Yammer is facebook for Business! – Product Positioning and Messaging!

Yammer is facebook for Business! – This was apparently the Product Positioning choice of its own CEO.  The CEO thinks that this is good shorthand for conveying what his product is all about. It could also be meant in a pejorative way. Users could feel that the user interfaces and functionality are too similar to each other, and so may not be too original!

Here is a funny example of bad product positioning:

This product claims that it can not only clean your skin but also gives you a burst of energy? Sort of Dove Soap combined with Red Bull? What else can it do? Increase your brain power and makes all your kids geniuses?

On the other hand, here is a terrific example of both excellent product positioning and messaging together:

http://youtu.be/lpCJ-H0iUzI

If you watch the ad carefully, you will see the words Born in America on the front of the truck and the camera dwells on it for a few seconds before it moves on. Also you see the word Tundra in huge letters on the side of the truck. This is because their main competitors in this class of truck are Ford, Dodge Ram and Chevy.  They bombard the airwaves with ads that claim that they are tough american trucks implying that Toyota trucks are not. So with this one commercial Toyota is trying to message two things.1. that they are tough enough to tow a space shuttle and 2. that these trucks are not only manufactured in the US,  but designed also in the US! Here are some samples of what Toyota was up against:

Built Ford Tough!

http://youtu.be/Bp6wgu3-uwk

Here is the other big competitor for Toyota – Dodge Ram.

http://youtu.be/s4qNhYBp59k

Product Positioning involves broadly the following:

*   The Product Category or the market in which the product will compete. Could be broad ones like Social Media, Business to Consumer (B2C), Business to Business(B2B), etc. or narrower than that,  like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for Textile SME companies, for example.

*   Defining the Encapsulation or the Attributes of the product that define the Product Space more completely. Could be Status Updates, Images, Videos, Instant Messaging in the case of a Social Media product or attributes like Prospect Registration, Prospect Emails, Contact Tracking, etc in the case of a CRM product for SMEs.

*   Surveying the perceptions of a sampling of prospects, customers and clients about your product or idea or existing solutions from competitors. This is one area learning up on Lean Startups and how those methods are used could be invaluable..

*    Visualizing or mapping where your product stands in relation to others in the market.

*    Determining your current location in the Product Mapping and assessing how well your product fits the market.

*     Making adjustments to your product positioning and features so that you are comfortable with the new Product/Market fit that the changes would bring you.

Documentum is a great example of how a company changed its positioning a few times to become one of the most successful Document Management Software companies. They first started with a custom solution to store, index and retrieve Training Manuals for Boeing. They then morphed into a Document Management solution for Pharmaceutical companies that required a similar solution to manage a new experimental drug’s FDA approval process. They needed a system to store large volumes of data in documents and spreadsheets, index them and make them available through search easily. In addition they wanted a system where someone could check out a document for editing and check it back in when done. You don’t want two people copying a document, making changes independently and over writing each others’ edits. Their next move was to make this a general document management system that could be useful for many other groups of people – like attorneys and paralegals to store and edit filings for cases. Today they are part of EMC corporation who integrated workflow systems with the Documentum document management system to add to its utility.

The above is also a great example of how a “document management system” category could be merged with another category “workflow systems” to create a super category “Collaborative Environments”  to compete with other products like Microsoft Sharepoint Portal.

 Product Messaging involves the following and follows Product Positioning:

*  Following proper Product Positioning, the proper messaging efforts starts with profiling your prospect, client or customer depending upon what your product is. What is the buyer Persona or Personas?

*  What is your product’s value proposition to each of your buyer personas?

*  Evaluating your product’s value proposition. This is one area where Lean Startup methods come in handy again.  Is it as valuable to your customer personas as you think they are?

*  Evaluating your competitors’ messages

*  Crafting your own messaging

*  Testing your messaging

*  Rolling out your messaging but do testing and refining on a continuous basis

Here’s a great example of how Steve Jobs keeps the messaging about Macs, iPods and iPhones very simple and keeps it to the point!

http://youtu.be/of_8iC6P9Cg

Product positioning is critical to a product start-up’s growth and determines to a large extent what your messaging will be. It may be possible to change the positioning drastically earlier in a start-up’s life  but as you line up customers and revenues,  it may become more difficult to pivot. Clean slate approaches where you change the name of the company and the product is also possible and done often!  This is also when you realize that you need one or two other competitors in a product space to make it a proper category! Categories always make it easier to describe what you are doing  and explain what makes you different. Investors are also comfortable with categories since they provide some validation of the product space. If you have competitors, others may have invested in them and so, reduces risk for them!

I learnt the hard way about positioning in business, about catering to the right segments – Shaffi Mather.

Catching small fish can pay big.

For sure big fish can get you more meat but there also less number of those in that deep blue sea. Pound for pound, the fisherman still prefers to cast the net with small holes – getting easy food in copious amount. 

Unfortunately the fisherman logic is somewhat lost to a vast majority of the enterprise companies in the world. India is home of a vast and complex array of small business. If you could catch them – the results will be equally copious.  Let’s look closely at the small business owners: 

Bigger businesses have more power. You may be able to get more revenue from them but making real bottom line – the profits will not be easy. Look at the example of telecom operator dealings with Mobile VAS companies. For every rupee received from the customers, mobile operators were able to keep 80 paisa while giving only 20 paisa to the original creators of the product. 

Small businesses are actually big business before they actually became big. You catch them young if you can get them. And they will be loyal to you as they grow because you are so deeply ingrained with them. 

With small business you have access to unpaid product managers. Think about the amount and quality of the feedback directly from CEO and founders of the small business you get. Those feedbacks are incredibly useful and can form the basis of amazing leaps in the value of your product. The best of all – it is all free. 

Now that you happy and all gung-ho on reaching to cast the net, let me also talk about a bit about the stumbling blocks. Like everything in life, the benefits do not come easy. You have be careful about multiple when you are trying to sell to small business: 

Selling to small business is the deal between you and the director of the company. It requires face to face meetings and real conversations. The trust does not come easy. This means, you have to spend your own personal time with the sales. 

Small businesses today are on social media. Social media is very inexpensive way to reach to your target markets. You got to learn how to use it for your advantage. If you are a new age entrepreneur you probably already have mastered the art. If not, find your “Always-on-Twitter-and-Facebook buddy” and get some tips. Be very nimble because your customers are nimble now. For big companies, the sales cycle is typically in months. For small business, the sales cycle is in weeks. You have to match their speed with your own to close the deal.

If you are careful with these, I am sure you will have large diversified and loyal customer base – the best quality customer base any company can desire.

SaaS #MadeinIndia Products – Social Media

As Batman (or a CEO, Founder, Partner) would want somethings to be done, or not done, and especially with a plethora of multiple social media channels to be on, a marketing guy, or a social media girl, or anyone handling social media for a company will always have a tough time.

So, then what is the solution? Well, a lot of smart made in India products have come out solving this same problem for a bunch of businesses. To manage all their social media accounts in 1 place, be it Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin etc.

So we created a list again of SaaS products made from India, specifically focussing on solving this problem around Social Media, this list is not exhaustive, and we hope to get a lot of feedback on more companies and products from you, so please drop in a comment or email us and we will add those companies as well.

Some of them are (in alphabetical order):

1. Crowdnub – Build and launch your rich custom-like Social app in minutes. Re-purpose, re-use, the smarter social app platform.

2. Beevolve – All in one Social Media Monitoring and Measurement Software

3. EaseSocial – EaseSocial automates all your social media campaigns. It allows you to view all the online conversations about your brand and products in real time.

4. Grabinbox – Manage multiple social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.

5. Konnect Social – Monitor & analyze all brand conversations from one simple tool.

6. Mangoapps – MangoApps uniquely combines Enterprise Social Networking, Team Collaboration tools and Intranet pages into one breakthrough product.

7. Markitty – making online marketing on social media easy.

8. MuHive – Customer Engagement on Steroids

9. SaltSocial – Social Media Monitoring and Engagement Dashboard for agencies and organizations.

10. Simplify360 – World’s first 360′ Social Media Marketing Suite

11. SocialAppsHQ – Social media monitoring, actionable analytics, engagement tools, viral apps and so much more in one easy-to-use platform.

12. Sokrati – Propel engagement and conversations via Social Media Marketing.

13. Unmetric – The Social Media benchmarking company for brands.

14. ViralMint – Viral Marketing and customer acquisition platform around social.

If you have any other suggestions, and we have missed out on any, please help us further, email us or put in a comment.

The next SaaS #madeinIndia products focus will be on business phone systems.