Category Archives: Marketing

Marketing Vision While Selling Product: The 3+1 Repositioning

Posted on July 15, 2011 | 1 Comment

This post was inspired by a recent beer with long-term colleague, friend, and fellow volleyball dad, Paul Albright, now chief revenue officer at Marketo.

The question we discussed was how can a company sell current product capabilities but also market vision at the same?  (For brevity’s sake I mean “product” to include either traditional software products or SaaS / cloud services.)

Most companies simply market their current product capabilities:  Here we are.  This is what we do.  Here are the benefits of using it.  Wanna buy one?

While this isn’t bad — particularly if you don’t forget step 3 (benefits) — you can do better.  How?  Say, for example, your competition sells an offering similar to yours and they sell using a current capabilities patter similar to the one above.  Now you show up selling something bigger:

 This is our current offering and it includes area 1 (which the other guy is pitching), but also areas 2 and 3, and the vision for our company is not just about having the best area 1, but instead to pursue a capstone vision that includes areas 1, 2, and 3.

Ceteris paribus, who do you think wins?  You do.  Why?  Because you completely enveloped the other guy’s message.    You neutralized him on area 1, you one-upped him in areas 2 and 3 (even if your current offering is anemic on an absolute basis), and then you made the customer feel both more aligned with and safer buying from your company because you are pursuing the bigger vision.

I call this a 3+1 repositioning.

I did my first 3+1 repositioning  back in about 1989 when I launched Ingres 6.3.  Prior versions Ingres were just for data management, but with release 6.3 we not only improved data management, but added knowledge management and object management capabilities and introduced the vision of an intelligent database system.  So area 1 = data management, area 2 = knowledge management, area 3 = object management, and the capstone vision was the intelligent database.  While it was a well-executed launch, it was a long time ago, Ingres had many other problems, and the ending wasn’t terribly happy.

So let’s look at some more recent examples.  SuccessFactors (where Albright was CMO and GM for several years) started out as a SaaS provider of performance reviews. How do you broaden that vision?  Well let’s look at what they say now:

Now let’s take a look at Marketo, a firm that I have traditionally thought of as about lead nurturing and incubation.

The magic of the 3+1 repositioning is:

  • It paints a broader vision, enveloping your competition
  • It provides a simple, memorable three-point message.  (Heck, I launched Ingres 6.3 more than 20 years ago and still remember the message!)
  • It lets you call higher, getting access to more power within the organization
  • It positions your company as a thought leader, someone defining the future of the market
  • It takes for granted your ability to neutralize any features du  jour in the core area.  (Oh, yes, we’re committed to having top-end lead management, but that’s just one part of the picture.)
  • It rallies your company, providing a North star towards which everyone can navigate.

The perils of a 3+1 repositioning are:

  • It can’t be done solely are a marketing exercise; it must be a company strategy and some resources must be invested in areas 2 and 3.
  • You can easily oversell areas 2 and 3, ending up with disappointed customers.  Remember the bear joke:  you just need to run faster than the other guy, so don’t overset expectations.
  • It can make your accountants nervous because there is a distinction between buying today’s product and buying into a (disclaimed) future vision and buying tomorrow’s product.  The latter tends to have negative revenue recognition issues.

In the end, I am a big fan of this 3+1 formula and encourage marketers everywhere to keep it in your toolbox.

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Posted in Marketing, strategy

What the CEO Really Thinks of Marketing (And 5 Things You Can Do About It)

Posted on July 12, 2011 | 3 Comments

As a marketing guy turned CEO, I have the relatively rare experience of having seen marketing from inside the organization as well as from above it.  Yesterday, the SV Forum Marketing SIG invited me to give a presentation where I discussed marketing from the CEO’s perspective.

I’ve embedded the slides below for your viewing pleasure.

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Posted in Marketing

If We Can’t Have Repeatable Success, Can We At Least Have Repeatable Failure?

Posted on April 27, 2011 | 5 Comments

I’ve always found business to have a fair amount of accidental, built-in hubris, largely resulting from the strategy formulation process.  I remember one time at Business Objects we had a strategy offsite where, in our infinite wisdom and with a fair bit of groupthink, we came up with the idea for a BI workflow solution, which we dubbed Sundance for the name of the lovely venue at which it was conceived.

I remember coming home from the offsite and having a conversation akin to the following:

Me:  What if Sundance doesn’t work?

Exec:  What do you mean, “doesn’t work?”

Me:  Well, for example, what if nobody wants to buy it?

Exec:  What do you mean, what if nobody wants want to buy it!?  It’s strategic.  We can put incentives in the salesforce compensation plans and bundle it.  Don’t worry, we can sell it.

Me:  I didn’t say what if no one wants to sell it.  I said what if no one wants to buy it.

Exec:  But, it’s strategic.  We decided it at the offsite.  You’re talking crazy Dave.  Come have another beer.

As a marketer by background, I tend to view most everything as an experiment.  That is the nature of marketing.  You never know what’s going to work.  You can try different things.  You can measure them.  You can see what works and what does not.  You can even try to build explanations for why certain things work and certain things don’t.  But you are trained to approach business with humility and with an experimental spirit.

Exec:  Look.  Sundance is not an experiment.  We can’t tell Wall Street it’s an experiement.  We need to tell them it’s the future of the company.

Me:  But what if it isn’t?  What if we’re wrong?  Heck, it’s not a bad idea, but we dreamed it up in two hours on a white board.

The problem is that things fail all the time in business.   Products fail.  Startups fail.  Business models fail.  Heck, Sundance failed.  And the bigger problem is that when we dismiss the possibility of failure in our planning, we dismiss the possibility of learning along with it.

Yes, business — and particularly so in startup-up land — is the quest for finding a repeatable, scaleable model.  (Why?  So you can “just add water” and create an arbitrarily large business — and valuation to go with it.)  But quite often in the hurry for repeatable success, managers fail to design things scientifically so they actually have some degree of repeatability and can thus learn from either success or failure.

Example:  you take a new product and put it in the hands of 8 different salespeople (all of whom are “world-class” as defined by the VP of sales) with 8 different backgrounds in 8 different cities selling to numerous types of different target customers with a variety of different sales pitches.  Consider these scenarios:

  • Everybody sells.  Buy more stock quick.  Anyone can sell this stuff to anybody saying pretty much anything.  (Hint:  this does not happen very often.)
  • Some sell and some don’t.  This is tricky.  Did the folks who sold sell because of their background, their territory, the target customer, their approach, or their salespitch?  Well, we don’t know.  We can look for patterns but we haven’t designed the experiment to make things easy.  The quick assumption is that the folks who sold did everything right and the folks who didn’t did everything wrong, but if you think about it, you can’t assume that’s the case.  Did we have a great salesperson in Chicago pitching the wrong message?  The guy in DC who sold a lot carries a rabbit’s foot — should we dispatch rabbit’s feet instantly to the whole salesforce?  After firing the VP of sales, we learn that “world-class” actually meant “I liked him/her” and can find virtually no additional common traits among the salesforce.  Hum.
  • Nobody sells.  This is hard, too.  Was everybody doing everything wrong?  Unlikely.  Yet, no one came together with the right combination to sell.  But are we sure the lady in Chicago is a bad salesperson?  Can we be sure that the pitch they’re using in DC doesn’t work?  Can we be certain that there is “no market” for the product as the VP of sales is insisting?  What can we learn from such a random experiment?  The answer is nothing.

Thus, my statement:  if we can’t have repeatable success, then can we at least have repeatable failure?

If instead of hiring 8 salespeople, we hired only 3,  put them all in NYC, and called only on the same handful of titles within investment banks using the same sales presentation and demo, could we have learned more?   Yes.

  • If it works, it’s great news, because you know exactly what to go scale.
  • If it doesn’t work, it’s still good news (perhaps for your successor) because you can, with a pretty high degree of certainty, conclude that mix of levers tried will not work.  Or, in the spirit of Thomas Edison, you’ve learned one more way not to make a light bulb.

I’ve picked two extreme cases and there certainly is middle ground in between, but the two key questions are:

  • Are we assuming only successful outcomes in our planning?
  • Are we designing things as an experiment from which we can learn no matter the outcome?

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Posted in management, Marketing, strategy

A Note to Public Relations: Be Credible and Check Your Math

Posted on February 2, 2011 | 9 Comments

I stumbled into this press release during my morning reading (ParAccel Triples Revenue, Doubles Customers and Appoints New Executive Team in 2010) and felt an overwhelming and immediate need to use it as an educational example in public relations (PR).

CAMPBELL, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–ParAccel, Inc., provider of the world’s fastest analytic database, today announced that it achieved record financial performance in 2010 with 300 percent revenue growth over 2009. The company doubled its customer base with key enterprise wins, launched ParAccel Analytic Database (PADB) 3.0, and continued to expand partnerships with leading platform, storage and analytics vendors. To keep pace with its growth, the company hired key new executives and moved its corporate headquarters to a larger facility located in Campbell – the heart of Silicon Valley.

Here are my comments on this release:

Make supportable claims. The “world’s fastest analytic database” claim strikes me as both unsupported and unsupportable.  Different databases are good at different things and there are many analytic database competitors in the market.  It is not credible that any one DBMS could be fastest at all of them.  But this is supposed to be a PR , not a product marketing, post so I won’t drill further.

If you’re going to talk growth, then provide real numbers.  Tripling revenue sounds very nice, but from what to what?  Many private companies now make these number-free growth claims, but they’re hard to take seriously.  Either release real numbers or avoid talking about growth.

If you’re going to talk about growth, do the math correctly.  Tripling revenue does not equal 300% growth. Think about it:  100% growth = doubling revenue, 200% growth = tripling revenue, so 300% growth = quadrupling revenue.   This is a serious credibility blunder and sadly it’s not uncommon.  Get a finance person to review press releases with numbers in them.

If you’re doubling customers and tripling revenues, then you’ve got me asking questions.  People will cross-check your numbers, particularly when you’re providing only pieces of the puzzle and have already made one math blunder.  I think they mean to say that they tripled annual revenues and doubled the cumulative size of the installed base (i.e., number of customers).   Since I’m not sure what to make of that, I made a little model in Excel.  I think what the model tells me is that, ceteris paribus, when you are on a strong growth trajectory doubling the installed base is not enough to triple revenues.  I’m sure there are better ways to analyze this, but that’s not my point.  My point is, as a marketer, when you are providing only pieces of the puzzle you are hanging yourself out to dry if those pieces are inconsistent or provide a clue to a less rosy bigger picture.

By the way, my guess, based on playing with the model below, is that the company had  a weak trajectory in 2006-2009 and then had a nice 2010.

“The data warehouse market, and specifically the market for high-performance analytic databases, is growing and evolving at an exponential rate;

Don’t say “exponential growth” if you don’t know what it means.  I love the data warehousing market.  It is large, growing, and healthy — but it is not growing exponentially.  Exponential growth has a precise meaning.  The data warehouse market is growing at a 12% (linear) rate and will $13.2B by 2013.  That’s huge and wonderful already.  Saying the growth is exponential just damages credibility and undermines an otherwise very strong message.

Say “Appoints New Executives,” not “Appoints New Executive Team.” The new CEO joined in August, so that’s not news.  The company has appointed a new COO, CMO, and VP of International.  Those are important roles and should be announced.  But the headline makes it sound like the board blew out the entire executive staff and replaced them in one shot.  This is not only a non sequitur (i.e., “we’re doing so well we fired everyone”), it’s also inaccurate.

“With this new, energized executive team in place, strategic partnerships with NetApp, … and leading business intelligence vendors, combined with … ParAccel is poised for an even more impressive 2011.”

Be careful in expectations management. While I just love the “energized” comment  (i.e., were the old guys tired?) my real issue is that the company is saying that 2011 will be better than 2010.  They shouldn’t say this unless they plan to more than triple revenues in 2011 and more than double the installed base.  Logically, anything less would then be a disappointment.

To keep pace with its growth, the company hired key new executives and moved its corporate headquarters to a larger facility located in Campbell – the heart of Silicon Valley.

Be credible.  Unless I somehow misplaced Bill and Dave’s Garage, Palo Alto is the heart of Silicon Valley. In 25 years in and around Silicon Valley, never before have I heard Campbell referred to as its heart.  C’mon.

Reminder:  see my FAQ for relevant disclaimers.

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Posted in Marketing, Uncategorized

Corporate Trust and the Little Things: 2.5 Servings per Package

Posted on December 15, 2010 | Leave a comment

In a age where some 30% of the US adult population is technically obese, if you’re like most people, then you’re probably trying to keep an eye on your weight, and therefore on your daily food intake as measured by things like number of calories, grams of fat, or grams of protein.

The good news is that 20 years ago, the US government decided to make it easier to know what you’re eating by passing the Nutrition and Labeling Act of 1990 which, among other things, required a Nutrition Facts label on most food products.

The bad news is that many marketers have tried to subvert the intent of that act by using a non-integer number of servings per package, thus making it quite hard for most of humanity to figure out what they’re actually getting.

Let’s take a concrete example:  Buitoni Light Four Cheese Ravioli.  Let’s look at the Nutrion Facts label, assuming that we’re interested in calories and grams of fat as our key metrics.  The label says the product has 250 calories and 6 grams of fat.  But, not so fast, those figures are per-serving.  So how many servings are there in a package?  2.5.  Really?  Wait, 2.5?  Come on, did they really design the size of the package so it would feed precisely 2.5 adults?   Were they targeting that small market segment of two adults and one eight year-old child who wanted to have (light) ravioli together for dinner?

I don’t think so.  While a hungry teenager could devour the package alone, for most adults I believe the package size is pretty clearly designed for two, which also makes sense when you think about the target market.  In my experience, if anything, it runs on the low side of two portions, not the high side.

So why would they say a package that was almost surely designed to feed 2 people contains 2.5 servings?  There’s only one reason I can think of:  to obfuscate the Nutrition Facts.

Quick, what’s 250 times 2.5 divided by 2?  Not so easy, huh?

Quick, what’s 625 divided by 2?  Easy, that’s 312.5, which is also the answer to the previous question and the actual number of calories you’ll get by eating half a package of Buitoni Light Four Cheese Ravioli.

So, by doing this trick, I’m sure they get most people to think “uh, 2.5 is about 2, so it’s about 250 calories per serving” thus understating the actual calories by 25%.

In researching this post, I learned that there are additional reasons why marketers might play with the reported servings per container (e.g., “healthy” claims are based on per-serving information), but this isn’t a food blog — it’s a business and marketing blog.  So why do I care?

The answer is trust.  Specifically, corporate trust.

Corporations spend billions every year on brand building and communication programs.  If you asked any of those companies about their brands, you would hear phrases like:  brand promise, brand trust, or faith in the brand.  Or if you asked about their desired corporate reputation, you would again hear words like:  integrity, trust, or faith.

The thing about trust is that’s hard to earn and easy to lose.

Nestle  can — and presumably has — spent lots of money trying to convince me to trust the Buitoni Brand.  To trust the quality.  To trust the consistency.  To trust — I was rather surprised to learn — its genuine Italian-ness.  So that when faced with that agonizing moment of truth, staring in utter horror at the confusing array of fresh pasta products, so that at that moment, my hand would guide itself to the Buitoni label.

And then you manipulate the servings-per-container and that trust is gone.

Trust doesn’t just come from what you say.  It comes from what you do.  Too many companies forget this and, in little instants, undermine billions in marketing and communications spend.

Don’t let yours be one of them.

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Posted in Marketing, Trust

The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

Posted on October 8, 2010 | 1 Comment

One of my colleagues forwarded me this deck, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs, which I thought I’d share.  It’s based on this book (of the same name) written by BusinessWeek reporter Carmine Gallo.

My favorite points:

  • Introduce the antagonist
  • Use the rule of threes
  • Sell dreams, not products
  • Practice (delivery) a lot

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Posted in Marketing

Confusion Is The Enemy and Inconsistency is His Ally

Posted on August 10, 2010 | 5 Comments

Pioneering a new market and introducing an innovative technology in the process invariably results in customer confusion, usually driven by a fairly predictable “I’ve never seen one of those before” reaction:

  • What is a relational database and why would I need one when IMS is doing just fine?
  • What is a business intelligence tool anyway why would I need it in addition to ReportSmith?
  • What is a data warehouse and why would I need one in addition to my operational databases?
  • What is search engine optimization and why should it matter to my marketing team?
  • What is server virtualization and why would I care?
  • What is a social network and why (in the world) would I want to part of one?

One of my top marketing rants is that pioneering new markets is difficult enough that vendors shouldn’t make the task any harder by muddling their message along the way.   While this would seem obvious, it happens all the time.  Why?

  • A diversity of internal opinion on how to describe the company and/or its product.  This is normal.
  • A lack of marketing leadership in establishing one clear “correct answer” that the company should follow.
  • A lack of discipline in sticking to one message on the part of the field and/or marketing team members.

Invariably, when pioneering a new market, there will be a variety of internal opinions about how to talk about it.  For example, as a technologist, I could honestly describe MarkLogic Server in any of the following ways:

  • XML database
  • XML server
  • Content database
  • Document database
  • Unstructured database

There are pros and cons to each of these choices.  While our media customers like the term “content,” it does not resonate with our Federal customers who see a data/content dichotomy as meaningless.  For years, we were gun shy about calling MarkLogic Server a “database,” because that would tend to prompt a reaction of “oh, we have one of those, it’s Oracle, thanks for coming by.”  So, for years we referred to MarkLogic Server as an “XML server,” attempting to follow the example set by Arbor Software who positioned its multi-dimensional database system as an “OLAP server.” Recently, we decided to come out of the database closet and, going forward, you will see us positioning MarkLogic Server, arguably more accurately, as a database for unstructured data.

But that’s not the point of this post.  This post is about consistency.  Note that we have quickly found 15 ways to position MarkLogic Server.   {XML, content, document, semi-structured, unstructured} x {database, server, platform}.    The question for marketing should be:  which way is best.  The question for everyone else should be:  which one did marketing pick?

Why?  Because it’s better to be consistent than better.

Imagine in your heart-of-hearts that you think “content server” is simply a better answer than “unstructured database” and you decide to use your own lingo instead.  The first thing you might do wrong in this instance is bleed.

Customer:  What is your product anyway?

You:  Well, that’s a great question.  It’s actually quite confusing and did you know that there are about 15 different things we could have called it.  Marketing — and you know those guys — what’s the expression “if you can, do, and if you can’t do marketing” — ha, ha — well, marketing decided to position it as an “unstructured database” but I think that’s a bad answer, so I actually think of it instead as a “content server” because it really does serve content — and boy does it go fast — and some of my buddies on our DC team call it an XML database, but that’s bad because everybody knows that Gartner hates XML databases — ix-nay on the atabase-day, har, har  — and it isn’t really all about XML, it’s really about marking up semi-structured information, you know?  Uh, what was your question again?

The are many problems with bleeding on the customer:

  • You’re talking instead of listening.  Look how many words you took to answer the simple question of “what is it?”
  • You’re confusing the customer, giving three or more different answers to one simple question
  • You may think you’re making yourself look smart with a great analysis, but to a sophisticated listener, you are making yourself look dumb instead
  • Most important, you are confusing the customer.  He/she asked a simple question and you were unable to give them a simple answer.  Quite possibly he/she had several follow-up questions in mind, all of which were forgotten during your stream of consciousness response.

The fact is that selling a new technology is hard enough that you shouldn’t make it harder through inconsistency and bleeding.  It isn’t easy to understand what MarkLogic Server is and we don’t have the benefit of a category with 3-5 other vendors all evangelizing the same idea.  If you’re in a similar situation, then you have to ask yourself:  shouldn’t you make things as simple as possible, speaking precisely and consistently so we can make it as easy as possible for customers to understand our message?

If you agree, that means two things:  (1) you need marketing to step up and choose:  to define the standard vernacular –ideally in a conversational Q&A-style format — and then drive it into all marketing communications and (2) you need to lead by example in sticking to it.  If you think marketing has chosen poorly, do not bleed on the customers (or fellow employees).  Go raise your concerns to marketing.  If you think there are common questions that need standard answers that are not yet addressed, then go to marketing.

When pioneering  a new market, your primary competitor is confusion, and inconsistency is his ally.

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Posted in Marketing

Marketing Abuse: The Word "Partnership"

Posted on June 9, 2010 | Leave a comment

Dear Marketer:

I get about 5 of these emails a day.

Subject:  Partnership Proposal-Damco Inc.

Dear Dave,

Hope you are doing great.

Damco has vast experience in providing high quality and cost effective data processing services to its clients globally. Since its inception in 1996, Damco has honed its level of expertise and built robust processes and methodologies ensuring quick turnaround times, confidentiality and data security. Damco’s offshore delivery centres are ISO 9001:2000 and CMMI Level 3 certified and in addition we are fully compliant with BS7799 security standards and Data Protection Act 1998.

Damco has already delivered its data processing services to leading organizations in various industries including – Publishers, Libraries, Law Firms, Insurance Companies, Credit Card Companies, Market Research Companies, Healthcare Providers, Universities, Hospitality, Airlines, Banks, Registration companies, Government.

Highlights of our offerings are:

a) Up to 50% Cost Saving from Outsourcing
b) Domain Experience & Technical Expertise
c) High Quality standards in accordance with ISO 9001:2000
d) Well defined processes and methodologies
e) Data Protection, Confidentiality and Service Level Agreements
f)  State-of-the-art Communication Facilities

[Next 5 paragraphs omitted]

I have many objections to these emails, which typically come from off-shoring companies.  Let’s share some lessons about what’s wrong with them.

  • First, they are deceptive.  They are not about “partnership” (unless of course you define partnership as “I give you money” and you give me offshore developers, which I don’t).
  • They start business relationship based on a lie.  Credibility should be the top priority for the marketing department.  With these mails you first get my attention and then immediately destroy your credibility — the equivalent of expending great energy to shout:  I’M DAVE AND I SUCK.  (Why say anything at all?)  I know very little about Dacom or Damco or whoever they are, but I do know one thing:  they are willing to send misleading emails to increase lead conversion rates and therefore I want nothing whatsoever to do with them.
  • They bury me in useless facts that neither differentiate the offerings nor make me interested in doing business with the company:  they mails are– quite literally — all the same.  Everyone is CMMI this and ISO that.
  • They are mis-leveled.   They go to the trouble of renting a CEO mailing list and then write copy is neither CEO-level nor designed for the #2 thing CEOs do with email:  forward them to a direct report. (The #1 thing is delete and junk-list the sender.)  Done correctly, the starting copy would be written to make me want to forward the mail to my VP of Engineering and the rest of the copy would be written for him.

You could preserve your credibility and try to find a more strategic marketing angle with a subject like:

  • Outsourcing:  Five Things You Didn’t Know
  • Finally, Something Different in an Outsourcing Vendor
  • Yet Another Outsourcing Mail, Not.  Three Reasons Acme’s Different

Or, apply some of Porter’s generic strategies and head along one of two primary dimensions:

  • Outsourcing At Rock-Bottom Cost, Here’s How We Can Do It (cost leadership)
  • How Thing X Makes Vendor Y Unique in Outsourcing (differentiation)

But no matter your chosen angle, Dear Marketer, please remember this:  do not start a business relationship with a lie.

The relationship will last only as long as it takes to hit “junk sender” and you will be permanently muted thereafter.

Cheers,

Dave

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Posted in Marketing

Five Rules for Competing with Giants

Posted on March 24, 2010 | 8 Comments

I’ve spent my career competing, for the most part successfully, against companies from 10 to 1,000 times bigger than my own.  Thus, over the years, I’ve developed some rules that can help maximize your odds of success when competing against giants.

  • Concentrate force.  The easiest way to be bigger than your competitor is to focus.  While Oracle was around 100x our size when I joined Business Objects,  our BI team was bigger than theirs; in 1995, we had nearly 300 people who did nothing but BI.  Focus can be about either product or market.  At Mark Logic, I believe that Endeca is around 2-3x our overall size, but by my estimation Mark Logic is 3-4x bigger than they are in our core markets of media and government.  While Autonomy is more than 10x our overall size, I believe that we may be bigger  in media and government (for relevant use-cases), and I’m nearly positive that we’re bigger in the dead center of our markets:  STM in publishing and intelligence in government.  Focus is hard because there are always people who are more obsessed with the opportunities you’re not pursuing than with those you are, so have a clear sense of your growth goals, decide rationally if you can meet them with your chosen focus areas, and then jettison those who can’t get with the focus program.
  • Be the best.  I like to say that no sane person wants to buy software from a startup.  Most IT folks sleep much better at night buying from the mega-vendors, even if they feel like they’re getting gouged on price.  People buy from startups not because they want to, but because they have no choice.  How can you give people no choice but to buy from you?  Solve one problem better than anyone else in the world.  Those are easy words to say, but they’re very hard to do.  Ask yourself:  what is the one problem that we can really solve better than anyone else in the world.  That’s what the VC cliché “world class” means.  Most startups aren’t honest with themselves in this department; they tell themselves white lies about where they can realistically be the best.  The result is they overextend and end up with three or more mediocre products instead of one great one.  Sometimes this is driven by greed for more addressable market; sometimes it’s driven by fear and the desire for diversification.  Remember the Andrew Carnegie quote:  put all your eggs in one basket and then watch the basket.
  • Split pins.  Most technology strategists are familiar with Geoffrey Moore‘s “bowling alley” model which says that startups should view markets as bowling pins, using one market to knock down the next.  This model encourages startups to skip through markets hastily, like American travelers skipping through countries in Europe (e.g., If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium).  Instead of skipping pins, startups should split pins.  Without sounding too cosmic:  look for micro-alleys within bowling pins.  When I started at Mark Logic, I thought “publishing” was a pin and that all publishers were basically the same.  When I focused on publishing and looked not just for similarities among publishers but also differences between them, I learned that STM, education, news, market research, credit/financial, legal, trade, and B2B publishers were all different.  I like to say that all beagles look the same unless, of course, you’re a beagle.  By splitting pins instead of skipping them, you learn more about your customer’s needs, can serve them better, and — best of all — typically discover that the market you were about to skip over is about 10-100x bigger than you originally thought.
  • Hire stars.  Giant-fighting startups are not places for the weak or mediocre.  You need a team of aggressive, high-energy people who understand the mission and are ready to make the sacrifices required to win.  High-growth startups are lousy places to learn on the job.  That’s why the VC model gives nice chunks of equity to experienced managers with safe jobs in big companies.  They want to lure them into the startup and compensate them for the risk in so doing.  In the end, VC’s are not risk takers; they are risk eliminators.  They try to isolate all risk to the fundamental innovation and do so by setting every other lever of the business to standard. (See Chris Dixon’s recent post, Don’t Be Creative About the Wrong Things, for more.)  That’s why you need to build an A-team and be sure the people on it are scaling with the company.  Rest assured, even if you’re not asking the “can they scale” question about your team, the board is asking it about you.
  • Work together.  I’ve seen too many startups with divisive, prima-donna-laden cultures where staff meetings devolve to finger-pointing contests.  “I was the top salesperson at SAP and I can’t sell this stuff unless it works.”  “Well, I was the smartest guy at Harvard and my technology is so wonderful that a monkey could sell it.”  On and on.  This doesn’t work.  When you’re competing with giants you need the extra advantage that comes from brilliant people — working together — to solve problems.  All of us, when working in a functional group, are indeed smarter than one of us.  It took years to get this lesson through my head.  I first got it doing an exercise at a leadership program where each individual rank-ordered a list of items required for wilderness survival.  Then we broke in about 8 groups of 6 and re-did the exercise.  The worst group score beat the best individual’s score, and one of the individuals was a Brigadier General in the US Army.  Years later I discovered The Wisdom of Crowds and learned it again.  While it may sound hokey, teamwork is an amplifier of talent.  That’s why All-Star teams don’t do well in sports:  while each individual may play superbly; they just don’t play together.

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Posted in autonomy, endeca, Marketing, startups, strategy

PR Lessons from Sports This Week: Tiger F, Lysacek A+

Posted on February 20, 2010 | 3 Comments

What a great week for learning public relations (PR) from sports figures. First, we have (yet another) figure skating controversy with Evgeni Plushenko earning “only” silver despite having done quadruple jumps which the gold medalist, Evan Lysacek, did not.  Then, we have the Tiger Woods confession — after 3 months of silence — for his extramarital affairs.

I’m not judging morally or technically:  I blog about business, I know little about golf and even less about figure skating.  I am, however, judging PR strategy and skills in handling these situations.  In my estimation, Tiger gets an F and Lysacek gets an A+.

Why?

Lysacek did a simply amazing job in last night’s interview with NBC’s Bob Costas.  Either Lysacek is the best PR “natural” I have ever seen, or he has simply world-class PR advisors.  Despite Costas repeatedly baiting him, Lysacek looked a home-run hitter at batting practice, swatting away the inflammatory questions.

Excerpt (after having just shown a video of Plushenko saying that he thought he merited the gold):

Costas:  “Plushenko said:  ‘if the Olympic champion doesn’t know how to do quadruple jump, … now it’s not men’s figure skating, it’s dancing, … you can’t be considered a true men’s champion without the quad.’”

Lysacek:  “well, I think no one likes to lose, and a lot of what he’s saying is probably coming from a little bit of disappointment and anger so, taking it out of context, I don’t think, for me, I can’t be emotional or react to it …”

That is simply a superb answer.   He gets the real issue on the table (bitterness), takes the high ground, and refuses to answer the question all at the same time.  But it gets better:

Lysacek, continuing:  “the truth is that he’s been a force to be reckoned with in men’s skating for the last decade and has been a great role model for me …  [he] did something that no one thought was possible, [took time off,] came back, and got his third Olympic medal — two silvers and a gold — and that’s not something to be taken lightly.”

Wow.  Call the guy who’s attacking you a role model and then cite his accomplishments in a clear and precise way.   This guy is good.

But it doesn’t stop there, Costas continues:  “Plushenko said:  ‘ … the sport itself is regressing if the Olympic champion doesn’t do the quad, just doing nice transitions and being artistic, that’s not enough, because figure skating is a sport, not a show,’ again quoting him.”

Lysacek:  “Well I think it’s interesting that he puts so much emphasis on just one step in the program.  It is a 4 minute and 40 second skating routine so we have to put together our strongest moves — jumps, spins, and footwork — and we’re graded on everything we do in between …”

Here he’s answering the question, but using a powerful technique — framing — in how he answers.  Sure Plushenko wants to make it about one jump, but what about the other 4 minutes and 35 seconds?  It gets better:

Lysacek:  “… interesting enough, last night we tied on the component scores (the old artistic scores), and where I edged him — slightly — was on the technical scores which means my jumps were graded better than his and my spins were graded better than his.”

This guy’s on fire.  First, he reframes the problem back to whole-routine and then fires a cannon through the “dancing” argument by saying, “uh, by the way, I won on technical scores.”  And I love the passive voice :  not “my spins were better,” but “my spins were graded better.”  But it gets better still:

Lysacek:  “… to me he had a challenge, he had to skate last, he had to wait until the end of the event, he had the most pressure on him because he was leading after the short program, and I thought he looked incredible.  He went out and skated great and, for me, I congratulate him and hope that he’s 100% satisfied with that.”

Costas:  “Was he gracious to you in the immediate aftermath?”

Lysacek:  “Yes, he was very nice.  He’s a great guy.  I known him for a long time.  I’ve looked up to him for a long time.”

What do I love about Lysacek?

  • Great delivery
  • Absolute sincerity and ergo credibility
  • Great use of facts
  • Refusal to engage in an emotional conflict
  • Remapping the questions:  saying what you want to say almost regardless of what was asked

Now, let’s look at Tiger’s confession, via some excerpts:

Now every one of you has good reason to be critical of me. I want to say to each of you, simply and directly, I am deeply sorry for my irresponsible and selfish behavior I engaged in …

But still, I know I have bitterly disappointed all of you. I have made you question who I am and how I could have done the things I did. I am embarrassed that I have put you in this position …

The issue involved here was my repeated irresponsible behavior. I was unfaithful. I had affairs. I cheated. What I did is not acceptable, and I am the only person to blame …

I stopped living by the core values that I was taught to believe in. I knew my actions were wrong, but I convinced myself that normal rules didn’t apply. I never thought about who I was hurting. Instead, I thought only about myself. I ran straight through the boundaries that a married couple should live by. I thought I could get away with whatever I wanted to. I felt that I had worked hard my entire life and deserved to enjoy all the temptations around me. I felt I was entitled. Thanks to money and fame, I didn’t have to go far to find them.

I was wrong. I was foolish. I don’t get to play by different rules. The same boundaries that apply to everyone apply to me. I brought this shame on myself. I hurt my wife, my kids, my mother, my wife’s family, my friends, my foundation, and kids all around the world who admired me.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about what I’ve done. My failures have made me look at myself in a way I never wanted to before. It’s now up to me to make amends, and that starts by never repeating the mistakes I’ve made. It’s up to me to start living a life of integrity.

Let me be a little cynical here, but in terms of frequency “star athlete / rockstar / celebrity / politician has affair” should be a dog-bites-man, not a man-bites-dog story.  How is that John Denver can write his affairs into song lyrics …

There’s so many times I’ve let you down,
So many times, I’ve played around,
I’ll tell you now, that they don’t mean a thing

… and get away with it, while Tiger gets hung out to dry?  (And yes, I know there are a few decades in between.)

The first mistake Tiger made (other than the affairs) was letting this story get so big.  Some of that was out of his control (e.g., his enormous popularity) but a lot of it was controllable.  He could have just said earlier what he ended up saying later:  look, it’s no surprise that star athletes get a lot of “temptations” and I, uh, gave in.  My bad, it happens all the time, and what’s between me and wife is none of your business.  Next story, please.

But, having holed up for three months, he’s turned an “oh, another athlete had an affair” story into the Tiger Woods 24 Hours Mystery.  And, unfortunately, his confession does nothing to provide the details that he should now sadly provide if he wants to kill off the mystery angle, once and for all.

His delivery was poor:  scripted, stiff, hollow, robotic, insincere.

I didn’t like the way “therapy” was pitched.  You could substitute “disease” for “affair” and “drug” for “therapy” and the script would still make sense.  While I might sound harsh, that smacks of not taking responsibility.

The whole framing of the announcement was wrong.  Who is he apologizing to?  Everyone, it seems, but as one fan said:  “he doesn’t owe me an apology.”  Is he apologizing the sponsors who already fired him?    If so, send them a letter.  In his public statement, he should be apologizing to his wife and his kids, period.  The rest should be commentary for the media.  Not a confession.  Not an apology.

The execution was bad as well.  Media attendance was limited to three reporters, alienating the journalists he’s trying to reach.  The timing was in conflict with a golf event, further irritating the golf establishment.  There was no Q&A, which further reinforced the stiff/scripted perception.

So what I did dislike about the Tiger confession?

  • Insincere
  • Scripted
  • The therapy angle
  • Poorly timed
  • The mass apology framing

If I were Tiger’s PR advisor, I’d say the message (which should have been delivered fast) should be:

  • I got caught up in the celebrity bubble
  • I admit that I had affairs
  • I apologize to my wife and kids for what I’ve done
  • Any questions about my wife and family — either past or future — are  personal, and I will not answer them
  • Deep down I am unhappy and in therapy to try and fix that core problem
  • I hope to return to golf within a year
  • If I learn any lessons that are useful to others in this process, I hope to share them in the future (think:  book!)
  • This is extremely difficult for me and I thank you for your support

I value speed and authenticity in PR which is why I am so negative on the Tiger confession.  But I must admit that the media has responded pretty positively to it, for example, this piece in the New York Times, entitled Vulnerability in a Disciplined Performance.

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Posted in Marketing, PR