I tend to use colorful phrases and examples in my work, because it makes important points easier to communicate and remember. A couple of long-time clients recently and coincidentally sent me emails with some of the things they remember from our sessions. Since they bear on the state of the industry today and are still points I try to make, I thought I’d share them here.
The first is the best competitive position is helpless against a failure of the business case. My research on buyer behavior goes back over 30 years. In that time, I’ve learned that there are three kinds of positioning statements that matter, but they matter only under specific conditions. One position is differentiation, which compares your stuff (presumably favorably) with competitors. The second is objection management, which addresses specific likely push-backs, and the final one is enablers. These are critical because they represent the tie to the business case, the thing that enables the purchase in the first place.
You need to own enablers. The only time when differentiation or objection management matter is when enablers are contested among competitors. Today, buyers tell me that vendors spend their time explaining why they’re different, but never get to why the buyer cares in the first place. As a result, a vendor can get “traction” but never get any money. The seller who controls the enablers controls the deal, because they control the business case.
Another is that editorial presence sells website visits, website visits sell sales calls, and sales calls sell your product or service. This falls out of what I call “trajectory management”. You can’t sell anything to a buyer who doesn’t know you exist. Generally, buyers say they learn about a company from seeing its name in the media, which is what I call “editorial presence” because they’re in a story. When a buyer sees a company in an article, it’s usually associated with a product or service they’re interested in. They then go to the company’s website, and if they find information they think is useful (which might mean website or additional downloaded collateral) they’ll contact the company for a sales call.
Many companies don’t understand this simple progression. They try to get their sales message into an article, which in the first place is not going to work (the reporter won’t run it) and in the second place tries to induce a buying decision without ever making the buyer visible to the seller (which everyone in sales and marketing knows is dumb). You can’t take a sales message into a marketing channel. You get visible on a technology news site, but you sell the usual way.
A corollary to that one is “News” means “novelty”, not “truth”. For those interested, “Pravda” means truth, which is its own exercise in positioning. When you talk with reporters and analysts you have to remember what their interest is. Generally, they have to be read to be paid, so if your story is dull as dishwater, they have to find something more exciting to say or they’ve wasted their time talking with you. Something that might or might not be favorable to you, but certainly won’t be what you wanted out there.
I understand the problem of getting media attention, and the value of editorial presence as part of the trajectory I’ve talked about already. I don’t personally approve of falsehood as a means of promotion, but I can’t tell my clients that it doesn’t work or isn’t sometimes the best approach. I’ve also said that the truth is a convenient place to start a marketing story, and I tend to call press stories “fables” because they convey a message without getting too bogged down in reality. If you’re a reader of the media, keep all this in mind.
Here’s another media-related saying: Everyone is the same size in a ten-point font. Positioning for the media is about being exciting, interesting, newsworthy. You don’t have to be a big company to get “good ink” as the saying goes, but you do need to be interesting. “Interesting” means both a good story and one that’s not been told to exhaustion. If Concept X is already in the news, don’t expect to be able to announce it and get headline positioning. Imagine a story headline like “Vendor is the Twentieth to Announce NFV!” You have to be the company getting that concept into the news in the first place if you want the best outcome. If you’re repeating old news, you have to make it sound newer.
Sometimes being contrarian is a good way to get into an already-established story line, but if you really want to sell Concept X, it doesn’t make sense to make news by dissing it. More often the key is to take a different slant on the story—Concept X is good but not for the reasons others have told you. A good way to look at it is to ask whether what you want to say is a true insight. If not, if it’s old news, stay away from it.
On the PR side, another phrase: An “expert” is somebody who knows an editor. There are a lot of very bright people in every part of technology, most of whom you’ve never heard of and will never hear from. The reason is that they don’t have access to the media. If editorial presence sells website visits, it does that by making a reader/buyer aware of something or someone. That’s also true of analysts and other resources used for quotes and background in news articles.
Most media people will admit that they aren’t technologists, which means that they probably can’t pick an “expert” based on their own knowledge. Some people get the title “expert” by being around a long time, or by being able to explain things well, both of which are good criteria. Some get the title by being accessible, or by offering pithy quotes, or by being willing to fit a quote into a story the reporter/editor is trying to salvage. Those aren’t so good, criteria-wise. This is another thing for readers to keep in mind.
For user perspective, we have this one: To a user, “the network” is whatever isn’t on their desk or in their device. This one cuts a lot of ways. One is to show that most users aren’t all that aware of the structure of the services they use. “The Internet is down” means that they can’t reach it. It may be that what’s wrong has nothing whatsoever to do with the Internet. The user may still call their ISP to complain loudly, and the issues with customer support have exploded as broadband Internet has spread network services to people with little network knowledge.
Another important point here is that good management of the device at the network edge is critical for everyone. The edge device sees both the service and the service delivery into the user’s own network environment. You can really do SLA enforcement only where everyone can see the same thing, and the most important place in problem determination is the demarcation point between service and user. Get things right here, from either a user or service provider perspective, and you’re off to a great start.
How about this one for a fitting close? There’s no substitute for knowing what you’re doing. I’m always hearing comments like “I thought…” or “Joe told me…” or “Everyone knows…”, and they’re almost always a substitute for the admission that the speaker didn’t really know what they were doing. If you are dependent on technology in any form, you need to understand enough to play your role. You can manage a team of professionals if you know enough to recognize a professional when you see one, and if you can tell whether they’re doing roughly the right thing.
Businesses today are dependent on technology to an extent that no one would have believed possible twenty or thirty years ago. How many do you suppose are really able to understand the technologies they depend on, even enough to be an intelligent consumer. Remember caveat emptor? A small office or home office needs some tech knowledge to use tech optimally, and an enterprise needs a lot of it.
For service providers and vendors, this is especially important in the emerging era of virtualization and software-defined network functionality. I know hundreds of network professionals who know nothing about software, virtualization, the cloud, orchestration, and so forth. Some of them are involved in standards activities that will shape the future of the industry and determine the fate of their company. That’s not going to work.
Tech is glamorous, prosperous, exciting. It’s also difficult, sometimes almost impossibly so. No matter how smart you are, you need to be educated/exposed to tech in the specific areas of your responsibility, to do your job and ensure others do theirs.
This is a complicated industry, complicated in the business goals of all the players that intertwine and somehow have to be reconciled, and in the technologies that do the same thing. Cute sayings like the ones contained here are helpful in communicating something quickly, but in the long run everyone has to take more than a moment to contemplate their place in the ecosystem. To recapitulate the last point, there’s no substitute for knowing what you’re doing.