Welcome! Spark offers a practical—and some times irreverent—take on the state of strategy and marketing in the tech world. If you like Spark, pass it along to your colleagues and let us know.

In this third edition, we dive into the marketing trenches and climb to strategic heights by examining the intersection of tactics and planning. First, Brian Sommer offers his take on how tech companies can better understand and develop strategies for successful marketing tactics. Next, Jason Busch, offers a quick perspective on how tech strategic planning can come up short. Last, Art Hutchinson writes about charting effective strategy in uncertain tech waters by taking a scenario planning approach.

Disagree or have something to say? Get in touch: info@azulpartners.com

Smart Marketing: Playing the Lifecycle of Marketing Techniques to Your Advantage

Marketers don’t get far by sticking with old methods. Like old shoes, old marketing approaches may be comfortable but they do wear out and must be replaced. Few shoes and marketing approaches are good for more than a few years. How fresh are your techniques?

Don’t believe me? Think about webinars. In 1999, these events were rare and attracted fairly solid numbers of participants. Today, it’s really hard to get 30 people to attend many of these and those that do are often lower-level, unfunded, non-buyers. Webinars still work but only in ideal situations. Why have they become less effective? Because they are inexpensive, easy to produce and everyone added them to their marketing techniques. Overuse and extreme popularity made them commonplace. Prospects get too many invitations to attend webinars and now tune out requests to attend. The wide and rapid success of webinars has contributed mightily to prospects—dislike for them now. No, my spam filter (SpamBayes Outlook—an excellent add-in) almost always flags every webinar invitation as junk email.

Marketing strategies, and the marketers who use them, must continuously shift if they are to remain optimally effective. Marketing techniques and strategies have a life cycle—this must be understood if one is to deliver the most, best and cost-effective leads to Sales. If your game book hasn’t changed much in the last five years, your marketing efforts are probably getting harder, more expensive, less fun and less productive.

It’s important to know what new marketing methods are being created and used. One of my recent favorites involves a fellow who has identified the 100 most read and influential bloggers in IT. He routinely sends these bloggers free technology products from his clients. Of course, the bloggers use them and these products get written up in these blogs. As such, these blogs have become extremely low cost viral marketing tools and trigger a significant amount of new sales and market interest. Better still, these reviews stay in the internet forever and always popup during Google searches. This marketing technique is working because it is relatively unknown and the broader readership of blogs is not demanding that bloggers identify whether they have a connection to the product or how they got the product. Incidentally, the SpamBayes product mentioned above was due to a product review I noticed about it in a magazine.

Blogs are a new phenomenon and are appropriate tools in some situations. Azul Partners developed one for a leading software and services firm as a way to promote their overall sector. Another firm was strongly encouraged to use blogs as most of its buyers were young, recent college graduates with Electrical Engineering degrees. These people bought new technology based on Google searches. They were not typical F500 CFOs. They read blogs and blogs matter to them.

Newsletters are another form of media that have become overused and misused. Too many firms use them as self-centered, no-value-added communiqués which do not get read by target prospects. Others are so cluttered with ads that they become unreadable. My spam filter has gotten very good at steering most of these away from me. If you’re trying to reach F500 executives, remember that they have no time to spare, abhor infomercials and need advice now on how to be more successful grow their firm’s business. They could care less that you have come out with release 8.4.1.D of your software or that you’ve added a new person to your software quality team. If your firm produces one newsletter of no value adding consequence, chances are your readership will permanently plummet. Can you afford to take this chance? Newsletters still work but only when the publisher understands the targeted reader well and delivers content of value to them.

Choosing which marketing techniques to use is part and parcel of marketing strategy. Generally, one should avoid overused and tired approaches. Buyers have developed thick skins about these methods and are pre-disposed to ignore or be repulsed by them. This is why so many Sales organizations have shifted away from function/feature selling to strategic or solution selling. The better Sales groups are moving from these to ROI selling or to Point of View marketing. If your strategies are stuck in 1970, your results are going to be appalling.

Marketing strategy is similar to hunting strategies. Think about your quarry. If you want to bag hundreds of things and don’t care what you snare, you’ll need a line of beaters pushing thousands of your prey (and a bunch of everything else in the way) to your trap. If you want to bag just one elusive target, you’ll need a highly personalized method of tracking and bagging that target. Like hunting, marketers have to think like their prey. They need to understand the target, know their haunts, likes/dislikes, etc. In technology, the best marketers are those that continuously update their knowledge of prospects and look for new ways of reaching them. If you’ve seen something new and fresh, let me know. Good hunting!

Reach Brian at brian@azulpartners.com

Short Take: Why Strategic Planning
Often Comes up Short in the Tech World

Over the years, I’ve had the pleasure of working for—and advising—a number of incredibly bright individuals in the tech community with impeccable strategy credentials. But regardless of background and capability, I’ve seen organizations with the best leadership and strategy credentials often fail to bridge the gap between planning and market execution. In fact, based on my experience, those companies with the most impeccable credentials at the top are those who I would bet against when it comes to market execution in the tech world. Based on these observations, I’d argue those tech organizations focused most on traditional strategic planning often come up short for the following three reasons:

First tech organizations that focus too much on strategy fail to listen to the voice of the customer—as well as their engineers and field organization when making planning decisions. The voice of Microsoft Excel and perfect slide frameworks can never fully capture the dynamism and variability inherent in technology. Getting closer to the market—and the technology itself—is one of the key elements of planning, and many top strategic thinkers tend to work too much in their own vacuum.

Second, traditional planning and forecasting techniques tend to capture the future in neat frameworks that assume the world is going to fairly much be the same—plus or minus 10%. Those organizations focused too heavily on strategy using these techniques often fail to consider the outlier possibilities, those which a model cannot capture (for more information on breaking out from this approach, see Art’s article, below).

And last, we’ve all heard the phrase “analysis paralysis”. It’s one thing for an executive team to collectively create a strategy presentation to take to the board on a quarterly or annual basis. But it’s another to constantly occupy the executive team’s time with market analysis, forecasting, and debate. I’ve observed that the most strategic tech organizations spend too much executive time—on a near continuous basis—building consensus and conducting analysis when they should be focused on making decisions in a finite time frame and executing.

Reach Jason at jbusch@azulpartners.com

Charting a Course in Uncertain Tech Waters

Within every organization I’ve consulted to, I find executives arguing passionately for the importance of one or more threats or opportunities. They’re usually convincing—and speculative, and in conflict—all at the same time. Selecting the most promising opportunities and perilous threats on which to spend resources is never easy. The persistent trap for planners is being asked to forecast the unforecastable. "I know we don't know, but that's not good enough. I need a number. Now." Sound familiar?

Business literature and tradition offer many established analytical tools for making decisions when much is already known about an industry and a firm’s position in it, e.g., top-line and bottom-line financial trends, the pace and nature of technological change, business models, market size and growth, competitors and their habits and the ‘rules’ of competitive engagement, marketing and sales approaches, customer needs and feature preferences, suppliers—costs and distribution relationships.

“How does an organization rationally set priorities to ensure its health, growth and success when those priorities can literally shift overnight?”

When an industry is relatively stable, (the present looking much like the past; the future assumed to not be radically different), such rearview mirror planning is good enough. In high tech it seldom is. The future is always uncertain—often paralyzingly so. Entirely new industries are created all the time. Traditional planning tools work poorly at these margins. Such uncertainty can lead to fear or overconfidence, making prognostication, politics and power bigger parts of the decision-making process than they ever ought to be.

One of the unique problems in high tech is paying appropriate attention to that which seems unlikely but which would have a major impact if it happened. With the right analytical filters in place, such events aren’t that hard to spot. The pace and culture of many high tech enterprises however, often pushes against the kind of discipline needed to put such filters in place. The emergence in the mid ‘‘90s of a universal internetworking standard, (i.e., the web) was seen by many as highly desirable, (but highly unlikely) by more than one of my clients—years before it finally emerged. Then it did, and the world changed fundamentally. Some were prepared. Some were not and they’re gone. As the saying goes, “the revolution will not be televised”.

Tracking the steady trajectory of one’s core industry is important. Many industry analysts do this well. Unfortunately, it’s not enough. It’s as critical to know the subtle signs that signal the increasingly likelihood of such massive change. In a more proactive sense it’s also nice to know how to seed such a revolution and capitalize on the changes that result. The question is: How does an organization rationally set priorities to ensure its health, growth and success when those priorities can literally shift overnight?

“Scenarios allow management teams to practice—to rehearse compelling responses to a variety of archetypal situations they may face,
or want to create”

One response is to become entirely tactical—to foreswear serious planning altogether: doggedly pursuing a set goal while reacting as fast as possible to events as they unfold. “Why think too hard about next week when you’re living in a war or earthquake zone?” goes the logic, and it has some merit. The better response is to employ scenarios.

Structured, interactive, hypothetical (aka, scenario) thinking is the most effective approach for management teams needing to set strategy under conditions of uncertainty. Why? Because scenarios establish a robust common framework for recognizing new opportunities and threats as they emerge. Because scenarios enable distributed ongoing alignment of the decisions of many individuals across a broad array of emerging industry conditions. Because scenarios get past politics, power and prognostication—and the blind spots they create. Because scenarios allow a management team to agree to disagree, (for a time), while gathering the evidence needed to act with conviction.

In short, scenarios allow management teams to practice—to rehearse compelling responses to a variety of archetypal situations they may face, or want to create. Sports teams do this as a matter of course and it makes them better. Skip spring training and you won’t be playing in the majors. Management teams seldom do and many suffer for it.

Properly constructed and executed, scenario exercises for senior decision-makers can help weave together a huge array of possible future events and sort out those that are truly important. The alternatives are frenetic motion, management paralysis, or comfortable fiction. Investors deserve more; leaders shouldn’t settle for less.

Art Hutchinson, who is a first-time contributor to Spark, is Founder and Principal of Cartegic Group. He is also a Fellow with Azul Partners. Reach Art at art@cartegic.com

Out Takes …

We don’t know about you, but we’re tired of the road-show-talking-head approach to vendor marketing events. Are you looking for a creative marketing approach to accelerate the sales process, capture new leads, and get prospects—and customers—excited about your organization and the market opportunity you offer? Consider an interactive workshop that actively involves participants by sparking discussion and examining the future of a market—and what will be necessary to succeed. And get rid of that podium in front of the room for good. Curious? Drop us a line.

This newsletter is published by Azul Partners, Inc a market strategy and content advisory firm. Founded in 2004, Azul Partners advises the world’s leading software and professional services organizations. We work with companies to develop persuasive content and novel strategies that incorporate rational arguments, deep research and subject matter expertise. Learn more by visiting us on the web at www.azulpartners.com or drop a line: info@azulpartners.com