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Does your customer know what you are talking about?

Let us face it, technology startups are often founded by geeks, employ geeks and hence are, more often than not, geekdoms. There is tremendous value in it. However, there is a significant downside to this as it relates to communication.  Geeks speak geekspeak and unfortunately that is all the customers hear a lot of times. This is a HUGE mistake.

Never forget who you are in the business for. It is your customers. If your value proposition is not clear to the customer, you will perish. The customer needs to see value. She needs to know that you understand her pain and will help her. She needs empathy not geekspeak. And this is true even when you are speaking to tech buyers. You need to be very clear on how you and only you understand the pain they are feeling and can help them. If you can establish that empathy and can weave it into the product you are pitching, you are already ahead of the competition.

Abandon the geekspeak and the discussions on all the bells and whistles that your product has. Instead, focus on business value it creates or the business pain it alleviates. Use simple, easy to understand language. For example, instead of saying “the product has an enterprise class data warehouse based on a dimensional data model, supported by all major RDBMs, that houses information from disparate sources”, you can say that “using a single repository of data all the business users see the same version of truth. This allows for accurate and timely decision making and meaningful interdepartmental communication”. By eliminating geekspeak you have shown how the product is meaningful to the business user. Nice technology is good, in fact it is essential, but it is not an excuse for clearly articulated benefits. It is almost as though most technology companies operate behind a cloud of geekspeak, and it is the company that breaks through the clouds and communicates simply, that stands out.

So, spend some time. Understand the business problem you are solving, develop empathy with your potential customers and analyze your competition. You should then be able to come up with a story that resonates with the customer. If you are able to do that, you have the power to change the dialog, project yourself as the hero and differentiate yourself from the competition. And that can’t be a bad thing.

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10 No-Brainer Marketing Lessons for Nerds

Marketing a product is always tricky business. Step into a marketing discussion and it invariably ends with, “Should we really be spending so much on marketing? Isn’t there a better (read: cheaper) way to do this?” Now observe the marketing head honcho whose responsibility it is to get the product into the hands of users. He or she will scrunch the shoulders into a compact shape, ready for the tackle. You instinctively know the two tactics that will be used: First, he or she is going to talk about the need the company has to get its brand under the nose of users and next parade the marketing figures of successful competitors in the hope that reluctant bean counters will write the marketing cheque from sheer fright.

I don’t know if you noticed, but the head honcho just used the two key tenets of marketing we can all learn from:

You can market something only when there is a need. Figure out why someone needs something. Then fill the gap.

There are lessons in what others have done. First observe; if necessary, follow.

These are seemingly simple – and obvious – guidelines for successful marketing. But over the years I’ve noticed that techies make several marketing mistakes that can be easily avoided. These should serve you well if you are planning to release a software product for the first time:

  1. Don’t sell anything that is half baked: If you think the product is not ready, don’t waste time and money marketing it. Good marketing can’t fix a bad product.
  2. Don’t sell anything that the customer doesn’t need: Stop trying to convince others that your product has more features than competition. Focus instead on how your product meets customer needs better.
  3. Don’t blitz the customer with jargon: Chances are that the person about to buy your product doesn’t understand a word of technology. Would you buy a product you don’t understand? The same applies to your customer.
  4. Don’t believe you are the product’s ideal user: Often, a product begins by trying to solve a problem its user experienced. Over a period of time, this leads to the mistaken impression that the developer is the best use case. Remember, you are not trying to sell to yourself.
  5. Don’t bulldoze the customer with information: Don’t think a thick brochure or a 60-minute slide presentation that explains everything about your product can sell better than a sentence or a paragraph. You know that no one has time (otherwise, why would Twitter be such a killer of an idea?). Now make your marketing strategy understand that.
  6. Don’t spend marketing rupees without a sales process: This is a problem typical of start-ups. You may go and spend on fancy collateral, online media, cute videos, a stunning website, mobile marketing and discover you have customers but no sales process in place. By the time you wake up, the customer is gone.
  7. Don’t sell to customers who don’t have the budgets (or think of innovative business models for them): You can sell, but only if your customer has the budget to buy your product. In really crude words, target your customer better. If your customer doesn’t have the budget think of innovative business models that can co-opt the customer (outcome oriented pricing, co-ownership, pay-as-you-go, rental, profit sharing, etc).
  8. Don’t believe that marketing is maths: Just because you can measure some metrics doesn’t mean you can completely manage marketing by applying a couple of formulas. You can bet Steve Jobs did not have a metric to measure his ability to market Apple products. So, use instinct, see what works for you. On the other hand, don’t ignore the story marketing metrics are telling you!
  9. Don’t ignore the mistakes: Even a company like Google has seen hundreds of failures. Remember Google X? It was a version of a Google home page launched in 2005 that was made to look like a Mac OS interface. The bottom of the page said, “Roses are red. Violets are blue. OS X rocks. Homage to you.” Google removed it within a day of launch. Can’t imagine Google wanting to do anything with Apple today, can you?
  10. Don’t slash prices: The idea of marketing is to sell and make profit, right? So why hurt yourself by slashing prices? Instead, keep pricing realistic and competitive (unless you hold a monopoly in the market, in which case, why would you be wasting your time reading this?). With right-pricing, your customers will know you are in the market competing with your product, not with a price tag.

 

 

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Just open the door for me, I can close the sale

In the course of my career, I can’t remember how many times I have heard some version of this phrase from entrepreneurs. In fact, there is a thriving industry that has grown to service exactly this need: door openers that use their connections to get warm introductions to companies for a retainer and a commission. Even with that, why is it that most startups fail for lack of sales? Is it because the introductions weren’t warm enough? the entrepreneurs weren’t competent enough? the product wasn’t good enough? or something else?

In this series of blog posts I will explore some of the reasons behind this and what can be done to mitigate the risk of failure.

In my view, the failing is in the mindset which leads to a flawed approach. Having a repeatable, scalable sales and go-to-market strategy is not akin to flinging stuff on a wall and seeing what sticks. You need a plan. You also need to be nimble and reduce your burn rate. Most of all you need commitment from the executive team. The good news is that there are people that have thought through this. In fact, it would do entrepreneurs a lot of good to learn more about Steve Blank and Eric Ries.

Steve Blank (steveblank.com) has written extensively on developing a customer before you even go ahead and develop a product. There is a lot of truth to that but it may not always be easy to do.  Not to worry. In case of companies that already have an offering but are looking to penetrate new markets or grow in existing ones, it will do them a world of good to understand the needs of potential customers before doing much else. There may be an unmet need that they can exploit.  There may be channels that can be used, partners that can be leveraged. The point is that, if you elicit potential customer feedback, you will likely spend less time and money and have a greater chance of success, than if you were to enter the market and tried your “luck”.

Eric Ries (http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/) has taken the philosophy behind the “Lean Manufacturing” techniques developed at Toyota Corporation and applied them to startups. The key philosophy is to have multiple, quick, low-cost trials of the product with real customers to figure out what customers really value and throw out what they don’t. The idea being that you don’t end up spending millions of dollars and many months in developing something that the customers don’t care much about.

There is a lot to learned from these gentlemen. There is a lot also to be learned from one’s own experience and other helpful individuals’. So, dear entrepreneur, slow down a bit, assimilate information, think, and then act. It will do you a lot of good. Above all, know that entering new markets or developing new customers is hard work that requires time, thought and resources. It is not just a matter of opening doors. If anybody tells you otherwise, then I have a bridge to sell you.

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3 objectives your homepage has to accomplish

As a tech startup, your homepage is the first encounter a visitor will have with your business. The first real encounter. And as a business, what is it that you would like to convey during this encounter? Ideally, you would talk for 30 hours straight but then people have lives to live, promises to keep and food to eat. So what do you do?

Get your homepage to cover you on three simple grounds. Three primary objectives. Here they go.

What’s your promise?

Every company has a promise. The promise answers the question Why should I look at your products? and sets the expectations before the visitor takes a dive into your offerings. Are your products the easiest to use in the market? Most powerful? Reliable?

For companies having a single offering, it is the promise of that single product itself. MailChimp promises easy email newsletters as opposed to Campaign Monitor’s beautiful email newsletters.

MailChimp's Homepage

For companies having multiple offerings, it is the common promise that runs along all the products, more like the promise of the company. 37signals’ promise is making collaboration productive and enjoyable for people every day while Atlassian’s promise is to help innovators everywhere plan, build, and launch great software.

Atlassian's hompage

However, if you have been chosen as the special one and different products of yours have different promises, it is best to stick to the promise of your flagship product.

Talk about your products
This is a drill you know all too well, so I will just focus on how this differs for a multi-product company from a single-product company.

If you are a company with a single offering, just talk about the benefits of your product liberally sprinkled with examples and use cases like FreshBooks does. FreshBooks' Homepage For multi-product companies, it is best to display the most important products from the portfolio with a short description of them and link them to the respective product pages. 37signals Homepage Remember the homepage is not about throwing all the information you have in your visitor’s face, it is about sending them the right way in the right frame of mind.

Build credibility

Would you have dinner at a restaurant where you would be their first guest at 10 pm? Would you go to a concert that starts in 2 hours but has sold only 300 tickets till now? No. If there isn’t anyone else at the restaurant, or there aren’t thousands of people attending the concert already, it just isn’t good. Period.

Human beings are social animals, and for us to be convinced that something is worth our time and money, we need to be told that other people have used the product earlier and found it to be food. We need to be ascertained of the credibility. And as a tech startup, you establish credibility using customer names, testimonials, success stories and press coverage. If you have all of them in aplenty, the world just gave you a standing ovation. If not, a couple of them work fine too.

Campaign Monitor's Homepage

However, building credibility is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. A prospect will become a customer only if he can see a customer list, and you can have a customer list only if prospects convert to become customers. In cases like these, get customers to invest emotionally instead — tell them the story of your company, show them the pedigree of your founders and give them a behind-the-scenes peek.

Final words

Of course, you can get creative with the order and medium of the obejctives I mention above. You can have a 90-sec video, an illustration where your mascot does all the talking, screenshots of the product itself or wax eloquent in good old text.

What’s your take? Do you think there’s anything else that a product homepage has to have?

Cross Post – PokeandBite.com

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Marketing: “Line Extension Trap” – How SMEs can use this to take on big boys in their own game!!

This is more of a go-to-marketing issue rather than juts marketing per say. This issue
is mainly suffered not by startups but mainly those who probably has a product which
is selling and doing good and now thinking what is the next product I should do or
even those say who are in services successful in one area and want to enter another
or say those who are successful in services and now want to enter products. Basically
those who are successful in what they are doing and now want to enter another area
under the same brand name. This is one of hotly debated topics in the marketing
world which is the “line extension strategy” and “line extension trap”. In fact this is
the problem plaguing most big MNCs and enterprises (and even small and medium
sized companies looking for expansion) and that confusion is something our SMEs
should take advantage of (when dealing with the Big boys of the industry).

Most so called enterprises need to keep growing at a constant pace else they will be
looked down in the stock market and they have to keep looking out on expansion.
Here comes the trouble – where do you expand? There are many ways and I broadly
classify them into two as “the market line extension” and “the technology line
extension”. In technology line extension you base the technology as the common
factor, have multiple products which have similar technology base and then try to
serve probably different markets. Then there is market line extension where in you
extend to other products which are in line with your other products in the market
but may be very different in technology and implementation. In the former, easy for
engineers very tough for marketing and sales and in the latter, easy for market and
sales but very tough to engineering and also lot tougher time to market too. What
decision you take on this “line extension” many a times depends on the pedigree of
the decision maker (say CEO) and this is where the Line Extension can fall into “Line
extension Trap” and push the company spiraling down the hole. Most of the decision
makers from technology background take the former route where as those from the
business and marketing or even sales background take the latter approach.

My opinion after seeing many companies faltering is that, it is better to err on the
marketing side because that is closest to the customer and you don’t have to rebrand
or change the perception in the mind of the customer (what is called positioning)
when you do a natural line extension (in the minds of the customer) compared to
when you do a technological line extension where in your brand suddenly stands for

two totally different things and you lose ground in both places and I call this “Line
Extension trap” and I have seen many companies make the same mistake of taking
the technologically route rather than the Marketing route and you lose your existing
dominance as you are seen going away to the other markets and you get killed or
fiercely defended in the other markets because there is already a leader who will
defend his territory to the hilt. Ofcourse you will suffer in your own market because
the competitions (like SMEs who have laser focus) will start describing the big guy no
longer belongs to this market and solidify their position as the expert in that area. This
is where the SMEs need to keep a close eye on their big brother competitor and as
soon as they fall for this “line-extension-trap”, time to attack the market and make it
your own

There are lot more strategies and learning’s in this topic and I will keep them for
ensuing articles but in the meantime if you have any questions, concerns or if you
disagree with me, please do drop me an email to [email protected]

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4 Secrets to Pitching Your Product

Your products are finally off the production line and ready to sell to retailers.  But where do you begin? Or maybe your brand is successful in regional retailers but you can’t seem to get your foot into big box retailers. The truth is, it’s not enough to have an amazing product. You also need to have a solid business plan to present to retail buyers.

Based on our experience from both the buying and selling sides of the retail table, and now sharing advice to help entrepreneurs get into national retail locations, here are four pitch strategies we’ve found hit the sweet spot of retail buyers across America.

1. Answer the question, “What’s in it for me?” A common mistake is to focus on what the retailer can do for your product. Expand your thinking! A key to capturing a buyer’s interest is showing them how your product meets her financial needs and strategic vision. Financial needs are usually related to revenue or profit margin. Strategic vision can be corporate goals or growth strategies.

For example, let’s say your company, Friendly Tools, sells manual hand tools that are easy to use, compact for storage and designed with the novice user in mind. Think about the strategies important to the home improvement retailer you are targeting. If their goal is to attract more novice home improvement do-it-yourself-ers (DIYers), the following demonstrates how Friendly Tools’ can rework their retail pitch to align with this retailer’s needs:

  • The Friendly Tools brand of manual tools can help drive traffic and sales among your target shopper: the novice home improvement DIYer.
  • Friendly Tools can help to increase your top-line revenues with our unique brand positioning of “Made by DIYers for DIYers.” No other competitive brand competes in this space, therefore, our product line won’t cannibalize sales of your current products. Rather, we can help you bring in additional revenue.

Original post can be accessed at Open Forum. Posted by Romy Taormina and Vanessa Ting

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Untested ideas to increase the effectiveness of your B2B newsletter

What does a typical B2B newsletter look like? An announcement from the company talking about the latest feature. A featured blog post with a link to read more and a list of other “must-read” blog posts. New success stories, white papers and how-to videos. And upcoming events, webinars and job openings in some cases. It pretty much sums up everything the company wants the recipient to know. But what makes the recipient take more than a 3-sec glimpse at the newsletter when he is sifting through tens, if not hundreds, of emails? Wouldn’t he rather hit your website at a time convenient to him and learn all of it from there? What can you do to increase the open rate and time spent with your newsletter? Here are two untested ideas, more simply just ideas, to increase the overall effectiveness of your email newsletter.

How about writing an article exclusively for the newsletter as its main story? The article doesn’t go up on your blog or get tucked away in the resources section after the newsletter goes out, not even after a fortnight. It is for the newsletter and stays just there. If the reader misses it, he misses it. Tell people about the exclusivity when they are signing up for the newsletter. Also, make sure this article teaches the recipient at least 23 new ways of doing his job better. So if you are selling an email marketing solution (how meta I know) give him tips on how to break through the inbox clutter, or how QR codes can be used to get super busy people to sign up for the newsletter. In addition to increasing the open rate of your newsletter, the exclusive content also primes the space for a big bang when you announce a new product.

Now what about the case where your newsletter hits the inbox at a time when the recipient doesn’t want anything to do with email marketing? How can you get him to at least glance through the newsletter and come back to it later if he finds something of interest? How about having a cartoon strip that takes a dig at the jargons used in the email marketing space? Or a meme bringing forth epic email marketing fails? Maybe an email marketing version of Clients from Hell? Anything that gives the reader a quick chuckle yet is relevant to your industry. And if you are funny enough, he might pass around the newsletter to colleagues and friends just for the funnies, who knows?

Over to you. Do you think these ideas will work for you? What else have you tried to increase the effectiveness of your newsletter?

Original Post can be accessed at PokeandBite.com

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5 Indian companies that get marketing

Indians have been known to be poor marketers for long, especially when it comes to taking products to the world. It is easy to blame the lack of good management schools for this but there are a whole lot of other softer aspects at play – limited exposure to different cultures around the world, limited hobbies with watching pirated movies being the favorite one, poor taste in things proven by the fact that Chetan Bhagat still writes and the lack of a sense of humor. And it gets even worse in the tech world where talking to a screen for sixteen hours ensures normal conversation skills are gone out of the window too. But the good news is things are changing. The last 2-3 years have seen a bunch of companies who know better than to put lame plugs in every forum they can lay their hands on, and blast emails starting with “Dear Sirs/Madam.”

This post brings to you 5 Indian startups and small businesses that really get marketing. These are companies that have been able to cut through the noise and claim their rightful positions in the market. These are your new homegrown marketing heros.

Visual Website Optimizer (Wingify) #1

Visual Website Optimizer is in the business of selling A/B testing tools to help marketers increase sales and conversions. When it comes to their own marketing, they don’t do anything different or fancy. They just focus on getting the basics right and measure it down to the smallest decimal. Then they play around with the page heading, call-to-action buttons, microcopy and measure it again. Rinse and repeat.

What they get right:

  • Clean website that explains the product, builds credibility and leads the user to try it out instantly.
  • Obsession with numbers. For every feature and success story, they mention how they increased conversions by 137% rather than over 100% or multiple times.
  • Excellent blog with fundamentals of A/B testing, case studies from varying domains and enough sparks to get the reader to try out their own tests.

What they don’t (aka unsolicited advice):

  • The sea of numbers gets a little too mechanical at times and Visual Website Optimizer could bring a more human touch to their communications. The homepage could tuck in an image of actual people using their product. Ditto for their banners which just have their tagline slapped on them. Also their blog posts need to have the author names displayed prominently so the readers know whom to address in the comments. People connect to people, not to some faceless entity.

Zomato #2

Zomato is India’s largest restaurant guide. For them, a major part of their marketing is done by the product itself. A clean interface, comprehensive restaurant info and in-depth reviews by passionate foodies makes this the goto destination for everything food. I have made sure to pass on the word to all fellow foodies and gluttons.

What they get right:

  • The social aspects they introduced recently with a foodie leaderboard of sorts, an option to follow other foodies and trending restaurants. I call myself a foodie on most of my online bios but have never written a restaurant review. Now with the added incentive, I sat down to write a couple of my own reviews and started following people who I see have similar tastes.
  • The rebranding from Foodiebay to Zomato. It allowed them to expand into other verticals without the name being a constraint, and kept legal troubles with eBay at bay.
  • Their events and contests. While I haven’t participated in any of them, I can see a lot of buzz on Facebook every time there is one happening.

What they don’t:

  • Blog. Have you ever clicked on the prominent blog link from their main navigation? It takes you to a blog talking about their learnings along the startup journey. Now people come to Zomato to know more about restaurants and food, not about startups. They should have a blog talking about the new hotspots in the city, dishes to try out, restaurant reviews and overall trends from the world of food. Funny thing is they do have another blog calledZomato Crunch talking about a bunch of the topics I mentioned, but it gets no love from the main website. I don’t remember how I chanced upon it and have to google the name to get there every time.
  • Twitter over-flooding. A lot of people ask Zomato for restaurant recommendations when they are in a new city or want to discover more places to eat. Zomato just re-tweets it out and during the weekends, it ends up clogging my timeline. So here’s what I would suggest – Link to content on Zomato Crunch from the main handle and have another handle for helping fellow foodies with restaurant recommendations, maybe even different ones for different cities.
  • Banner ads. Zomato was able to beat Burrp at the food game owing to their cleaner interface. However, with multiple ads slapped on the right panel every time you are checking out a restaurant (and most of them are yuck!!) this will come in the very way of what got them to ramp up so quickly. Of course they need to make money for which they could either do sponsored listings, or go the Google Adwords way.

Cleartrip #3

Cleartrip is another company where the product does the talking. Every time I have to book an air ticket, it’s straightaway Cleartrip for me. I don’t even bother checking any other place.

The funny part about Cleartrip’s marketing is I haven’t seen them market their product at all. Their blog talks about a couple of TV ads but the only time I have seen them are on their YouTube channel. They focus on making their product simpler every single day and that’s what they talk about on their blog and Twitter. And they have been able to build quite a fanfare going that route.

What they get right:

  • Positioning. In an industry where everyone has been screaming “Save 30%, DISCOUNT!!!, Rs 1500/- off” for years, they have been able to carve a niche for themselves targeting business travelers and developing loyal customers (don’t really have numbers on this but I am sure there are more people like me).
  • Twitter timing strategy. Every time they have something new to tweet about, you will see 2-3 tweets coming from their account one after the other. All of them are re-worded versions of the same tweet, but this tactic ensures that you are not going to miss the tweet as you scroll down your timeline.
  • No junk emails. In an industry where constant emails talking about discounts to places I never want to go to are the norm, Cleartrip again stands apart. I have never received an email from them that I wasn’t expecting. And the emails that I get are very nicely done.

What they don’t:

  • SEO. If you google for “flight tickets”, even Cleartrip throws “free”, “cheap”, “save 15%” in the paid results and more surprisingly in the organic ones too. While they say these SEO tactics are working well for them, they could probably do better leveraging the Cleartrip brand name and mentioning how easy it is to book tickets with Cleartrip.

Freshdesk #4

Freshdesk provides help desk software, a crowded space having bigger players like Zendesk and Desk.com. But with the right marketing stunts (and I guess a good product), they have been able to create their own space in the market. Their biggest stunt came when a cloud analyst Ben Kepes called them a Zendesk rip-off just because of the “desk” in their name. The Zendesk CEO joined in the attack too and then one of Kepes’ Twitter followers called them a bunch of Indian cowboys. Freshdesk created a separate website detailing these blows, mentioning that they are proud Indians and talking about how Freshdesk outshines Zendesk. The entire incident made Hacker News glory too. Since then, Freshdesk has kept at it and is now a popular name in the help desk space.

What they get right:

  • Keep true to their name. All their communications have the element of freshness liberally sprinkled through them. Their blog supposedly gets you “Your daily dose of peppermints, orange juice and oatmeal cookies” and they have a whitepaper…err green paper…called “Is your support team ready for a zombie apocalypse?” And no, they are not wannabe attempts at being cool. They are cool.
  • Positioning. Have positioned themselves as an underdog rival against the mightier Zendesk, they are able to generate excellent media coverage for themselves.

What they don’t:

  • Discounts. Their website has so many “discounts” and “free” slapped all around that you are bound to ask for one even if their product is the best thing since sliced bread. Also playing too heavily on the discounts angle makes it look like the product is inferior.
  • Website navigation. There were a bunch of times when I had no idea which section of the website was I in, or what was I supposed to do next. The different navigation structures at the top and bottom certainly don’t help, and neither does the absence of breadcrumbs.

??? #5

I cheated. I am only going to give you four companies that get marketing. You, my friend, give me one.

Which Indian company do you admire for their marketing? The idea is not just to create the initial big bang, but to be at it regularly measuring and improving as you go along. If that company is yours, don’t be shy. Just be ready to explain why. Over to you.

Original post can be accessed at Pokeandbite.com

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Want mass media coverage? Dumb down your story.

As a startup or small business, getting covered in The Economic Times or India Today can give your business the wings it needs. Investors take notice. Smart people working elsewhere look up your company. Team members thump their chest and show the coverage to their wives and girlfriends. You reach potential customers too if India is a part of your target market. Now, if you are in a sexy consumer business, getting covered is not difficult. Ask Zomato. Or those online lingerie people. But what if you are in a business your mom doesn’t understand a word of?

The thing with mass media is that they only cover stories that inspire, educate, entertain or piss off the common man. Your job is to figure out how to do that. Your job is to dumb down your story to fit the mould. Or sex it up, which is pretty much the same thing from the other side of the fence.

As a tech business, you have to be ready to take the product out of the equation and work another angle into the story. Was the company founded by two 16-year olds? Did you have 70 customers even before you had the product ready? How about having no HR member even with a 100-person team? The common man loves crazy. Was the company started from Shillong? Are you entering a game that Google has been playing for long? The common man loves underdogs. He loves drama. The smell of blood. Cleavage.

When I was at FusionCharts, we were able to generate some good press for ourselves and I will take you through one of the stories we created. If you really want to know, FusionCharts helps you create delightful charts in JavaScript. The common man doesn’t give a flying fuck about that. So what angle could we bring in? Turns out the angle brought itself to us.

One fine day we got to know that the Federal IT Dashboard, a project undertaken by the US government to track 600 billion dollars of IT spending, uses FusionCharts in plenty. How about we pitch that to the press? Interesting but no thanks. Just a couple of days later, we came across a picture of Barack Obama using the Federal IT Dashboard. Would “Barack Obama uses FusionCharts as a part of the Federal IT dashboard that tracks 600 billion dollars of IT spending in the US” work? 600 billion dollars is definitely impressive but what’s this Federal IT Dashboard thingy? Also the message was too long. After playing around with the language to make it crisper, we finally decided to cut it down to “Barack Obama uses FusionCharts.”

The story got covered in all leading publications of India. The press took the liberty of modifying it to suit their agenda as well. When Obama came to India in late 2010, we got to see coverage on the lines of “Barack Obama uses made-in-India FusionCharts in spite of his anti-outsourcing policies.” Over time, the story has gotten a little old but still no publication passes a chance to tuck it in some corner of a FusionCharts coverage.

Every company has a story. What’s yours?

Original Post can be accessed at Pokeandbite.com

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Tourism and technology. And Marketing.

Dubai. Singapore. London Olympics. The Olympics.

They’re all large parties.

Dubai (8th most visited in the world) knows this – markets itself well, over 7 Million people come there every year, 450 Hotels spring up, they need software to automate, a company like Knowcross benefits. (they sell to Hospitality)

Marketing brings footfalls.

Singapore (5th most visited in the world) knows this – markets itself well, over 11 Million people come there every year, over 900 hostels, each needs to manage its room iterniary, a company like Kayako can tweak its tool to make a killing.  A web based inventory manager with social plugins.

Marketing discovers opportunities.

London Olympics 2012 – the queen knows this – hires James bond to provide masala. 8.8 Million tickets were sold and now everyone wants an App for everything. A company like Trellisys should benefit.

Marketing generates money. 

Why would you not invest in Marketing? What does Sales bring?

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Get Your Story Straight

What do top technology companies have in common? Think about SalesForce, IBM,VMware, Workday, Apple, Riverbed, Cisco.  What separates market leaders and category creators from the rest of the pack?

They tell powerful stories.

Stories matter. We see it over and over again. Companies that capitalize on an inflection point and grab a leadership position always have a thought-provoking point of view that resonates with buyers. Customers buy into the story before they buy the solution. 

And a story is more than a slogan or a catchy tagline. It’s offering a different perspective, not just pushing a product. It’s a crisp, clear way of communicating how a company or a product will solve a big, hairy problem for customers. It comes from putting the customer’s needs and requirements first, not the technology or the company’s agenda.

Look at Cisco. The company wasn’t founded to sell routers and switches. It started when a husband and wife wanted to email each other from different offices at Stanford and they couldn’t. So they created the multi-protocol router and solved the problem. And they knew others wanted the same problem solved. They didn’t launch a product—they solved a problem and created a powerful story and different point-of-view. And they instilled a customer-first, problem-solving culture at Cisco. You know the rest of that story.

Need other examples? Look at game-changing CEOs Marc Benioff, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos. They disrupted markets and catapulted their companies into legendary status with conversations that re-framed the problem for buyers. They articulated their company’s value in simple, concise positioning stories and a narrative that offers a new perspective to buyers.

So if a great story is the key to success, why doesn’t every technology company have one? The reason is simple.

All too often, the responsibility for positioning is taken on by tech CEOs or product managers who are in love with their technology.  And technology moves to the forefront of the story. WRONG. Buyers don’t care what’s cool about your technology or your IP. They care what it does for them.

The most effective storylines carve out a distinct corner of the room—and box competitors in as having a solution for “yesterday’s problem” or “the right idea, but the wrong approach.”

What makes a good storyline? The most effective positioning stories MUST answer three questions for the target buyer:

#1: Why your company or product, NOW?

Tell them in clear, human terms what problem your product solves and why it’s important to solve it TODAY. Is this an old problem that has gotten worse? A new problem caused by fast-changing market dynamics? Will your buyer lose his job if he doesn’t solve this problem? Strong positioning stories empathize with the buyer’s situation and create a sense of urgency about solving a critical problem.

#2: Why is your solution different?

Once the buyer agrees with your point of view, the next question on their mind is “who else can solve this problem?” or “can my existing technology vendor take care of this for me?” Great stories lay down the logic for a new approach to solving the problem. This requires talking about your secret sauce, IP, or game-changing differentiators  in terms of business requirements. You can avoid the tedious “feature-checklist” war by articulating the need for a different approach. Different, not better, always wins.

#3: How will this improve my life six months from now?

Paint your buyer a picture of how much better their life will be with an investment in your solution. Your life is “hell” right now (big problem); here is the unique approach (our secret sauce) for solving this problem; here is what your life will soon look like.

All market leaders and category disruptors have a compelling and distinct point of view. If you want to join them, start by getting your story straight.

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The Product Business is Like the Movie Business

I read the cover story in Forbes on the success of Dropbox, which is set to do about $240 million in sales in 2011, with only 70 employees. As Forbes points out, that is about 3x the revenue per employee of Google, which is no slouch in the revenue per employee department itself. First, congratulations, Dropbox! This is the type of breathtaking number that makes the ordinarily successful companies like, well, Zoho, to wonder “What are we doing wrong?”

In our 15 year history in Zoho Corporation – which is bigger than the Zoho product suite itself – we have shipped over 70 products, of which we would say about 30 have been successful in the sense of being nicely profitable. Yet, even with that group of 30 products, we have seen the 10x effect: a set of two products that have taken approximately the same amount of effort to build, by similarly situated teams, yet one of them does 10x the sales of the other, with both of them being profitable. Of course the 10-bagger is much more profitable but the key point is that both of them could be counted as successful in the sense of being profitable. We have even seen 100x difference for approximately the same effort, but in our case, that is the difference between doing only $100K a year in sales vs $10 million a year, and I would not count that as 100x because the $100K product either grows up or we would eventually discontinue it because it is not profitable.

Dropbox is a logical extension of this phenomenon, where a product does 100x the sales, without taking much more by way of engineering effort than a profitable 1x product. And then the grand daddy of them all – Google search, which in its heyday reached $1 billion in sales, on not much more than the effort of a single engineering team – the headcount gets added later to diversify the company but the original search was a small team. I believe there has only been one Google search so far, so the ordinarily successful (ahem!) shouldn’t feel too bad.

Y Combinator, which has funded over 300 companies so far, is a perfect illustration. All these teams are similarly situated, with similar founder profiles and they all get similar initial funding, and they spend similar initial effort. If we consider only the universe of profitable YC companies, my guess is that so far there is only one 100-bagger i.e Dropbox, in the YC portfolio. Based on Zoho experience, I would estimate YC has about ten 10-baggers, and about fifty one-baggers (i.e just about profitable).

Welcome to the product business, which looks very much like the movie business!

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What makes a product “fit” a market? Or how to achieve product-market fit?

A relatively young term in an entrepreneur’s vocabulary is “product-market fit” (PMF). Attributed to Marc Andreessen in 2009, this term, has a relatively simple meaning but one that’s hard to really get a sense of:

Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.

If you go after an awesome market – growing fast, has excellent demand and a great growth curve, then you’ve got 90% product-market fit, even though technically 50% of the challenge in any startup is coming up with a good product.

Lets assume you are going after a great market.

How do you know its a great market? Besides the fact that its large (obvious) the speed of adoptionis tremendous.

What then makes a product “fit” a market?

First there are 3 important assumptions I make:

1. The best team does not necessarily create the best product.

2. The best product does not necessarily win in the market.

3. It is rare for startups or entrepreneurs to create markets.

A product “fits” a market when

1. Your metrics for adoption of your product exceed adoption of all your “competitors” combined (Instagram had more downloads in 1 week than other competitors did in 6 months)

2. There are so many missing features in your product but its still being sought after (HotorNot had no other features except an upvote and downvote)

3. The problem you solve for the user is such a big one that they are willing to forgive the lack of “nice to have” capabilities (during its early days, Twitter kept crashing daily)

The first point (metric) answers the question – What should I measure to know when I have achieved PMF?

The second point (features) answers – How can I tell?

The third point is the most important. To know about problems that are painful and large there’s one thing you need to learn, i.e. Learn how to ask the right questions!

Relevant links that I would highly recommend you read:

1. Jeff Bussgang on why early in the product cycle entrepreneurs should be hunch and not data driven.

2. Andrew Chen on “When” has a product-market fit been achieved?

3. Ash Maurya on the 3 stages of a startup and why problem-solution fit comes before product-market fit

4. Patrick’s perspectives on steps to product-market fit.

Cross Post – BestEngagingCommunities.com Contributed by Mukund Mohan. 

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8 Symptoms: You Know You Have A Positioning Problem When….

A change in strategy changes everything. It cannot be undertaken lightly.

Capitalizing on a change in strategy or inflection point often requires solving a new customer problem, selling and marketing to a different set of buyers and competing against a new group of competitors.

Yet all too often, the effort required to capture the minds and wallets of a new set of buyers is treated casually – but it is the underpinning that makes a brilliant strategy drive revenue growth.

What do all these successful, market-leading technology companies – IBM, SalesForce,Workday, Riverbed, Cisco – have in common?

They all have powerful, compelling, thought-provoking Stories. 

For these companies, Positioning has become a core competency and the road to market leadership and revenue growth.

Those technology companies that successfully capitalize on a new product, service or market inflection point have a compelling, thought provoking, engaging story. It’s that simple.

However, very few technology companies are effectively able to translate their product, service, IP and features into a message that resonates with buyers, clearly differentiates from the competition and captures the imagination of the market.

During past year, I have seen hundreds of technology positioning presentations. Over and over again, I continue to see the same positioning pitfalls – and common symptoms that point an underlying Positioning problem that is holding back the company and inhibiting revenue growth.

You know you have a positioning problem when:

1) Your Slide Deck is 30 Slides: your presentation takes too many slides to explain your solution before your buyer ‘gets-it”. Your presentation drags on in a vain attempt to sell and convince your potential buyer.

2) Long Sales Cycles and Lots of “No-Decision”: your message does not create a sense or urgency with your buyers – it’s not a “hair-on-fire” conversation – as a result, sales cycles drag out or the buyers don’t seen any difference between you and any of your competitors, so they don’t make a decision.

3) Ask 3 People What You Do and You Get 3 Different Answers: inconsistent messaging is the death-knell for any technology company. In the absence of a good story, everyone makes one up. The result is predictable. The market is confused and you don’t “own” a position in the minds of your buyer.

4) Blah, Blah, Blah – You Sound Like All Your Competitors: your message and positioning story sounds exactly like your competition – your buyer could take any of your competitor’s logo and put in on your web site and it would look the same. A glazed look has set in with your buyers – and if your buyer can’t see any discernable difference between you and your competitors, they will go with the bigger, “brand-name” competitor.

5.) Your Company is Not Considered a Player in the Market:  your blah, blah, message dissolves into the cacophony of noise in the market  – brand awareness has become brand annoyance – if your company is not considered in a every sales cycle or you are off the radar-screen with the analysts and buyers, your positioning strategy has failed and is broken.

6) You Spent a Lot of $ on PR and Got Nowhere: strategies fizzle when positioning is broken and the market is not responding to your message.  In response, you spend a lot of money on a PR campaign, thinking a drumbeat and flurry of social media posts, tweets, press releases, white papers and analyst meetings will bring you the attention and market awareness your solution rightly deserves. However, if you don’t have anything interesting to say or your “me-too” story is boring, stale and un-differentiated– no amount of PR $ or social media effort will make a hill-of-beans difference. A provocative, thoughtful, differentiated story is the underpinning essential to drive market awareness and ultimately revenue growth.

7) Your Sales People Call on Anything That Moves: long sales cycles, lots of no-decisions, high “loss” rates, deeply discounted pricing, suspect forecasts – are all symptoms of a positioning problem. Strong, effective positioning focuses the sales efforts by clearly identifying the ideal target buyer – and creating a differentiated, thought provoking story that resonates with this buyer and creates a sense of urgency for them toact. Powerful positioning is a catalyst, giving the field organization a rallying cry, strong qualifying direction and confidence they have a story that will win them deals.

8 ) You Don’t Have a Viewpoint: you don’t stand for anything – and you are contribution the same old “blah, blah, blah” to the noise in the market. Your buyers have turned off –     – do you have anything substantive to offer your buyers? What is your contribution to this industry? What new way of thinking do you contribute? Failed strategies “sell” products. Successful companies ENGAGE buyers. Engages them with new ideas, solve problems that make their lives better, provocative viewpoints that make buyers stand up and notice.

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Indian Software Startups Similar to Excitement of Late-90s Silicon Valley

Editor’s note: Sharad Sharma and M.R. Rangaswami are co-hosts of the NASSCOM Product Conclave 2011 (November 8-10, 2011), a must-attend event for software product startups. Now in its eighth year, more than 1,200 delegates from 600+ companies are expected to attend. Sharma and Rangaswami share with SandHill readers their insights on what’s happening in this dynamic market – and why U.S. buyers and software execs should keep the Indian startups on their radar screen.

One of the keynote speakers at the NASSCOM Product Conclave a couple of years back was Guy Kawasaki. In his recently published his book, “Enchantment,” he wrote that our Conclave was one of the most interesting that he had attended in the last few years because of the energy at the conference. And the energy this year is already really high. That’s because, in some respects, the Indian software products industry today is where Silicon Valley was in the 1997-98 time frame.

The Valley then was in a different era of entrepreneurship. There was enormous excitement about where the future of the world was headed and the role that the Valley could play in that. India is somewhat like that in the context of what’s happening now and the role that its software products industry can play in the economic future of India and the rest of the world. It’s a very exciting time.

Original Post at Sandhill.com