This belief and his findings correlate with a research project Performance Works recently completed focusing on gaps in traditional education as perceived by educators throughout the Southwestern United States. The nearly unanimous response of educators to the question “If you had a magic wand and could offer one more thing to students, what would it be?” was character education and leadership development. Administrators and teachers alike cited the importance of empowering students to find their voice. The skills most commonly highlighted as needing attention were problem solving, collaboration, communication and critical analysis.

As parents, citizens and human beings, these findings touch us deeply and spur us to action. Kids need and deserve a “code to live by.” Educators are consumed with test scores and standards. They don’t have the energy, time or resources to tackle these less-tangible, harder-to-measure skills. It’s not clear that all parents are equipped to teach those traits either and our personal belief is that without them, our kids will fail. We’re bringing children into a complex world of change — cultural, technological, economic and environmental — and they deserve to feel empowered and need to be resilient.

So, it is with a profound sense of responsibility and hope that we decided to launch Community Works. Community Works is a leadership development and character education program aimed at middle and high school students and our mission is to build the next generation of student leaders. The curriculum is designed to address core elements of character including problem solving, relationship building, effective communication, collaboration and conflict resolution through workshops and hands on projects.

We are piloting the program in Los Angeles and would love to hear your thoughts about what matters most when it comes to educating the next generation. Help us create a program to help our kids succeed.

Product marketing differentiates your products from other products. Brand marketing differentiates your customers from other customers.

Imagine walking on solid, enormous, continuous surface presenting all the possible features of products in a category. Customers can and do wander anywhere along the surface: over here there’s higher quality, walking over there the price goes down, walking over here at the product gets faster and more efficient. Product Marketing inherently assume this continuous surface connects all the products customers can consider as competitors.

Product marketers look for differentiation. They look for a spot on this surface they can own. And when things go exactly right—they look for customers to self-select based on a deep preference for that spot in the landscape.

In this sense, the holy Grail for both brand and product marketing is differentiation. However, differentiation is very different.

Differentiation in product marketing is the perceived separation between your product and your competition on this continuous feature surface. The ideal positioning is a spot only you occupy and therefore you describe is defensible. Often these spots are different in ways only you recognize as significant. This is a mindset Ron Weissman reminds us here is known as the “narcissism of small differences” to anthropologists. In feudal times, you can imagine a feudal lord finding this position and building a  fort to defend it so no one else can occupy that spit of land. However, if you are small it is likely your fort is small…and weak.  And it is likely that one of the bigger land owners will be able to overwhelm the territory if they simply try.

Brand marketing is different. With brand marketing you’re attempting to create is an island disconnected from this surface.

Brand marketing is realizing your goal is to separate your customers, not your product. You are creating an island. A discontinuous piece of land that may be hard to reach, but is just as hard to leave. You are creating separation in the customer’s decision process of your product versus your competitors. Not features, but personal identity. You are trying to get the customer to see themselves as the kind of person who looks for options all over your island, and not over on that other larger surface of land where you would likely be almost defenseless against onslaught.

If your customers feel like they have voluntarily left that continuous surface of features to be with their own kind and travel to your island, they will find themselves traveling on only that feature surface. They will ask which iPad version to buy or which dog breed or which Macy’s shirt. But their consideration of options won’t leave the island. After all, they are BMW people, not Cadillac people. Dog people, not cat people. 

For a competitor to get those customers to leave your island to go to the other surface of land—to earn consideration—is wildly more difficult. They need to make the person willing to get up and swim, give up what they have been, change their identity. The force this takes, what chemists call the “activation energy,” is dramatically higher. If life on the island gets really bad, folks will flee, but they don’t do it lightly.

Rationale? Of course, the dog person says dogs are friendlier. The Macy’s person says the prices make more sense. The BMW owner says Cadillac makes boring cars. But the truth is not in these descriptions. The truth is these people simply do not consider anything in the other category when they’re trying to figure out how to meet their desires and needs. They are BMW people, dog people, and Macy’s people.

Takeaways

• What kind of person uses your product or service?
• How do you were present your offering so that either people of that type will recognize themselves or people who have never consider themselves to be the type will decide to place themselves?
• Brand Marketing does not replace Product Marketing; it is a complement that builds customer loyalty.

When Virgin America first took off, I flew it quite a bit…as personal research. I was intrigued by the audaciousness of starting an airline tied to the brash reputation of Richard Branson’s Virgin. I remain impressed. There’s an old joke in tech: “How did God create the world in 6 days?” “He didn’t have an installed base.” We believe this applies: Virgin America is what happens when you start from scratch and…

• Know aircraft design
• Knowthe stateoftechnology
• Take the habits of fliers seriously
• Analyze the true incremental costs of amenities
• Consider how amenity “costs” introduce profit opportunities

A few examples of where this leads to better decisions:

• Individualized entertainmentsystem (“Red”), even in coach = satisfaction and eyeballs. As an obvious point, people like controlling their media. Beyond that, a compelling entertainmentsystem delivers eyeball for targeted advertising potential. Years ago, I was interested in airplane cabin advertising, especially first class. Passengers had only one channel on a big screen and many watched. With laptops, iStuff, etc., those days are gone. Red’s compelling content (you can overdose on inspiration from TED presentations alone!) seems to capture more eyeballs than any other airline system I’ve seen…opening the door for monetizing those eyeballs with advertising and cross-promotion. Of course, having numerous channels fights with mass advertising to the whole cabin, but as an advertiser, I’d prefer to pay less for fewer, more tailored eyeballs.
• Clever video for mandatory safety presentation= more people watching…repeatedly. Only VA’s rendition gets this effect. I don’t know if it means more VA passengers will live through an accident, but I do know it glues eyes to the entertainment system leading smoothly to a few precious minutes of full-cabin ads. Who’s advertising now?Google,Progressive insurance, and the chic Moran hotels — pretty good company. That said, I’m surprised they haven’t created a few new versions to ensure frequent fliers don’t zone out.

Ok, we’re taking off now…

• Tons of food and beverage selections available VIA theentertainmentsystem = advertising and co-promotion. With lots of choices, you need a multipage menu. A menu means advertising and co-promotion opportunities. This month, it boasts ads for a new tea brand and one of the available movies…and those pages bring in cash.
• Food and beverage order VIA theentertainmentsystem = no shrinkage. Over the years, I’ve gotten a LOT of free drinks from flight attendants. I’d guess around 10% — definitely over 5%. My smile isn’t that great, so I’m not sure why, but it’s true. I like it, but in Hospitality, this is called “shrinkage.” And according to the National Bar & Restaurant Association, it can cost 10-23% of revenue! When I ordering is the only way to communicate my beverage desire to the flight attendant, presto chango, no shrinkage. And it feels like a value-add to me!
• No carts in the aisles (well, far fewer) = less sense of restriction — even if you never move. Plus, because you order what you want when you want it, you get personalize refreshment timing.
• Happier crew members = better, more pleasant service. I’ve been so intrigued by this, I’ve bugged numerous crew members. It’s grandmother research, so sure, there are exceptions. But the difference in job satisfaction vs. the larger U.S. Airlines is profound. And it shows in the service. The reason for the difference is a topic for another post, but I asked a flight attendant early on “What’s different?” Her answer: “They talk to us…and they listen.” Easy, hmm?
• Power to each seat = one more reason to pick VA rather than buying a special cable for the times you upgrade on the right United flights. It’s still a new, wild feeling to work on my laptop and listen to myiPhonewhile working in the airport and on the flight…and get off and go to meetings with a full battery.

Takeaways

• If you knew all about your industry (you might), all about technologies to support your offering and brand promise (you can), and all about what your customers crave (you should…you really should), what would you do differently?

Questions for discussion during #UsGuysChat Twitter Chat on 12/5/11 (please join us!)

Post revised 12/3/11 to add #UsGuysChat questions

“It’s time to go deep on gamification,” remarked Ken Rosen at the October 31st #UsGuysChat. So on November 21st, #UsGuysChat on Twitter dives into Gamification II: Crossroads.

The Gamification Wiki makes it clear:

According to a 2011 Gartner Research Report it is estimated that by 2015, more than 50 percent of organizations that manage innovation processes will gamify those processes.

Nearly 175 million Americans  have also used “games.” The new workforce will take childhood gaming experiences into their professional lives and decision making. That will mean different product development, marketing, and enterprise development.
Gamification is the practice of changing behaviors to achieve a new goal. Applied effectively, change occurs incrementally; new behaviors become unconscious habits. A reward acknowledges this new behavior as an achievement; a new door opens and so on.

Gamification’s thought leadership is diverse. Nick Kellet, #usguys pioneer, gaming expert and CEO at GiftTRAP, reviews it all in Gamification Resources: People, Books, Slides, Blogs, Events & Tool . Some bestow gamification with near-mythic potential to empower and effect massive, positive change. Others bemoan great risks if not adopted wisely.

Either way, gamification is a business practice and trend that can’t be ignored. Gartner research (June 2011) projects that $74 billion plus will be spend on gaming in 2011 alone. This includes hardware, software, as well as online gaming. Likewise Saatchi & Saatchi reports (May 2011 Ipsos) that the US online population (18 to 44) is pretty evenly divided by gender – 54% male, 46% female.  Boredom ranks as the prime reason (57%) for playing. So interest exists: can you harness it for your own goals?

This puts #usguys at a crossroads. One road leads to a “Rosie the Riveter” do-good warm feeling.  This can include influencing behavior of your colleagues at work or volunteers for a cause. The other risks a dark path of noble or opportunistic failures; the risk is associating one bad experience with the method itself, something akin to “lipstick on a pig.”

Questions for discussion during #UsGuysChat Twitter chat  on 11/21/11 at noon PT/3pm ET:

1. What is gamification; who are some of your favorite thought leaders?
2. What makes the gaming experience unique (gameful)?
3. What is good gaming > i.e., the art of getting better; enriching behaviors that enhance the experience
4. What is bad gaming  > i.e., lipstick on a pig; enforcing behaviors that devalue the expereince
5. Is a gameful experience the same as loyalty/enagagement?
6. What do you see as next for the future of Gamification? How will YOU use it?
7. What are your takeaways from today discussion? What would you tell a colleague?

Related articles

• Want to be a gamification expert? Get certified (gigaom.com)
• Avoiding the Faddish Side of Gamification (technologyreview.in)

Oracle long ago moved from features focus to a claim of Fortune 500 dominance

Anthropologists have a name for tech/spec marketing: the narcissism of small differences. “Our search engine works in Hungarian, yours does not.”

Product or Company?
Sure, you must prove your product meets spec. But you can elevate the conversation way beyond this and change the playing field from merely positioning your product as slightly better to positioning your company as doing something important. Outclass the

competition; let them brand themselves as engineering-driven while you position yourself as a company that matters to customers.

Real-World Success

Planview is a great example of what can happen when you systematically elevate the conversation from features to company excellence. They launched a best practices initiative several years ago, Prisms. Rather than focus end-user training around narrow, product and GUI training,

Planview educates users about best practices in managing an IT department, based on the experiences of hundreds of customers. Of course, Planview’s software is critical to implementing best practices, but the focus of the training became excellence in IT. Over time, Planview’s reputation and community grew to such an extent that they are now Gartner’s Magic Quadrant leader in enterprise portfolio management, to a great degree because of the integration of their best practice philosophy into every aspect of software, training and company identity. Planview’s customers know that if they use Planview’s products, they will have a better performing IT department. And that’s all that really matters.

Based on whether your product is a technical or a lifestyle product and whether you are marketing to business buyers or consumers, there are a variety of ways to take the higher ground:

• Educate the market in industry best practices highlighting what your best customers are achieving with your product to enhance their performance, as Planview does.
• Become a trusted source for information about your market or industry, not just your company. Launch a vendor-neutral market information site.
• Promote your product’s longer-term social value, as supply chain vendor Plex does, by demonstrating how its solution safeguards the integrity of the food supply chain.
• Focus on helping your customers’ realize their personal or career aspirational goals and objectives, the way Host Analytics helps CFOs gain a “seat at the table” in core decision making, well beyond the traditional role of the CFO.
• Link your company to broader social campaigns, such as whiteboard vendor Promethean‘s focus on
  

  Just water...or hydration?

  improving educational achievement, particularly in minority communities

• Transform an ordinary consumer good into a technically advanced lifestyle product as Camelbak does,turning bottled water into a sophisticated solution promoting “hydration” as a way of improving athletic performance. Camelbak has also linked its company’s brand to broader social campaigns to promote water purity and safety.

Takeaways

• Think outside the (product) box. Change the playing field from product features to company brand. Focus marketing campaigns on your company’s market success and its core values, not just on head to head product comparisons.
• Take every opportunity to position your company as a thought leader or linking your mission to a broad industry movement, a social good or a universal longing. As the old marketing adage says, “laggards sell soap, leaders realize they’re selling beauty.”
• Understand that buyers are entering into a relationship with you, not merely consuming a product. Use success stories to demonstrate how you have helped customers their achieve core personal or business goals.

Questions for #UsGuysChat on 11/7 at noon PT, 3pm ET (To join this online chat, use Twitter and follow the hashtag #UsGuysChat. Please join us!)

1. Is Leadership valuable & different from features and benefits…or just Marketing-speak?
2. How can focusing on customer application build leadership & value?
3. Can you give ONE example of something your biz has done to attain Leadership?
4. Can you give ONE example where one company competes on features & another with Leadership?

5. Can you give ONE example of a way Leadership helped your bottom line?
6. If you support a social issue related to your leadership claim, does the market give you credit? (E.g. Promethean board’s focus on education; Plex focus on food supply chain safety)
7. How can you promote your Leadership without coming off as a “guru wannabe?”

Remember to join us 11/7/11 at noon PT, 3pm ET by following Twitter hashtag #UsGuysChat to dive into this topic.

By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette

In last week’s post, we introduced BlueArc, a maker of networked attached storage (NAS) systems for managing unstructured data in high-performance computing applications, and Ken Rosen, a corporate strategy and marketing consultant who worked with the Blue Arc team in the mid-2000s.

Rosen talked about how sales for the company had hit a plateau by 2004, forcing BlueArc to evolve its marketing and sales model. It could no longer rely on prospects being able to figure out for themselves how and why the product would be a fit for them. BlueArc needed to talk with key decision makers within its target markets and learn how to relate its products to their needs in a language they understood. It needed to win over those individuals with the influence to champion BlueArc within their organizations.

“The goal is to dissect the brain of the market and know at a conscious level how the market thinks … do that and you have a shot at being able to speak their language about things that really matter to them,” Rosen said.

In 2004 and 2005, BlueArc focused on animation, drug discovery and Internet services, then moved on to the oil and gas upstream exploration, design and simulation markets in 2006 and 2007.

How did BlueArc track and measure the efforts of its sales and marketing teams against results?

“A key tactic was simply identifying key markets as the only markets visible in the CRM system,” Rosen said. “This sounds trivial, but if reps saw that management was only tracking prospects in key markets, it was a strong signal that focus was serious.

“At the same time, pipeline was tracked by vertical market, so it was obvious long before deals closed whether the focus was working. Finally, the marketing team assigned a point person for each market to work with the sales teams. This person was motivated to support reps in closing business in the market and worked with reps to hear what parts of the targeting and messaging were and were not working.”

As always, executive focus was critical. In a telling moment, a successful, senior sales rep said, “I don’t think I need to know about these markets. I just need someone to get me in front of a prospect so I can ask about their pain.” BlueArc CEO Mike Gustafson and VP of sales Chris McBride responded with a single message: “Sales skills and the ability to do discovery are table stakes. Outselling the competition means our reps walk in the door knowing about key customer challenges, so they can become trusted advisors, not students.”

What was the outcome?

The result of this focused market segmentation and primary research? BlueArc posted six consecutive quarters of record revenue growth.

Executive buy-in and a shared philosophy were crucial. This, after all, had to be a team effort across the organization that could rely on whatever support it needed, from the front-line sales staff to the engineers.

Rosen remembers his first conversation with Gustafson.

“I began the meeting with, ‘Here’s what I believe, if you agree, let’s talk, if not …  we probably shouldn’t go on: If you want to sell to me, you have to solve my pain. And if you want to even discuss my pain, you have to do it in my language.’”

Gustafson of course agreed.

“To sell to the enterprise market, you have to talk to the audience, ask them what keeps them up at night and listen to how they talk about their challenges,” Rosen said. “The more valuable insights don’t come from asking about what product or feature customers want, they come from asking customers what they do, need, and crave.”

This entire process can be led internally or with external help such as Rosen, but the challenge of doing it in-house is significant.

“There are two practical challenges: first, if you believe in doing the research, it can be hard for someone in the company to ask questions without selling…and hard for a prospect to open up without feeling like they are in some sort of sales cycle. On the other hand, if you believe you should just hire someone who already knows about your markets, it simply isn’t practical to find someone whose task is to be, and continue to be, an expert on all functions of all the potential markets you can sell into.”

What were the key lessons learned?

On his blog, Rosen has distilled the lessons learned from his experience at BlueArc into a five-point scale for deciding which target markets to pursue.

To quote:

1. How intense is prospect pain in the area you serve?

If the pain from the problem you solve isn’t setting prospects’ hair on fire, if they don’t think about it almost every day, your sales cycle will be longer. Personally, I greatly prefer customers who use words like “pain” over “need,” but both trump “desire.” Sell aspirin, not vitamins.

2. How well do you solve that pain?

This is where most companies are most comfortable, because it is the most inward-looking question: Do we solve the problem? For too many companies, a “yes” to this question implies “OK, let’s hire the sales force and start advertising!” We humbly disagree. It’s one of five criteria and you’re not likely the only firm solving the problem.

3. How strong is the competition?

This criterion is pretty obvious: less competitive environments ease the sales cycle.

4. Can you actually close deals?

Many companies think about the problem they solve without worrying about whether they can actually reach a decision maker. Maybe he only buys integrated products. Maybe she only buys from Fortune 500 companies. Maybe he hasn’t changed vendors in 10 years because the cost to change is too high. Maybe the ideal market is fragmented and requires a sales channel too expensive for this stage of your development. You have to convert someone who needs your product into someone who buys your product.

5. Long-term value of the market

Market selection doesn’t mean you cut your growth aspirations. Far from it. It means you believe the fastest path to growth is by saying something compelling to someone specific. So our final criteria: What is market growth? Will success lead you to adjacent markets (Geoffrey Moore’s bowling pin strategy)? Does one market offer better-known references? Does your team have special background that makes success easier?

Reposted with permission of Francis Moran Associates

Related articles

• BlueArc case study: Target marketing to get past low-hanging fruit (Part 1)
• 5 Criteria for Breakthrough Target Markets

By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette

Last month, BlueArc Corp., a 13-year-old maker of network storage systems based in California, was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems for a reported $600 million.

BlueArc’s business was networked attached storage (NAS), the kind of high-end storage system for managing unstructured data — files, spreadsheets, digital content and images — in high-performance computing applications. However, the company struggled for years to achieve profitability despite periods of strong revenue growth.

“BlueArc, while it had received funding somewhere north of $200 million, couldn’t dominate the NAS market on its own. It needed a partner. With the acquisition by Hitachi and its intellectual property girth, it has nailed that market down,” InformationWeek’s Deni Connor wrote shortly after the deal was announced.

Despite its challenges in achieving profitability, BlueArc had established itself in a number of key industry sectors — health and life sciences, media and entertainment, telecommunications, energy and e-discovery. Its key competitive advantage from a technology standpoint was a file system built on custom chips, which were able to maintain a performance advantage over competing Intel technology at a price point that kept customers coming, Paul Madera, a managing director with Meritech Capital Partners, told the Wall Street Journal.

But it takes much more than the wow factor of the technology to achieve market penetration, especially in key verticals with unique needs and pain points. We caught up with Ken Rosen, a corporate strategy and marketing consultant with Performance Works who worked with the Blue Arc team in the mid-2000s, about how the company learned to see the world from the perspective of its potential customers.

Technical superiority vs. business value

Rosen was hired as a consultant in 2004 on the recommendation of Apax Partners, one of BlueArc’s investors. By that point, six years after it was founded, the company’s early rapid growth based on technical superiority had plateaued.

“The founders had started the company with a technically creative idea, putting algorithms in hardware rather than software,” Rosen said. “As a startup in the late ’90s when they were seen as hot and up and coming, they got people on their side the way many small companies did, by explaining their technical superiority and selling to people who understood and craved it.”

These early markets included research and hosting and a variety of horizontal applications, where customers could see for themselves how BlueArc’s technology would provide them with a business advantage. This provided BlueArc with its initial market traction among companies that had a clear pain point and were actively looking for a solution.

“This was the key difference between marketing and sales in this era and later eras in the growth path of the company,” Rosen said. “The customer needing to connect technology to business value versus BlueArc understanding the customers’ business well enough to highlight business value.”

In other words, BlueArc’s initial sales and marketing model relied on prospects being able to figure out for themselves how and why the product would be a fit for them. As a result, the company had trouble resonating with the next tier of potential customers – those companies that were aware they had a pain, but were not actively looking for a solution or didn’t know a solution was available. (We call these the second and third buckets in our three buckets of customer segmentation.)

From Rosen’s perspective, it wasn’t that the BlueArc team had dropped the ball; they simply realized it was time to evolve their marketing strategy in accordance with the current growth phase of the company. It was time to change the message to position the product in terms of the market’s need.

Finding the pain

After Rosen joined the planning effort, the team took a strategic look at BlueArc’s potential target markets and narrowed it down to 14. Then it was time to pound the pavement.

“I believe in primary research,” Rosen said. “If you talk to decision makers, ask good questions and don’t try and sell them something, they will tell you their pain points … they will even tell you how they want you to sell to them. We’ve found the source of ‘truth’ – where ‘truth’ is the best path to growth – is primary research 99 percent of the time.”

For example, in the pharmaceutical industry, BlueArc learned that the scientists and researchers typically have the power to overrule the IT department when a different path will drive better, more productive science. Talking to the IT guys about the merits of high-performance storage was often a wasted effort because, too often, IT is evaluated on maintaining standards and reducing vendors rather than the science of new drug discovery. What BlueArc had to do was get the ear of the scientists and talk about how the technology would help with what mattered most to them – accelerating drug discovery and shortening time to market.

“We started in IT and on the science side to test both directions for priorities which were a match with the differentiation of BlueArc’s offering,” Rosen said. “That is, if BlueArc were a commodity provider of standard equipment, the right point person might have been in IT. But given its area of differentiation, the decision maker who cared was a different person with very different priorities.”

Rosen beat the bushes in his own network, mined BlueArc’s sales pipeline and even purchased lists of executives from companies that typically fill rooms with executives for focus groups. Instead of focus groups, however, BlueArc simply asked for one-hour phone calls. The goal was to have frank conversations with decision makers within the industry who were willing to discuss issues critical to their success.

Don’t sell, just talk

“Executives often wanted to keep talking at the end of these calls,” Rosen said. “You know discussions are going well when the person interviewed thanks you for helping them look at the own needs and operations in new ways. It means you are reaching the heart of how they think about their own success.”

Most important, at this stage, BlueArc was talking to its target market without trying to sell anything.

The company then used this intelligence to educate its sales team with direct, in-person training sessions.

BlueArc repeated the same process in its other target industries. In 2004 and 2005 it focused on animation, pharmaceutical and biotech drug discovery and Internet services, then expanded into the oil and gas exploration and design and simulation markets in 2006 and 2007.

How did BlueArc execute on what it had learned from this primary research and what was the outcome? Next week we will reveal the results and share Rosen’s takeaways.

Reposted with permission of Francis Moran Associates.

Related articles

• Target Market Selection to Achieve Breakthrough Revenue Performance

The action: The entrepreneur drags me out of line, insists that I see his demo, NOW!!, and corrals me into a corner, balancing his laptop on a stack of cartons.

“Ok, you’ve got my attention,” I sigh, with more than a hint of annoyance.  He launches into a demo of a complex app doing who knows what on screen.
“See,” he says, “it all works, just like I told you it would!”
“Uh…,” I sputter, “what exactly am I looking at?”  
“My app,” he says, “the one I told you would revolutionize multi-application business collaboration!”
In his mind, simply witnessing his demo will instantly convert me from a skeptic into an investor.  In my mind, I can fake an urgent call (the surest way to flee a tedious demo) or be polite and suffer in silence. Holding a lunch tray, I can’t readily grab my phone, so, once again, I resign myself to the latter course—death by demo.

Techno-idealist CEOs are convinced that app goodness, once demoed, is irresistible. Hence the plaintive cry: “please, please watch my demo and you’ll see why we’ll be the next Facebook.” But most demos rarely impress. And a truly bad demo can kill the deal, because it reveals—up close and personal—the CXO’s inability to market, sell, communicate, or understand how to build a business. (Please note that even great demos rarely, by themselves, make the sale to investors. But they can create enough interest to start an investor dialog.)

So what’s the roadmap for giving a dynamic demo that increases interest rather than sends investors diving for their iPhones?

1. WWSJD? What would Steve Jobs demo? As Steve illustrates, your demo should reinforce your larger business story and brand. Please tell me how what you’re demoing is different from all the other stuff that seems to be just like yours. And don’t forget to tell me why these differences are important to your target users. Make just a few key points and repeat them for emphasis. And don’t show me every feature.
2. While you log on, I log off.  Every OS and many apps have some form of security log-in. So, unless you’re demoing some brand-new log-in technology–and that’s the focus of your company– skip walking me through your log-on. Just show me the app. Get to the point–or you’ve just wasted 30 seconds of the two to three minutes I’m likely to give you at a trade show or venture event.
3. Tell & Show, don’t Show & Tell. Tell me what I’m about to see before you show me.  And tell me why what I’m about to see is important to your customers. What should I look for during the demo? Then tell me again what you just showed me and reinforce why it is important to your customer.
4. Make my jaw drop . . . or stop.  Quickly take me to the point in the demo when your customer’s jaw drops. When does a client or user stop you and gasp, “OMG. I’ve got to have this!”  Why is this the point in the demo when awareness turns into product lust? “What,” you say, “we don’t have a jaw-dropping moment?” Maybe you ought to rethink your demo…or your product.
5. The bottom line: leverage the power of story-telling. Tell me a story. Give me a context for viewing your demo. Show me a day in the life of the user.  Or give me a meaningful use case. Otherwise, the demo is just mouse clicking lacking  that bigger picture which creates meaning, stickiness, and impact.

Takeaways

• A compelling story helps create a compelling demo. Unfortunately most demos, and probably yours too, are boring. Show me how you’re solving a big, important problem. Make me care about the problem and I’ll probably end up caring about your demo.
• Unleash your inner Steve Jobs. Watch how great performers give compelling demos. There are plenty of excellent online demos to watch and emulate.*  So learn from the best. And practice by recording yourself giving the demo. Be as critical as possible.
• And…don’t ambush my lunch.

Happy demoing!

* Among the demo resources available to entrepreneurs, I’d recommend: http://www.secondderivative.com/ and the work of Mary Etta Eaton at Stanford University: http://www.linkedin.com/in/maryettaeaton1 

Image Credits:http://www.eurastro.de/iya/galileannights, J. Marot-Lassauzaie, G. Tomezzoli.

eWEEK’s Big Ideas about Big Data (8/15/11) Big Data definition, “with help from research firm Gartner:”  “Big data refers to the volume, variety and velocity of structured and unstructured data pouring through networks into processors and storage devices, along with the conversion of such data into business advice for enterprises.”

That’s like saying “New ideas come from electricity moving among brain cells.”  It’s correct, but emphasis is wrong. It makes sense an IT-oriented firm like Gartner would focus on speeds, feeds, and infrastructure, but executives need a different view.

 Let’s be clear, Big Data is NOT simply dealing with a lots data! I sympathize with colleagues who hate the name. After all, 1,000 movies is a Petabyte. But 1,000 movies is not a Big Data problem. On the other hand, I just spoke with the CTO of a top Pharmaceutical firm. They have a serious Big Data initiative…and the total data fits on a single hard drive.

So what IS Big Data? NEW meaning from NEW sources

Big Data is finding new meaning from new data sources. New meaning that was never practical to find before—because of scale, data format, distribution of data in may locations, the fact that no one thought of looking before, etc. Sources from Lego store purchase patterns to iPhone GPS info. From automobile traffic patterns to internet data traffic patterns. From weather to earthquakes. From tech support response times to medication response times. It is EASILY as much a new mindset as new technology. NEW meaning from NEW sources.

Why should you care? Because just for a start, businesses can learn what to offer and to whom. When to offersomething new and through what channels. Which employee can best solve a problem and when to get outside help. Which competitor will win and when their stock price will reflect the victory. I’ll go out on a limb here: I consider Big Data the most important thing for business since the Internet. (Feel free to tell me I’m off-base in comments!)

The hard part: Where to start? When something will change everything, where do you start? CIOs think about data storage, clusters, Hadoop, and data sources. Marketers think of customer behavior, influence patterns, and traffic flows. CEOs and CFOs think about ROI on (what will clearly be) new infrastructure and staffing.

When the internet was born, it was—truly—a baby. We all grew up with it. When it was small, we did small things. As it grew in power and reach, we did bigger things.

The birth of Big Data is different

The birth of Big Data is different from the birth of the Internet because the data explosion is already here. The information to refine or reinvent your industry probably exists (although it too will expand enormously in the coming  years). What will you do? Will you wait until the field it fully baked and play me-too with competitors? Or will you accept that Big Data is a new way to think about decisions?

A favorite saying is, “When the paradigm shifts, everyone goes to zero.” Another is “when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Both apply. Please comment and let us know how you are responding.

TAKEAWAYS

1. Gather at least a cocktail party understanding of Big Data implications for your field…now.
2. Reflecting on data already being collected in your field (or fields affecting you) and how deeper understanding can change your decisions…or even your approach to how companies compete.
3. Start writing down the sort of questions capable of changing how companies compete in your field. You’ll be able to answer them sooner than you may think. Hint: Start with “Why do…?”

QUESTIONS for 9/19/11 #UsGuysChat (This is our first time hitting this deep topic, so may not get to all depending on conversation flow.)

Q1 [quick one]:  How many discussions have you been in on Big Data? (This is my first, several, many, so many that I avoid them now)

 Q2: What does “Big Data” mean to you?

 Q3: In what FUNCTIONS do you expect Big Data to have the greatest impact?

 Q4: In what INDUSTRIES do you expect Big Data to have the greatest impact?

 Q5: What should we do or learn now (tech, new types of questions, key players, etc.) to prepare for the rise of Big Data?

 Q6: How can we best help others to understand the implications of Big Data?

Your Brand is your promise—a promise of how you will behave in good time…and bad.  Why promise your customer something about which they don’t care?

With that question in mind, let’s zoom back from micro-entrepreneurs to the enterprise with a graphic (thank you IBM) showing how massive Brand confusion exists for many, many…many companies. On the right, why firms think customers follow them on social media…and on the left, why customers actually follow. Just a little shocking, no?

Notice companies think customers care about companies: “People want to know about us and our products.” But customers actually care about themselves: “How can I get a better deal on my purchases and know I’m buying the right product?”

Companies who do not understand their own Brand promise cannot deliver what customer want. In this case, companies put the wrong things on their social media sites because they don’t know what matters.

What is your Brand promise? Are you clear about how it influences your daily decisions? Are every one of your employees clear about how your Brand guides…and sets boundaries…on how they will behave…every single day?

TAKEAWAYS

• You cannot deliver on a Brand promise that matters to customers if you don’t know what matters to customers.
• You cannot trust history, your colleagues, or conventional wisdom to tell you what customers value.
• The only way to know what customers value? Ask them. And not in the context of selling when their barriers are up.  You must even be careful when only using quantitative, multiple-choice surveys (at least in the beginning) because you may not even offer the right response choices.
• What customers value can change. If you are special, you are special in the context of your competition or other choices your customer can make. As they change, your value changes. Ask again.

What if you truly don’t know what it is about your offering that really matters? And what if you don’t have the people to ask customers outside of a selling situation? Give us a call. We do this all the time and are happy offer suggestions.