first product marketing job.  It was all I wanted to do after I got my MBA -- I wanted to drive the definition and completion of products.  I was coming in from an applications (sales) engineering position right into product marketing, which I thought would give me a good view on what customers needed and what the product had to look like -- and it did.  I started right away defining a feature list, prioritizing them, cost-analyzing them, getting customer feedback, drive the schedules, etc.  I quickly found out that product marketing is a thankless job: there are too many people to make happy (customers, R&D, sales, executives, partners, etc.) and there's no way to make them all happy; and you're constantly trying to connect all of the dots and pick up the loose ends.

During my first months of product marketing, one of the company's more experienced marketers, pulled me aside, as he was leaving the company, and told me not to sweat the "small stuff" like features, etc. and instead focus my thoughts and work on positioning and the overall vision of how the product is changing the industry.  That "lecture" didn't make any sense at all!  I had a lot of respect for him, so I did take note of what he said, but it really didn't change the way I went about product marketing at the time.

As a few years have passed by and I moved up through the ranks and eventually became a  executive, his comments began to make more and more sense.  In fact, I have come to the conclusion than feature-driven product marketing only sets your product for long-term failure.  It makes you focus on incremental change.  It is very surprising that a lot of my colleagues and consultant, and some that I have the ultimate respect for (example), still predominantly push a feature-driven approach to marketing.  I do realize that pitching a feature-driven approach works much better with less experienced CEOs and it is a better "consulting sell", but I'm not convinced if it's what really creates differentiation for their client companies.  I'd go back to what my old colleague told me -- product marketing provides a lot more value if focused on the overall positioning (i.e. how differently the product is solving the customer problem) and the long term vision of how it's bringing non-incremental value to the customer (technically and financially).

One way to drive this point is to highlight that if someone in the car industry polled customers in 1900's about how a car should look like, the customers would have all said they'd want a carriage with a horse that eats less and craps less.  [Excuse the French!]

Monday, March 2, 2009

Blog time! Just do it!

I didn't get a chance to write in my blog last week - I was just too busy.  There's a whole bunch of things I have lined up to blog about (so stay tuned) but since I'm guilty of ignoring my own blog, I thought it's maybe time to blog about blogging itself!

As it turns out, within a 24 hour period last week, I heard the response "... but I don't want to write about myself ..." as I was recommending my fellow consultants to go ahead and start a blog.  It was interesting to hear the same response from two different very accomplished business people, and it got me started thinking about their reaction.

Very often, when we talk about blogging and social media, people just think about the technology.  "Oh, I need to get on Facebook!",  "I must twitter", "Should I use Word Press or Blogger?", etc.  We all fail to see that these are just distribution channels.  No wonder there are so many "all about me" blogs out there - people just wanted to get a blog going and didn't consider their audience, their platform, etc. and so they started blogging about something they were very verse about (themselves).  And that's probably why the first reactions I got was "I don't want to write about myself", like that's all blogging is about!

Blogging happens to be a strong element of a larger branding campaign.  It doesn't matter if its a branding campaign for a Fortune 500 company or branding of an individual.  It's even bigger piece of the branding exercise if it's for an individual, a consultant, or a small company.  Blogging creates a voice, and it is nearly impossible to take on a thought leadership brand if the company (or individual) has no voice.  So, in that case, blogging is an essential part of establishing yourself as a thought leader.

Besides the "I don't want to write about myself comment", other common responses are "what if my position on something offends a client or prospect?" or "I don't want to give people a chance to comment negatively on my product or thought!".  Now, these are a more valid concerns.

However, blogging is about having a take, especially if you want to have a blog that is differentiated.  Having a take doesn't necessarily require stirring up controversy, but it does mean that you need to take a stance on something.  If your blog is "safe" it's most likely boring (unless it's a "how to" blog --- which then doesn't do much for the thought leadership brand).  And boring is not a good thing ..... bottom line: want it or not, having a take is a part of creating a position of thought leadership.

On the other response: if people have something to comment on negatively, what better place to have those comments aired than on your own blog? - where you have ample opportunity to respond, but even better where you have an chance to link to other pages with similar responses and comments, and increase your page rank!  The negative comments are getting blogged somewhere, at least if they happen on your own blog, you know about them and can keep them under control.  As a friend of mine said, if your teenagers are going to drink, they're better drinking in your own house with you around!