Archive for November, 2006
November 13th, 2006
Mary Sullivan has prepared a great presentation on “It’s All About Them: Customer-Focused Messaging“ for the tonight’s SDForum Marketing SIG at DLA Piper Silicon Valley.
Mary offers a messaging framework for moving beyond product-centric features and product-centric benefits to demonstrating your understanding of a prospect’s problems, needs, and wants. If you want to see more samples of her thinking for startups see her two blogs “Way to Grow” and “First Year”
The meeting starts at 6:30 with networking, Mary’s presentation will be from 7-8:15PM. I have previewed it with her and was struck by the number of thought provoking suggestions for marketing folks–and software startup founding teams–used to focusing on features.
Just a brief note on the SDForum Marketing SIG, our promise is “Practical tips and techniques for anticipating, identifying, and satisfying customers needs for emerging technologies profitably.” We are guided by this quote from “Management: Task, Responsibilities, Practices” by Peter Drucker on the importance of marketing:
“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only these two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”
Update August 2008: Mary Sullivan’s slides are now available here http://www.sdforum.com/document/docWindow.cfm?fuseaction=document.viewDocument&documentid=85&documentFormatId=103
November 12th, 2006
Here are 3 things I learned from Jennifer Vessels in Next Step’s workshop “How to Sell the Real Value of Your Solution” on Thursday, November 7.
- I need to align my sales efforts with my prospect’s success factors. This means that I need to figure how they are getting measured and how to influence and serve their basic needs.
- We had an interesting and lively discussion about selling to or around corporate gatekeepers, typically purchasing and IT departments.
- They recommended a book called “Questions That Sell: The Powerful Process For Discovering What Your Customers Really Want“, which I plan to check out and report back on in more detail.
November 9th, 2006
On Nov. 8, I attended the Guy Kawasaki Art of the Start Seminar. This was the second time I have listened to Guy’s presentation. Guy is an amazing speaker and has given this pitch a hundred times. Even after 100’s of presentations, Guy continues to illustrate passion and enthusiasm in his Art of the Start pitch. A few techniques that he used to keep the crowd enticed and entertained were using current topics for examples and news breaking politics for jokes.
Three lessons that I took away from “The Art of Rainmaking” portion of the seminar include:
- Build Credibility
- Find the Influencers
- Don’t use Cheap Adjectives
Building credibility is difficult as a start up. Some obstacles you should overcome to help make you more credible include:
- Closing paying customers
- Developing strategic partners
- Investor board for references
- Advisers / industry experts who believe and will testify for you
- Milestones- what is your path for success
Finding the influencers is key. Often start ups try to sell to executives, which means asking someone with a budget and an overwhelming amount of responsibility to take a gamble on unproven technology. As a first time CEO, you lack the credibility to be trusted to deliver on your claims. Startups would be better served to find prospects who are already looking for a solution to a problem they solve. Even if these prospects do not make the purchasing decision, they will influence the decision maker.
Cheap Adjectives are words like revolutionary, disruptive, culture altering, paradigm shifting, and change the way. Commerce has been taking place for over 3000 years: it is virtually impossible to come up with a new way of generating revenue. When selling, do not over state claims and bullshit your customers with cheap adjectives.
Two key things we try to help clients understand: their prospect’s perception of the total cost of acquisition, and initially its easier to close smaller companies.
- What is the opportunity cost of implementing your software? How many guys must be pulled away from their day to day job to work on a special project? If you cannot tell the customer something that they do not already know about their business in two hours or less, you are wasting their time. Furthermore, your software must be installed, usable, and delivering results in a week. Finding the influencers is essentially finding your early adopters.
- Most early adopters are found in small or medium sized companies. As a start up, it is too difficult to close a Fortune 500 company. Go after smaller companies, close business, and build credibility.
The Art of the Start is an amazing book and an even better seminar. They are definitely worth your time.
November 8th, 2006
Art of the Start is one of the best workshops out there for startups. Here are 3 things I learned from it.
- Mary Hodder, founder and CEO of Dabble, reminded the audience of the saying “If you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for money!”
- One of the most important Guy Kawasaki’s rules: 10/20/30. It applies to all pitches whether to VC or prospects. 10 slides, 20 minutes and 30 point font size.
- I learned about an interesting new startup Slideshare. It allows you to share powerpoint slides. We will be checking this out soon.
November 2nd, 2006
I did my profile in http://kmi06.pbwiki.com/SeanMurphy in the form of a FAQ
Q:Why do you come to KMWorld?
This is my third year, so it’s something of a triumph of hope over experience, but I believe that there are a number of techniques and technologies in the “knowledge management” space that are going to have a profound impact on business. This conference is one place to listen to bona fide practitioners and see vendors with innovative technology you don’t see in many other venues and certainly not all together.
Q: Are there specific technology issues that you are interested in?
- How are wikis, blogs, and instant messaging (IM) tools going to merge into content management systems on corporate intranets?
- How can the very powerful text analytics tools available for enterprises be scaled down so that they work for personal information management: I am thinking of a number of things like latent semantic indexing, recommendation and group lens systems for small teams and ad hoc groups, and e-discovery tools that I could use for my e-mail and IM (instead of by a corporate compliance officer or outside counsel).
Q:If you could merge this conference with another one which would it be?
Two choices: Techdirt Greenhouse and Office 2.0:
- Techdirt Greenhouse (see also the wiki for the Jun-10-2006 event) fosters a level of discussion among the attendees that would be very energizing at KMWorld. Have 3 people come up and present a current challenge in their organization related to knowledge management. The group breaks into six teams, two each working on the three issues. There is small group discussion, a report back to the larger group by each team, and then a large group discussion
- Office 2.0[1] had a number of vendors aimed at replacing PC based apps with web services, the net effect was to focus on enabling group process and communication. Many of these applications have a strong potential to enable much more effective knowledge sharing at least in a team setting than any of the “top down” enterprise class portals that make the same promise.
Q: Any sessions in particular you plan to attend?
I missed Tuesday because of a prior commitment but today I plan to listen to Dave Pollard, whom I find to be consistently insightful, talk about “Adding Meaning and Value to Information” in Session A203
Q: Did you see any new vendors on the Exhibits Floor that are worth mentioning.
The Abbrevity folks look like they have a very interesting and very scalable file classifier that is extremely low cost, designed to be run in parallel, and could scan an enterprise intranet and attached file systems overnight. It may form the basis for some interesting vertical applications when they find the right partners.
One under-appreciated company is Traction Software which offers a richly featured blogging / content management system that has seen uptake in environments with complex security requirements (e.g. a number of three letter government agencies). But they already ten years old, and may not be willing to make the changes (or perhaps take the risks) to gain wider acceptance.
I spent a lot of time in the adjacent hall in the “Streaming Media” show where there was an interesting mix of technologies for video and audio broadcasting that struck me as very applicable to enterprise training needs. One company that I was interested in there in particular was Blogtronix looks like it would be very useful for mid-size and larger corporations with rich internal blogging ecosystems that they want to keep inside the firewall (or perhaps only publish via extranet/VPN), it offers a mix of functions that others are sure to follow but I was still excited to see it. I chatted briefly with Dave Sifry last year after an AlwaysOn breakfast and asked him why Technorati didn’t offer an appliance for intranet blogging ecosystems: “off strategy” was his reply. Probably the right answer for his firm but there is clearly a need. (Update Nov 7: Intel seems to think so as well with SuiteTwo)
Q: Any advice for the Conference Organizers?
It sure would be nice if each session had a permalink and trackback function, if it’s available I haven’t found it).
Q: What else can you tell us about yourself?
I have a backgrounder here: http://www.skmurphy.com/about/
[1] Update Jan-18-2011: Office 2.0 website www.office20con.com has been taken over by spammers, links deleted.
November 1st, 2006
There is a wiki for the conference at http://kmi06.pbwiki.com/ where I will also be doing some gardening (which I think sounds better than gnoming).
We are also helping out New Idea Engineering with their booth; if you get a chance drop by booth 200 and say hello to Dr. Search, who first appeared in Issue 6 of the Enterprise Search Newsletter (and bears a remarkable resemblance to Theresa, at least on the show floor). If your job involves the care and feeding of an enterprise search engine it’s worth subscribing. There is also a Yahoo group for Independent Search Engine Developers
A technical and business discussion group for developers, consultants, IT people and managers who work with Enterprise Search Engines such as Autonomy (now owns Verity and Ultraseek as well), Endeca, FAST, Google (Enterprise), IBM Omnifind, Nutch, Oracle Text, and Lucene. While some engines already have specific groups, most large companies own more than one engine; vendor selection and integration can be rather complex, and of course each vendor pushes their own solutions.
Full disclosure: New Idea is a client, I like wikis, and everyone remains fully clothed at all times while visiting Dr. Search on the show floor.
Tags: km2006
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