Please Stop Generic Enterprise Marketing!

The biggest challenge for most tech companies is marketing. You often hear companies lamenting poor technology winning out due to superior marketing.

I’m not sure if this is true. Maybe it was poorer technology (read less cool) but was it a poorer solution?

I don’t believe you can have a superior solution without superior marketing. If you can’t tell the market what you are have in a compelling manner, then how can you tell yourself what you need to build?

Generally speaking, companies that market poorly are probably in the wrong solution space, no matter how awesome their technology. There are exceptions of course, but many of these exceptions are tagging along in a market defined by other players and their marketing is largely irrelevant- a large tide raises all boats.

But what is superior marketing anyway? To me, it’s resonating and being relevant to the customer in both practical and emotional matters.

Sadly, very little marketing does that. Much of what is produced is a tired summary of product features and generic value propositions that apply to any piece of software imaginable.

The Generic Marketing Template From Hell

Due to XYZ, companies today need to streamline and achieve greater cost efficiencies and productivity by centralizing all their BLAH BLAHs on our market leading, scalable, easy-to-use, flexible, powerful, end-to-end enterprise solution.

The rest of the material is describing features and benefits ad-nauseam, as if volume will make things more relevant. Sadly, more is less since the core value is lost in the volume and fear of complexity and irrelevance raised in the reader. Every item you mention that is irrelevant bores and alienates the reader- that’s if it doesn’t scare him.

Say you are looking for expense tracking software- are you going to look at the software that also includes asset management and a general ledger? If so will you think that it’s too complicated and that the expense software is a suboptimal module in  larger, more complex solution? Of course there are viable package software markets such as ERP. But they especially refrain from carpet bombing their readers and they focus on a specific audience and market for the integrated solution.

Part of the problem is being sales-driven rather then marketing-driven: a strangely contradictory situation that hurts sales as mentioned in When Being Customer Driven is Dangerous last month. The result is consensus marketing that appeals to everyone and no one.

How to avoid this? You need to pick your battles and this is hard work. Do your background work and identify your real target customers. This is NOT who might be interested in your software. This is who you want to build software to sell to.  This is the big difference between software and other products- software is never finished, and what you add determines who you can most effectively sell to. And who you sell to defines your market, making it easier to sell to similar people.

Here is a Formula for Complex Enterprise Software Success

In my mind, product marketing should be called market producting. That would in one stroke fix most of the issues in B2B marketing, most of which stems from the thought that we are taking a product and marketing it, rather then finding a market and building a product for it.

Here is my mathematical equation for marketing success. It’s a bit contrived, but it captures the interdependency and momentum building effect of a proper market producting approach to software.

FEATURES + REFERENCES + MARKET AWARENESS + DEEPER PIPELINE =  more leads, shorter sales cycles, higher close rates and profitability

All four items on the left are more powerful if focused on specific market segments because they are all interrelated IF and ONLY if focused sufficiently in a market solution space. To do this, the economics of software force us to pick our battles intelligently so that our expenditure on features and marketing create tight market fit and expand market awareness. This in turn generates good references and further advances this virtuous cycle. Even our sales pipeline must be aligned with this equation because your “failed sale” is one of your most significant marketing touches to a customer. When you revisit one to three years later these activities primed the base of your pipeline.

And guess what? Generic marketing doesn’t get you there. It fails in reaching the customer AND it fails in defining your market understanding to build your solutions towards. And, most painfully, it fails in creating the focus outlined in the above equation.

You need to find the core: the urgent, pervasive problem that is relevant and resonates with the target customer, and hence the market he is in. Then you need to build and message around that.

This is hard, strategic work that requires deep research, lots of market interaction, testing, modelling and realistic market development and product develop estimates to ensure positive cash flow before the money runs out.

And if you can’t find that core? Maybe it’s not there, leaving you with a slow growth, tenuous, hopefully profitable company. Maybe you are somehow attached to another fast growing market, catching the spill-off, and it will still last for a while. Overall, your options are 1) find a comfortable niche to stay in business, 2) change direction by radically improving your market producting, or 3) close shop.