Dear Marketing you are NOT smarter than your audience

A friend of mine recently took up just about the most interesting hobby I've come across. He has spent the past few months taking workshops in standup comedy. I'd imagine that standing up on stage and actually trying to make people laugh ON PURPOSE must be one of the most intimidating tasks out there. For that I commend him.

In talking to him about the experience and what it's like he shared something thing that I believe should be a lesson that should be given to folks like me that work in marketing. During one of his early comedy lessons the instructor shared with them one of the golden rules of comedy: "Never talk down to your audience… assume they are smart enough to get the joke."

How profound. In the context of a joke, adding unnecessary explanation and clutter to your deliver simply renders the punch line UN-funny. In marketing the same type of behavior can render whatever message you're trying to convey overly confusing. To my dismay, I've been guilty of this. I've been guilty of failing to give my audience enough credit.

I can't help but think this simply boils down to having a better understanding of your audience. Understand their background; understand their expectations. In short know what matters most to them.

I work in the B2B space selling software that manages datacenters. Something that I've found myself guilty of is over-explaining the things that my products did. Sometimes even down to describing basic concepts. In retrospect I've now realize that keeping those slides a part of my presentations, not only made my presentations too long, but they also rendered my message overly complex, or worse, condescending. IT professionals don't need to be told what a computer is or what a storage array is. Heck, most of the time they just want to get to the point, they simply want to know what the result of using my products will be, and if those results align to whatever needs they have. Simple right? Turns out not so much if you spend some time reading enterprise datacenter management software brochures.

I've now begun my journey down the road of trusting that my audience will get the joke….

Everything on the Food network looks easy…

I have found that one of the most difficult things to do is to take something complex and explain it in a simple way to teach someone. Perhaps I'm biased because my wife is a teacher. But my experience has been that it also takes a real subject matter expert to be able to take a complex concept and whittle it down to only the most important parts and make it sound simple and easy at the same time.

The Food network is a great example of this. Cooking may not be the hardest task but it does take some practice and it can be quite intimidating to a novice. Even the most difficult dishes however are made to look very easy to prepare if you ever watch the Food network. I suppose that when you're an Iron Chef you can make anything look as easy as making a grilled cheese sandwich.

Often times I get asked by both coworkers and friends "what exactly do you do?" I tell them that I am a product marketing manager, which inevitably leads to more questions about what product marketing is exactly. So a personal challenge I've undertaken is an attempt to create a simple explanation for what it is that product marketing does. By doing so perhaps I've taken a few baby steps towards becoming an Iron Chef of marketing if you will. I needed the explanation to be more than a job description and also more interesting than a list of the deliverables I get from my boss.

So I've come up with a simple analogy - I write the story that helps to fill the sales funnel. It's the story that, if written well, serves to both find prospects as well as helps those prospects convert to opportunities and sales.



When I was in elementary school I learned in English class that a good story goes through 3 phases: Introduction, Plot, and Conclusion.

In the marketing story I write I think of theses stages in terms of the desired outcomes for the content I create to support my narrative. So I have 3 outcomes or phases for my story as well: Eyeballs, Education, and Urgency.

• Eyeballs: The key to the beginning of the story is customer segmentation. The messaging and value of the solution needs to resonate with the "Tribe" (to borrow a term from Seth Godin) that best fits the user and buyer profile of my product. By fine tuning the story from the beginning to appeal to a particular audience that helps both to get eyeballs reading the story, while also ensuring I target the audience that is most likely to be converted through to opportunities.
  
   
• Education: This is the easiest part of the story to write. It can consist of product brochures and flyers, product websites, demos, and other types of collateral that educate the eyeballs I've captured as to what it is exactly that the product does, and the value or outcomes that will result. Again if done well more conversion and more movement down the sales funnel.
  
   
• Urgency: I find this the most difficult part of the story to write, as it requires the most depth of knowledge. Customer success stories, tools to help determine ROI or tools to quantify risk, vendor neutral educational content along with the expertise that I've enable my colleagues in sales with can be the key chapters of the story that drive real opportunities. This is when the story helps a reader understand how their world could be a better place. It tells them how others have benefitted from my solution and whenever possible ties this back to an economic impact. Put another way, this is when the story can really help close the gap between awareness and engagement.
  

Finally there is one last piece. If I've told my story correctly then this is when sales professionals take it to the finish line. I've tried to help them up to this point by writing a marketing story to help convert targets in to opportunities. They should now have a funnel of potential customers who are well educated on what we do, how we can help them and have a sense of urgency that now is a good time to make an investment.

So that's the explanation I'm going with the next time I get asked "what do you do?"

I'm going to make myself a grilled cheese sandwich now…

Who needs product marketing…

I came across this post on Gigaom proposing that startup culture is becoming a fetish. The story references the churn being seen in the number of startups vying for exposure at SXSW. Lots of new ideas and new apps with no potential customers identified. The behavior seems to be driven by developers creating startups, and getting caught up with the glamour of turning an idea in to an app without a business plan in place.

The hole I see is the role that product marketing fills. At its heart product marketing helps determine whether an idea is worth bothering with. Perhaps I should rephrase that. I believe there is tremendous value in simply going through the exercise of turning an idea in to something. But one key piece is ensuring that something can actually be a viable business. Product marketing helps to fill the gaps between technology and a market need. An idea or technology only has as much value as the problem it solves and it's difficult to measure the size of a problem until you can identify who experiences it. In short you need to know what customers you're going after along with how you will help them.

Here's a very simple example of a world without product marketing.

This makes no sense to most people…

• 2L Storage shelf on door
  
• Adjustable Door Bin
  
• Adjustable Rollers
  
• Auto defrost
  
• 329 kWh/Year Energuide rating
  
• Reversible door swing
  
• Slide-out shelf design
  

This does make sense…

• A small refrigerator to keep your beer cold.
  

The impression I got from the article was that lots of these startups are simply trying to sell 329 kWh boxes without figuring out if there is a demand for cold beer first.

And that's why you need product marketing. Or that's why I have a job anyway…

The first rule of design…there is no design

I was reading a story about how Apple's SVP of Design Jony Ive is rumored to be leaving. He's not a household name the way that Steve Jobs is, but many believe that he's been as critical to Apples success as anyone. He was the designer of the candy colored iMac computers that were the first big hit of the second iteration of Steve Jobs' Apple, and has had a hand in the design of their entire portfolio of products since then.

He has an elegant approach to design which he outlines in the documentary Objectified which profiles several prominent personalities in the world of industrial design.

The core of his approach in his own words is simplicity. Not simplicity for the sake of simplicity or to be a minimalist. He states that his main role as a designer is to get design out of the way. A good design isn't based on arbitrary shapes; good design should feel as though it hasn't been designed at all. It should feel natural and intuitive. An example of this in his work is Apple's exceptional discipline in not including unnecessary design elements in their products. Rarely does Apple add additional lights or buttons to their products unless they serve a clear functional purpose, and in some cases they even go so far as to remove buttons that are considered standard because ultimately they aren't necessary (the track pads on their Macbooks are an example of this).

I think there is a lesson to be learned as a product marketing person from this simplicity. Focus on the customer problem(s) you solve. Don't agonize over the hurdles that your engineers had to overcome to create a solution. Nobody really cares about that; they just want to know their problem can be solved, or in some cases they want to better understand the problem itself. Having potential customers read about patent pending technology, years of laborious development effort, and what every line of code does has little impact on how they use the product.

How the product helps them and the outcomes from using them is something that can universally resonate.

After all the first rule of design… there is no design.
 

Democracy in the age of the internet…

Democracy - a form of political organization in which all people, through consensus, direct referendum, or elected representatives exercise equal control over the matters which affect their interests. 

I was reading an interesting topic of discussion on Quora around whether or not Japanese girls were still the best predictor of future trends in technology. This question made me think about an interesting trend that I see which I refer to as the democratization of technology.

For years tomorrow's trends were found in the sea of neon of the Akihabara district in Tokyo, in the hands on hyper connected young women. One example is their pioneering use of SMS or text messaging as a communication method. Today I think next big thing lies in a very different demographic however. 

What I see technology trends being driven by a traditionally Luddite demographic. Yes, baby boomers.

The Nintendo Wii as a great example rode a wave of success built off a consumer base of seniors, women and other non gamers. Every day during my subway commute I see more and more people from my parents' generation playing Angry Birds or checking their email on an iPhone as well.

Apps are what pushed the iPhone in to the mainstream. They make software available to everyone without requiring a degree in computer science. Apps do two things incredibly well. First, they eliminate the hassles associated with installing and configuring traditional software. No media to worry about, no minimum specs, they just work. The other value of an app is the ability to focus specific content for a user. They clear away all the information clutter out there on the web. My mom's experience is an interesting example. She doesn't like using Google to search for information. Even with the algorithm they use to push the most relevant searches to the top, she finds the mere existence of ten thousand other options to be a headache. 

With an app all the information clutter is swept away. A restaurant finding app as an example gives my mom the ability to focus only on the information she wants - where to eat dinner. The app has removed what intimidated her most about the internet, too much information. The statistics show that she's not the only one.

In the world of B2B I see a similar trend of democratizing technology. The big buzzword of the day in that world is "cloud computing". I won't bother trying to define cloud since many have already done this. Instead I will state that I believe the value of the cloud is in empowering the little guys of the world to compete with the big guys.

Whether you're going to Amazon to subscribe to a server farm with no capital cost, or simply using Salesforce.com to manage your sales opportunities, all these services give small businesses and startups around the world access to infrastructure and applications formerly reserved only for massive corporations who had access to massive capital, and the time to build these complex systems. Now all you need is a credit card to subscribe to whatever infrastructure or applications you need freeing you up to focus on your core competency.

I find all this quite refreshing. By making technology more accessible, and importantly as accessibility becomes the driver of innovation we have made step in an exciting new direction…

Bowling – the great marketing metaphor

I hate flying. I find airplanes the stale air gives me headaches. As part of my job occasional business travel is a reality though.

Lately there is one part of flying that I do look forward to. My airline of choice has done a good with their entertainment options to make my time on planes a bit more enjoyable. On a recent flight home from a series of meetings on the west coast, I got settled in and browsed through their latest movie selection. I was excited to see The Social Network as one of the options. As a new parent, my wife and I don't get many opportunities to go to the movies so the backlog of movies I keep meaning to see is quite large. A little downtime in the air is a perfect chance to catch up on that list.

I'd read a lot of good reviews of the film and as a regular Facebook user I was quite intrigued as well.

The movie was great, my favourite part was probably the score done by Trent Reznor. In retrospect something else in the film stands out as well. The Social Network also showed as a great case study for one of the tenants from "Crossing the Chasm" by Geoffrey Moore.

The book has become one of the must reads for technology entrepreneurs. In it Moore describes how to grow your customer base from early adopters through to mainstream success with a great bowling analogy. Segmenting different niche markets or bowling pins and knocking them down one by one using adjacent markets as the catalyst to move on to new ones.

This process is described brilliantly in The Social Network and shows how Facebook went from early adopter success through to the $50B valuation company it is today.

The early adopters were Harvard students; they were both a local user base as well as a user base with the cachet of being members of Harvard's exclusive community. Exclusivity was their value proposition. The next bowling pin was Boston University, that market was both local (quite literally an adjacent market) and to move the plot forward also allowed Mark Zuckerberg to satisfy some personal spite J

From there the expansion was more strategic, Stanford had visionaries who could build a presence in the always connected world of Silicon Valley, and later Cambridge and other exclusive international schools became their early majority. Mission accomplished – 1 million users, chasm crossed. Brilliant selection of bowling pins knocked over with a defined strategy.

In the real world Facebook has over 500 million unique users and last I checked had a valuation of over $50B. I guess in bowling lingo they've really hit on a string of turkeys. (full disclosure, I don't really understand bowling lingo, but last time I went bowling I got a turkey for a string of strikes which I am very proud of)

Ultimately great products still need great market strategies, so maybe it's time to dust off the two tone shoes and start bowling…

Why conversations and public washrooms don’t mix…

With the big game just around the corner, I'm left to remember one of my fondest football memories.

One autumn afternoon a group of friends and I took the drive from Toronto down to Buffalo to watch a Bills game. The best part of the game experience is definitely the tailgate before and sometimes after the game itself. However the most vivid memory I have of that particular trip was not the game, or the tailgate. It was an incident in the washroom.

For those of you who have never been to Ralph Wilson stadium in Buffalo, the men's washrooms have sort of a shared sewage trough, rather than individual urinals. A friend and I had lined up at the trough and began our business, when suddenly someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked "can you scoot over a bit?" and proceeded to squeeze in between us. "Uh sure..." was my response.

That right there was the most awkward exchange of words I've ever had in my life.

This gets me to the other uncomfortable exchanges I've had to endure… cold calls.

But wait... in today's world of business, is the cold call a dead concept? A search on Google seems to indicate that many people believe they are. I disagree. While I can't argue that content marketing, effective use of social platforms, and demand campaigns can help increase inbound interested in your products. Eventually human contact still needs to happen for most B2B purchases.

While perhaps less ice cold these first touch conversations can still be quite awkward, particularly if the salesperson has been poorly enabled.

I describe the core of my job as writing the story that my company tells. But what sense is there in having a good story if you don't have people out there telling it? That's how I think of sales enablement. As best as I can, I focus less on scripts and memorized bullet points, and more on trying to teach people about the context around the story. After all, every story needs some context and nuance beyond simply the punch line to be truly memorable.

In that vein I end up putting quite a lot of my focus outside of what it is that my own company does, and I spend a lot of time doing my best James Bond impression and try to get under the covers of what my competitors are doing and where and how they beat us. Competitive battle cards, news briefs updating new competitor products and versions and full portfolio comparison documents tend to be the most frequently downloaded and requested pieces of collateral I create.  Those along with product positioning documents make up the bulk of my internal sales enablement kits.

Perhaps not the most glamorous part of my job, but hopefully this effort helps prevent sales calls that feel like the chat I had in Buffalo that cold afternoon.