I often create customer presentations for clients, and talk to friends and ex-colleagues to see how tech companies are positioning their offerings to customers. What I’ve observed is that staff inside tech organizations get very comfortable with their products and their internal acronyms and tend create messaging in a sort of internal “cocoon”, and as a result, position their products in a way that often does not connect well to customers.
We’ve all heard the term “pull marketing” and know it is a desired marketing outcome where the customer is reaching back to you as the vendor for information about your product. That makes the life of sales easier because customers are saying they want to talk to them – and that can lead to an easier and shorter sales cycle. Think of “Push” marketing as the opposite -– when a vendor broadcasts their message to customers and hopes that something about their message resonates and leads to sales pipeline and closed deals. Declaring that one of your messaging pillars is “accelerate I/O performance” sounds like a good thing, but how does it connect with a problem the customer has? In other words, Why should target customers care?
“Push” marketing is often the result of being internally focused and this is often driven by product-focused org structures, as discussed in my blog earlier this your, “Do Your Product Business Units Lead to (Product) “Push” Marketing (and Missed Revenue)?” The problem with “Push” marketing is illustrated in Figure 1 below. If you’ve been reading my blog posts, you have seen that I often talk about the need to “Build a Bridge” between your product and your target audience. If your message does not clearly articulate why customers should care, you are not connecting – and your product is missing revenue opportunities…
Figure 1: “Pushing” Your Product Message to Customers
Figure 2 below shows the “no-brainer” best practice of using messaging that connects with customers. The visual here is of someone throwing a grappling hook to the customer and connecting with them, like rock climbers do as they try to scale a summit.
Figure 2: Connecting with Your Target Customers
But how do you throw that hook that connects to customers? The key to messaging that connects to customers is to make the messaging about them, not about you. Figure 3 below illustrates this choice. We’ve all seen “message maps” that define the message for what you are marketing and selling. Strong messaging needs to start with context so there is generally:
- A story about the customer situation (e.g. IT has gotten more complex and staff must do more with less…),
- A message on specific customer challenges (e.g. and storage has gotten dramatically more complex and costly)
- An overall value proposition for what you sell (e.g. “Whizbang Storage Inc. simplifies storage so you can spend your time on money keeping customers happy…”
- Then the fork in the road…
- About you? (Push)
- About them (Create Pull)
Figure 3: The Messaging Fork in the Road
The “Baseline Messaging” part of your message is pretty straight-forward and many companies have a clear message. The problem is that at this point, your message is too high level for a customer to get excited that you have unique value to them. The differentiation occurs at the next level down of messaging and that is where the messaging “fork in the road” occurs.
Let me give you a specific example to illustrate what I am talking about. In early 2014, I was reviewing a customer-facing presentation for a vendor in the Flash Storage space. The good news about flash is that it has brought dramatic performance improvements to the data center. The bad news about marketing and selling Flash technology is that it can be used in many different ways – to replace your primary storage, to accelerate storage performance for a specific use case like virtual desktops, among others. The point here is that Flash Storage can be used for many things, so how is a customer supposed to know what value your company provides with your products?
In this particular presentation, everything got off to a great start. They articulated the customer situation clearly and set context on which part of the flash market they were addressing. They had a clear slide that set up four key customer challenges in their space. Then they had a clear slide that set of the three key value propositions of their product.
They were at the fork in the road. What would they do next?
I groaned when I saw the next few slides. I flipped through the rest of the deck hoping to find something else, but was disappointed. The next 10 slides were drill down on the value prop they had outlined for their product – and it included some impressive attributes that had helped them get initial market traction.
But they could have spent that same time talking about specifically how they solved each of the problems that they had identified as being important to customers. By addressing these challenges directly, their message would connect with customers – and that connection would enable them to sell more of their product. Figure 3 below shows some specific examples of messages that are about “you” (Push) and about “them” (Pull). Intuitively we all know that if we answer a customers, “Why should I care?” question, that leads to more effective marketing and selling – and more revenue – yet somehow this practice is the exception in the tech industry…
Figure 4: The Message Fork – Value Prop Examples
Next week I will talk more about how to develop messaging and “them” and how it might differ from the “product messaging pillars” that many tech vendors use today.
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