There are three kinds of benefits performance can offer:

• It can allow you to do things more simply and/or cost-effectively (e.g., with less hardware or less tuning).
• It can allow you to do things better. Examples include:
  • Faster-loading web pages for your customers.
  • Faster-responding queries for your business analysts.
  • Better prices on your algorithmic trading.
  • Better analytic results, perhaps from:
    • Using more data.
    • Running more queries.
• It can allow you to do something that would be impractical otherwise (usually because of expense).

These benefits are easily confused. When a prospect says “I can’t do X with existing technology”, what she really means is often “I can’t afford to do X well enough to matter.” When a vendor says “We make it cheap and easy to do Y”, what prospects hear is commonly “Great! Now we’ll be able to do Y within our resources and budget.”

Given the breadth of the subject, it’s hard to generalize comprehensively about the marketing of performance claims. But my observations include: 

1. For “cheaper” to be a strong message, you have to be significantly cheaper in TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), not just in system acquisition/floor space/power costs. But raw performance is often not the biggest driver of cost, given:

• The cost and risk of technology adoption in immature markets, when experience and expertise are hard to come by.
• The cost and risk of technology adoption in mature markets, when expectations and switching costs may both be high.

2. Hardware/software purchase/license cost is a directly important performance consideration mainly to two classes of users:

• Those who want to do a lot more of something than they have been doing to date, and quail at the expense unless they change vehicles. But that’s in the “better/more” category of my taxonomy, not the “simpler/cheaper” one.
• Those who want to do something they couldn’t afford before. That goes in the “impractical” section.

I have real trouble thinking of a pure “we out-benchmark the other guys and so we’re cheaper” story that ever has won.

3. But “simpler” is a benefit that should not be overlooked. It speaks to all of operational cost, operational risk, and resource availability. Analytic RDBMS vendors brag about how little tuning their systems require. In both the Hadoop and NoSQL/NewSQL markets, ease of scaled-out cluster management is a major criterion.

4. An important sub-case of “better” is “do lots more”. Scenarios I run across frequently include (and these overlap a lot):

• We want to analyze a lot more data!
• We want to do a lot more analysis on our data.
• We’re hitting a wall with Oracle Standard Edition, and Oracle Enterprise Edition/Exadata cost much more than we want to pay.

5. If you think your story TRULY is “Our performance is so great it makes the otherwise impossible possible,” you’re kidding yourself. First, you have competitors, who also make it possible. Second, if what you’re newly making possible is all that bloody important, then probably people have already been making do to get it done as best they can, even in an inferior way.

Yes, I know there are a few exceptions. I invite you to mention them in the comment thread.

If you want to say “It can’t be done without us” as part of your marketing flair, be my guest. But please remember that what you’re saying isn’t actually true.

6. Overall, the most fruitful performance-related business-benefit positioning usually straddles “better” and “impractical without us.” For the richer or more sophisticated buyers, you’re “better”. For the laggards, you’re taking them by the hand and leading them to the Promised Land.

7. Actually, the middle layer of the layered messaging model may be more important than the top one. Your “metric” kinds of benefits may be clearer than your business benefit stories.

8. Anyhow, it’s hard to market on performance only, since performance stories are often hard to differentiate from each other. So the rest of your technical benefits may be what sets you apart from your close competitors. As just two examples:

• Multiple generations of data management technologies have been differentiated in large part by their associated development tools. Examples include prerelational DBMS in the early 1980s, relational DBMS in the later 1980s, and CEP/streaming tools in the present era.
• Memory-centric business intelligence tools are rarely differentiated from each other on performance grounds.

When I put it like that, it sounds straight out of Seth Godin. But Haidt says it in a different — and to me more compelling — way (emphasis mine):

Self-interest, political scientists have found, is a surprisingly weak predictor of people’s views on specific issues. Parents of children in public school are not more supportive of government aid to schools than other citizens. People without health insurance are not more likely to favor government-provided health insurance than are people who are fully insured.

Despite what you might have learned in Economics 101, people aren’t always selfish. In politics, they’re more often groupish. When people feel that a group they value — be it racial, religious, regional or ideological — is under attack, they rally to its defense, even at some cost to themselves. We evolved to be tribal, and politics is a competition among coalitions of tribes.

The key to understanding tribal behavior is not money, it’s sacredness. The great trick that humans developed at some point in the last few hundred thousand years is the ability to circle around a tree, rock, ancestor, flag, book or god, and then treat that thing as sacred. People who worship the same idol can trust one another, work as a team and prevail over less cohesive groups. So if you want to understand politics, and especially our divisive culture wars, you must follow the sacredness.

A good way to follow the sacredness is to listen to the stories that each tribe tells about itself and the larger nation.

Haidt then goes on to cite detailed explications of the core stories of the US Left and the US Right, and to back up his claims with a couple of examples from very recent politics:

It’s one thing for the government to insist that people have a right to buy a product that their employer abhors. But it’s a rather direct act of sacrilege (for many Christians) for the government to force religious institutions to pay for that product. The outraged reaction galvanized the Christian right and gave a lift to Rick Santorum’s campaign.

It’s one thing for a state government to make abortions harder to get (as with a waiting period). But it’s a rather direct act of sacrilege (for nearly all liberals as well as libertarians) for a state to force a doctor to insert a probe into a woman’s vagina. The outraged reaction galvanized the secular left and gave a lift to President Obama.

It would be interesting to try a similar contrast of stories for central IT vs. web-company hackers, or for relational hardliners vs. NoSQL fans. They might come out just as different-sounding as the liberal-vs.-conservative comparison in Haidt’s article.

What you probably remember best about Act Up is its theatrical genius (or gall, depending on your sensibility). Its members held a “die-in” during a Mass inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral, going limp in the aisles so that police officers had to use stretchers to carry them away. They hurled the ash and bone of fallen comrades over the fence around the White House and onto the lawn.

But if boldness had been the sum of Act Up, the group wouldn’t have accomplished so much. It added enterprise and erudition to the mix. A friend of mine who covered an Act Up demonstration in San Francisco remembers standing in the street, chatting over the phone with a group spokesman and telling him that she would file her newspaper story as soon as she rounded up a certain statistic. Minutes later he called back, said that he had found a Kinko’s store nearby and told her that documents with the information she was seeking had already been faxed to her there.

In “How to Survive a Plague,” gay men and their allies are shown educating themselves about antiviral medications, about clinical-trial protocols, about the Food and Drug Administration approval process. They are shown successfully making the case that the trials should be less restrictive, and the process much faster. Because what they’re saying is so concrete and constructive, scientists can’t avoid paying it heed.

“If you come at a problem in a way that’s just disruptive and iconoclastic, but you don’t know what you’re talking about, all you are is a nuisance,” said Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, when we talked last week. Act Up’s leaders, he told me, knew what they were talking about. As a result, they “cracked open the opaque process” of drug development, altered the patient-doctor relationship and “changed the whole face of advocacy,” he said.

In my opinion, the article’s estimation of ACT-UP’s impact is only modestly overstated. In fact, I think the rapid swing in public opinion regarding the importance of AIDS can be traced to three principle factors, at least in the US, namely:

• Gay or gay-related activitism, primary that of ACT-UP, just as the article says.
• Public shock over some celebrity AIDS cases (actor and friend of President Reagan Rock Hudson perhaps most of all).
• A growing realization that heterosexually transmitted AIDS was or would soon become a grave danger too.

Even if you don’t wholly agree, you should at least concede that ACT-UP commanded more respect and influence than small groups of liberal extremists usually do. So it’s instructive to examine the reasons for ACT-UP’s success.

*Those who’ve worked it through include a multi-billion dollar powerhouse, a two-person lifestyle business, and some pre-revenue start-ups.

For the strategy worksheet, I took the extreme position that every employee of every IT vendor should have at least some idea of the answers. In this case, I won’t go quite that far. But I will say that most IT vendors will find most of these questions to be of great importance. So no matter what your role in the organization, you might find it helpful to see how much of this stuff you actually know.

And if you’re the CEO, you should score 100%.

Once again, for reasons of length, I’ll summarize up top and comment on each question below.

Marketing and business development

Relationship development: We invest ____________________________ in building personal relationships with ______________________________.

Awareness: Beyond that, we build awareness by ____________________.

Our people responsible for social media are ___________________.

Lead generation: We get leads by _______________________________.

Repeat marketing: We market in support of repeat sales by ___________.

Sales

Qualifying prospects: Our prospect qualification criteria are ___________.

Sales cycle: The length and effort of our sales cycles is about __________.

Sales productivity: A sales team can generate ______________________ in sales annually, after a ramp-up time of ___________________________.

Repeat sales process: Our repeat-business sales process is ___________.

Technology and delivery

Development (weaknesses): Our plan for fixing our technical weaknesses is ________________________________________________________.

Development (strengths): Our plan for extending our technical lead is __________________________________________________________.

Support: Our support organizations look like ________________________.

Manufacturing and/or service delivery: We make our stuff by _______.

Finance and human resources

Cash flow: We expect to spend _________________________________; our operating cash intake could be as low as ________________________.

Investment: Our plan for getting investment is _____________________.

Hiring: Each hire consumes _____________________________ resources.

I’ll explain some of what I mean.

Marketing and business development

Relationship development: We invest ____________________________ in building personal relationships with ______________________________.

Suppose you’ve done everything right in strategic messaging, and come up with an awesome story that people will believe. How do you cash in?

It all starts with personal relationships — with (potential) investors, with (potential) partners, with prospects, with influencers of all kinds. As I noted in the strategy piece:

Few people get their impressions about you directly, mainly:

• Core influencers with whom you maintain significant personal relationships.
• Existing customers whose impression of you comes almost solely from how you perform in their account.

Almost everybody else gets their impression of you refracted through influencers.

Given that, influencer-relations is a make-or-break challenge. Often, several categories of influencer (for example partners, press, analysts, and self-appointed evangelists) are central to the business mission, perhaps for several different reasons.

Awareness: Beyond that, we build awareness by ____________________.

But business isn’t just done one-to-one. You need to build broader awareness, if for no other reason than to prime the pump for future one-to-one interactions — such as sales cycles. Advertising (especially online), trade shows (ever less), mailing lists — even the abominations that are press releases — all can have their place.

Prudence is a virtue when building awareness. Cost-effectiveness is key. So is not-screwing-up; there are a lot of ways that careless marketing can undermine your story, your image, your messages, and your chances of success. But don’t take prudence to the too-common extremes of blandness, mushiness or neglect. Marketing is an arena in which fortune favors the bold.

Our people responsible for social media are ___________________.

Companies are confused about how to use social media. That’s the smaller problem. The bigger problem is that, even when they understand approximately what to do, they don’t muster the resources and staying power to do it.

My biggest social media tip is this: Empower multiple, selected (or self-selected) employees to engage in social media for you. By “social media” I mean blogs (your/their own), blog comments, forum posts, and Twitter, to start with. By “empower” I mean:

• Actively encourage or even recruit them.
• Don’t burden them with approval processes and the like.

The most fertile ground to recruit bloggers and the like may be in your pre-sales support group, since pre-sales support people are professionally required to:

• Know how to communicate clearly.
• Be knowledgeable about specifics.
• Be credible.
• Know the limits of what they are or aren’t permitted to say.
• Know how to avoid giving offense.

If you leave social media to senior executives and/or marketing staffers, it’s probably not going to happen to nearly the extent it should.

Lead generation: We get leads by _______________________________.

For most sales models, it is necessary to generate leads. Lead generation overlaps heavily with a subset of awareness-building, but it is emphatically not the same thing. It’s more reasonable to say:

• Lead generation starts with the part of awareness building that can capture information about potential customers …
• … and then adds machinery for tracking and follow-up.

Please note that leads aren’t just measured by quantity. Quality is a much more important metric — the point of a lead is to kick off a sales cycle that has good chances for success.

Repeat marketing: We market in support of repeat sales by ___________.

Repeat sales are a whole different animal from initial sales. If nothing else — by definition, there’s only a limited universe of potential repeat buyers.

Sales

Qualifying prospects: Our prospect qualification criteria are ___________.

Most sales cycles die before they start, and that’s a good thing. A crucial sales skill is “qualifying” prospects — i.e., determining which are worthy of the large investment a full sales cycle takes. Your qualification template is a filter for sales cycles; those that get through should, on average, produce revenue well in excess of their cost.

Sales cycle: The length and effort of our sales cycles is about __________.

Enterprise sales is a process, which goes through a typical series of steps, which have predictable delays. An experienced sales manager coming to a new start-up might mis-predict average sales cycle length by a factor of 1.5-2. She will not, however, be off by a factor of 5.

Sales productivity: A sales team can generate ______________________ in sales annually, after a ramp-up time of ___________________________.

One of the key metrics in running an enterprise IT business is sales productivity, which equates roughly to

(Win rate) x (Revenue per successful sales cycle) x (Sales cycles per team per year).

Also important are the cost and composition of a sales team, and how long it takes them to achieve their expected level of productivity. When I encounter management teams that don’t understand these basic concepts, snark can ensue.

Repeat sales process: Our repeat-business sales process is ___________.

A large fraction of an IT vendor’s business comes from repeat sales. So does an even larger fraction of profits, where by “larger fraction” I mean a number that can easily exceed 100%. So it’s crucial to do repeat sales well.

Key differences between repeat and initial sales include:

• Repeat sales may require buy-in from more customer personnel, or from less enthusiastic ones, than do initial sales. Fortunately, you also have a lot more in the way of an account relationship to help you work toward that approval.
• Repeat sales cycles are heavily informed by your customers’ experience with your products … and with your support organizations … and with the match or lack thereof between your promises and your actual deliveries.
• The best salespeople to “hunt” new accounts are often not the best to “farm” established ones.

Technology and delivery

Development (weaknesses): Our plan for fixing our technical weaknesses is ________________________________________________________.

Some competitive liabilities, what not precluding initial success, inhibit you from expanding your market footprint past a certain point. So what you do in sales and marketing is hostage to your efforts in technological catch-up.

Please note that catch-up may be a different kind of engineering, requiring different kinds of management, than is needed for initial creation of something cool-but-fragile. What’s more, the schedule of problem-fixing can be hard to predict — if you knew everything about how to fix your product problems, you wouldn’t have designed them in in the first place.

Development (strengths): Our plan for extending our technical lead is __________________________________________________________.

Few IT vendors are blessed with truly stupid competitors, and so your biggest technical advantages won’t be as big forever. Software vendors may try to act on multi-year forward-looking development plans while still allowing for reactive catch-up. Hardware vendors more typically build and finish discrete product lines. But no matter what you’re developing, you have to be sensitive to a lot of other people’s priorities and timetables.

Support: Our support organizations look like ________________________.

An IT vendor has to be good at post-sales support. Period. An IT vendor that isn’t tiny also has to be efficient at support. And you have to be flexible with respect to just what it is that you’re good and efficient at, for reasons including:

• Pre-sales support is commonly crucial.
• Post-sales support can provide key insights for repeat sales, and for sales and marketing in general.
• Business models for post-sales support can change over time.

This all just becomes more true in the open source world, where the software itself is commonly free.

Manufacturing and/or service delivery: We make our stuff by _______.

Support aside, “How exactly are we getting the results of our engineering to customers?”
may not be a big question for software products vendors. But it’s indeed major if you’re offering hardware, appliances, and/or some form of SaaS (Software as a Service). Going completely inhouse is rarely the best choice — but no hosting solution is ideal, and neither is any hardware OEM or contract manufacturer.

Finance and human resources

Cash flow: We expect to spend _________________________________; our operating cash intake could be as low as ________________________.

A basic rule of business is “If you run out of money, you’re out of business.” So you need to plan for your reasonable worst-case cash flow. Cash flow, of course, equates to the difference between cash in and cash out; of the two, incoming cash is usually the harder to predict.

Investment: Our plan for getting investment is _____________________.

If you don’t need money, and never will, congratulations. Otherwise, little is more important than getting it when — or preferably before — you need it.

Hiring: Each hire consumes _____________________________ resources.

Hiring is a huge part of what you do. It consumes substantial time for sure, especially but not only from management. It may also consume significant cash. And once somebody is hired, training is a big deal as well.

If you don’t have a hiring and training plan, then you probably don’t have a growth plan at all.

*E.g., consulting via the Monash Advantage and predecessor services. Every question on the list below has arisen recently in the course of my work, most of them many times over.

If you run an IT vendor, help run one, or aspire to do so, then I encourage you to give these questions a whirl. If you don’t think the answers are all knowable — either now or for the foreseeable future — it’s still advisable to make working guesses. Flexibility is a virtue — but even so, having a tentative strategy is far better than having no strategy at all. Strategy is to execution as design is to coding. The best time to fix software bugs is before you start coding; the best time to fix a bad strategy is before you’ve committed yourself to executing it. Yes, both the design and the strategy will need to be changed over time; but a smart, internally-consistent strategy is a lot better than a contradictory one, than an obviously hopeless one, or than no strategy at all.

This is a really long post, so I’ll summarize it up here. Explanations of each point follow below.

Positioning, messaging (and product)

Category: We make a _________________________________________.

Core value proposition: It is especially good at/for ___________________.

Architecture/commitment: It achieves this excellence because (we) ____.

Markets and use cases: If you ____________________, you should buy it.

Buyer universe: We sell to ____________________________________.

Competition: They perceive their alternatives as _____________________.

Competitive strengths: Our stuff is superior with respect to their alternatives in terms of _______________________________________.

Competitive weaknesses: Our stuff is inferior with respect to their alternatives in terms of _______________________________________.

Influencer perception: Influencers perceive us as ___________________.

Investor perception: Investors perceive us as ______________________.

Sales

Difficulty of adoption: To use our stuff, buyers also have to ___________.

Pricing: Buyers willingly pay us ________________________________.

Sales process: Our sales cycles are managed and closed on our behalf by _______________________________________________________.

Deal-breakers: In some accounts, _______________________________ will prevent us from winning, almost no matter what.

Team

Personnel: We hire people with the characteristics ___________________.

Competition for personnel: People join us because __________________.

Location: They are located _____________________________________.

Technical allegiance: Our offerings are dependent upon ______________.

I’ll explain some of what I mean.

Positioning, messaging (and product)

Category: We make a _________________________________________.

As I’ve described via the layered messaging model, a company actually needs and has multiple marketing messages. Still, there are times you also need a one-sentence description of what you do or make, imprecise though it necessarily will be. If you don’t have this, there will be many situations in which you can’t communicate well, or in which influencers of various kinds can’t pass your story onwards.

Core value proposition: It is especially good at/for ___________________.

This corresponds to the middle level of the layered messaging model. You need to envision generic situations or use cases in which your product excels, perhaps due to its superior features or performance metrics. If you don’t have that kind of excellence, how can you compete at all?

Architecture/commitment: It achieves this excellence because (we) ____.

This corresponds to the bottom level of the layered messaging model. You need to have an idea as to why you’ll have a sustained advantage in meeting your core value proposition. If you don’t have a sustainable advantage, why will you succeed?

Markets and use cases: If you ____________________, you should buy it.

This corresponds to the top level of the layered messaging model. You need to identify specific use cases in which your core value proposition has obvious benefits.

The most natural form these can take is by application; hopefully you can identify applications at which you shine and also particular vertical markets in which those applications are important. Specific, sharply-defined technical use cases can work too. (“If you need to do many-way joins scanning large parts of a 50+ terabyte database, our system rocks!”) But without some kind of easily-identifiable target use case, how can you have effective sales, sales qualification, or marketing?

Buyer universe: We sell to ____________________________________.

To sell effectively, you need to know who will buy. That means types of company or other organization, and it also means job descriptions (even if not titles) within those enterprises. Within the customer enterprise, “who will buy” includes at least who will want to buy, who will pay for the purchase, and who else will have to approve or not-veto it.

Competition: They perceive their alternatives as _____________________.

If you don’t know who or what you’re competing against, how can you be sure you’re doing anything right? Competition can include any or all of:

• Reasonable marketplace alternatives.
• In-house solutions.
• No decision/action at all.

Often your top competitor, especially in the early days, is a combination of all three, as your target customers make do by hacking around existing technology as best they can.

Competitive strengths: Our stuff is superior with respect to their alternatives in terms of _______________________________________.

Be realistic here, or you’ll lead yourself astray. Note that the answers you provide may have different force in different use cases, markets, etc.; that may provide a good guide as to where you have the best competitive chances.

Competitive weaknesses: Our stuff is inferior with respect to their alternatives in terms of _______________________________________.

Be realistic here too, or you’ll lead yourself astray even faster. Once again, note that the answers you provide may have different force in different use cases, markets, etc.; that may provide an even better guide as to where you should focus your efforts.

Influencer perception: Influencers perceive us as ___________________.

Hopefully, the way you describe yourself and the way you are perceived are aligned. Even so, what people think of you is likely to be only a subset of what you think of yourself. The part of your messaging that other people accept is the part that actually aids your business success.

Few people get their impressions about you directly, mainly:

• Core influencers with whom you maintain significant personal relationships.
• Existing customers whose impression of you comes almost solely from how you perform in their account.

Almost everybody else gets their impression of you refracted through influencers, where by “everybody else” I mean prospects, the people who originally bring you into customer accounts, other influencers, and more. Even those whom you talk with directly, such as sales prospects and press, can be strongly affected by what other press and analysts (or at an earlier stage angels and venture capitalists) have to say.

Investor perception: Investors perceive us as ______________________.

At a minimum, investors (including VCs) and stock analysts are influencers. If you like to have money, they may be more important than that. Different kinds of investor and investor-influencer are most important at different stages of your company’s life.

I’ve seen companies get literally destroyed because the strategy they felt they had to pitch to VCs was different from the strategy they actually believed in executing. Don’t go there. Find the investors that match your strategy, not the other way around.

But the need to get investment can add a degree of difficulty to your messaging and your influencer outreach. And if you can’t figure out what kind of investor would believe in your strategy — well, maybe the whole investing world is correct, and your strategy isn’t really that good after all.

Sales

Difficulty of adoption: To use our stuff, buyers also have to ___________.

If you sell a $10 product that costs $1 million to use, your selling costs are likely to reflect the $1,000,010 total cost of adoption. No doubt they will be a lot more than $10/deal. This is not good.

Cash cost of adoption isn’t the only issue, of course; there’s also time, risk of failure, need for buy-in from other departments, and occasionally even regulatory approval. But in any case, you should:

• Think about what is truly being bought when your customer decides to buy from you.
• Make sure your sales and marketing resources are in line with the magnitude of the true sale.
• Make sure your revenue expectations from a sale are in line with its cost and difficulty.

That you may need to get some of your initial customers and references by selling at a pittance doesn’t undermine this general point; eventually, you do want to make a profit.

Pricing: Buyers willingly pay us ________________________________.

So what can you charge? The answer depends on, among other factors:

• The value your buyers believe they will get from using something like your product.
• Your product’s differentiation versus alternatives.
• The total costs of adopting and owning your product.
• Your customers’ general attitudes toward paying for stuff.

Also, it’s important to consider how customers are used to paying for products they’ll regard as analogous: Purchase? Subscription? Priced per user? Priced per terabyte? You want pricing to appear to them as sufficiently simple, fair, and free of risk or surprise.

Sales process: Our sales cycles are managed and closed on our behalf by _______________________________________________________.

If you can’t describe a workable and repeatable sales model, you don’t have a strategy. Please note that “we’ll sell through the channel” is very rarely a complete answer, at least in enterprise IT. Almost always, you’ll need something that resembles a direct sales force, field or inside as the case may be. Even if you have partners who are collecting leads, managing sales cycles, and signing contracts, nobody else cares as much about selling your product as you do. Nobody else knows as much about how to sell it either.

And the partners who are exceptions to that general rule? They’re typically market specialists — such as vertical market application providers — to whom you have to sell much as you might to traditional enterprises.

Deal-breakers: In some accounts, _______________________________ will prevent us from winning, almost no matter what.

Enterprise IT buyers typically go into a product selection process with certain rules or strong inclinations, in areas such as:

• How proven a product or vendor must be in the market (references, financial strength, etc.).
• Which platforms or architectures they want to support.
• What kinds of vendor lock-in they will or won’t tolerate.
• Which specific features they absolutely insist on having.

If there’s something — company size, product features, architectural philosophy, whatever — that dooms you in certain accounts, then you’re not in the business of selling to those accounts until you get the objection addressed. (At some accounts, you never will.)

Team

Personnel: We hire people with the characteristics ___________________.

If you don’t know who you’re trying to hire, and why, you’re unlikely to build a winning team. The answer to “Who?” should always come in at least three parts:

• Character, personality, and approach to work.
• Skills and knowledge.
• Resume demonstrating tests of the skills and knowledge in situations like your own.

All three areas are important, but they’re listed in declining order. If you’re very sure of a match in the first two, the third is unnecessary; if the third area is critical (and it often is), it’s mainly to validate what you think or hope in the first two respects.

Competition for personnel: People join us because __________________.

You don’t just need to know who to hire; you have to be able to hire them. Part of that is telling an inspiring story, and one they think will lead to project and corporate success. Part is corporate culture. Part is terms and conditions of employment. Part, of course, is just finding them in the first place.

Hiring people is every bit as important and difficult a sales job as selling product is.

Location: They are located _____________________________________.

Yes, this really is a core strategic issue. Building your company in the wrong place can doom it.

Some kinds of people are extremely hard to find outside certain geographical areas. For example, a large fraction of the people in the world who’ve done DBMS marketing over the past 20 years did it in the San Francisco area. To a lesser extent, that’s true of DBMS development as well, especially if you add Boston to SF.

Of course, you can operate in a distributed manner — but that puts its own kinds of constraints on the people you can hire and expect to be productive and effective.

Technical allegiance: Our offerings are dependent upon ______________.

Your team doesn’t just consist of your employees and outsider advisers. Even more important may be the outside vendors and projects upon whom you choose to become dependent. If your stuff doesn’t work unless your customers buy a specific other vendor’s stuff too, then that vendor’s strategy — in terms of technology, pricing, positioning, and everything else — pretty much becomes your strategy as well.

OK. That was long. I have an equally long list of more execution-oriented questions outlined as well, but for now I’ll defer turning them into an actual post. Of course, if you’re a client and would like to see my rough notes, I’d be happy to share them.

Meanwhile, as long as this list is, I’m sure there are still other worthy items I left out. What did I miss?

• To get a sense of how much investment there has been in its development.
• To judge how much “skin” the vendor has in the game, as a clue to how committed the vendor (and, if relevant, investors) are to future development.

People further like to know how much success a product has had — both for social proof and also as a clue to the product’s financial status.

Indeed, such social proof is a key aspect of one version of the layered messaging model.

And if you don’t disclose information in line with people’s minimum expectations, they:

• Suspect you of hiding something,
• Tend to assume the worst about you, and
• Generally get annoyed with the unnecessary hassle you put them through when they have to get the information  the hard way.

Hence, for example, my recent tweak of McObject, for not being willing to quickly run through basics such as:

• Age of company.
• Level of outside investment.
• Number of employees (the one they definitely stonewalled me on).

Why do people insist on knowing the number of employees, especially developers? Well, it’s a reasonable proxy for level of development effort (give or take outsourcing and the like). What’s more, it can’t really be kept secret, except at companies so weak that they aren’t interviewing anybody for new staff position. Hence it’s something routinely disclosed, even at companies that wouldn’t dream of being forthright about actual revenues and products. And so companies that don’t disclose headcount become suspiciously-regarded outliers.

The other metric that the community pretty much forces out of vendors is customer count. DATAllegro managed to fool people into thinking they had more customers than they did, and parlayed that all the way into an expensive Microsoft takeover (that hasn’t exactly worked out well for the buyer). But as a general rule, vendors are pretty forthright about customer success if pushed, with my recent post on columnar analytic DBMS customer metrics being an illustrative example.

Recently, I got into a flap with EMC Greenplum. I blindsided them on a story; they retaliated for the story by, among other things, screwing me over business-wise. Why did I blindside them in the first place? Because I believed that if I didn’t, they’d put me under intense pressure not to publicize news I’d obtained. (Given the punishment they dished out for my running it, I imagine my belief was quite correct.)

Meanwhile, here are excerpts from a post I drafted last year, but never ran: 

It’s getting ridiculous. Two different large companies have accused me in internal communications of breaking embargoes this year, and in neither case did they give me any kind of briefing with the information! In one of the two cases I published something I’d been told by a competitor of the company’s. In the other case I simply posted a link to a public story. These weren’t cases of getting information from the companies and having it reproduced by outside sources; I got information from the outside sources, period, without the vendors’ cooperation.

Now, the flip side of such stories is that I have good enough relationships with those companies to discover the internal lies. And business must go on, which is why I’m not naming the companies in question. Still, I can’t imagine any benefit to these vendors from internal dishonesty. And I have to wonder about the wisdom of putting untruthful people in jobs that involve gaining outsiders’ trust.

And I could have drafted a similar one the year before that, with “NDAs” in the place of embargoes.

Of course, it’s not just news — companies get upset by people who offer opinion as well.

Two things matter about marketing messages:

• Do people believe you?
• Do they care?

It’s easy to meet one or the other of those criteria. What’s tricky is satisfying both at once.

My essential recommendation was:

… the two fundamental templates of layered technology marketing:

Enterprise IT product (proof-today messaging stack)

• Tangible benefits
• Technical connection
• Features (and perhaps metrics)*
• Persuasive details
• Customer traction or proof-of-concept tests

and

Enterprise IT product (sustainable-lead messaging stack)

• Tangible benefits
• Technical connection
• Features (and perhaps metrics)*
• Technical connection
• Fundamental product architecture
  

The lower parts of the stack demonstrate differentiation, most directly addressing the “Why should I believe you?” question. The upper parts demonstrate value, answering “Why should I care?” But ultimately, credibility rests on the whole flow of the story, and is no stronger than the weakest of the five layers.

*In the original form I just said “features and metrics”. But truth be told, metrics — speeds/feeds/scale/whatever — are only as important as features in a minority of market segments.

Since then, consulting engagements have shown me there’s actually a third template; happily, it’s synergistic with either or both of the other two. That one goes: 

Enterprise IT product (focus and commitment messaging stack)

• Tangible benefits
• Technical connection
• Features (and perhaps metrics)*
• Dedication
• Focus on a specific set of use cases
  

Here “Focus on a specific set of use cases” is a lot like “Commitment to a specific market or class of users.”

Extreme examples of what I mean include:

• “We manage and serve content.” (MarkLogic’s classical positioning, perhaps to be changed going forward.)
• “Our technology does nothing except manage and analyze poly-structured data, and we’ve been doing that for years.” (One possibility for the change. )
• Same thing, but for machine-generated data. (That’s pretty much the Splunk story.)
• “Technology T focused on vertical market V, where our founders previously worked,” where “T” might be business intelligence or predictive analytics or CRM.

Less extreme forms include many vertical market strategies, many “we’re t-shirted coders just like you” messages, and McCormack & Dodge’s long-ago pitch “Buy our financial software because we have lots of Certified Public Accountants on our staff.”

The point of such a story is that, if you’re dedicated to solving a particular set of problems, it stands to reason that you’ll put a lot of things into your product to address them that somebody less dedicated might not bother with. Often, that’s actually true, and perhaps to a greater extent than a simple feature list could easily convey. Sometimes, you can even say that your competitors’ features that benefit other use cases show they aren’t as committed as you are, but usually that crosses the line into overhype.*

*It’s rare that having additional capabilities is truly a bad thing.

Variants of the focus-and-commitment argument include:

• “This is all we do.”
• “Everybody in the company is focused on doing this.”
• (Synergy with the proof-today stack) “This is the kind of user we talk to and try to please every day.”
• (Synergy with the sustainable-lead stack) “We made whichever architectural decisions we thought best to meet these needs, even if they wouldn’t be good choices in some other market we aren’t pursuing anyway.”

So why wouldn’t you use a focus-and-commitment argument? First, it might not be true. Second, it might haunt you when you later claim to be competent in other use cases as well. So in some cases you might want to suggest the argument rather than say it explicitly, or at least confine it to individual sales presentations that are unlikely to be quoted later. But despite those limitations, focus-and-commitment can be an important part of a credible and differentiated messaging strategy.

When news is minor enough, that’s unavoidable. But in this case and others I would have willingly been briefed (scheduling just got a bit awkward this time). The two lessons here are:

• Brief the people who will be called for quotes before you brief the press, and therefore …
• … know who the press is likely to ask for quotes.
  

If a marketing activity does not create a lead for you, then it doesn’t belong in your marketing machine.

Or to rephrase that: Storytelling doesn’t matter.

Well, if you believe and execute on that, your company will die (at least if it’s in some area such as enterprise technology). I really mean that. It’s why I tell people that the “Red Hat” approach would doom most companies, and they should never hire a marketing VP whose main claim to fame is Red Hat experience. I’ve been telling people for a few months that I don’t expect VoltDB to succeed, because I expect VoltDB to execute on the kind of belief quoted above.

The three fundamental functions of marketing are:

• Promote a desire to purchase things in your product category.
• Promote your view of what’s important within your product category.
• Promote actual purchases of your product.

A funnel-centric approach to marketing is useful mainly for the third of those three parts. As part of your marketing strategy, it’s great for anybody. It can even work as the whole thing if you’re just pushing a commodity, such as a Linux distribution (Red Hat) or an early-generation application server (JBoss). In those cases, your job really is to get people to switch from the “default” alternative (expensive incumbent and/or do-nothing), and give you money instead. It might also work if you truly don’t have any direct competitors, and are competing mainly for share of mind/share of wallet.

But in most enterprise technology markets, customers pick among multiple alternatives, each with its own appealing story. If you don’t tell your story too, you’ll fizzle and die.