secrets from silicon valley—how the most successful technology companies create breakaway...

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Creating Break-Away Positioning Strategies

Secrets of Silicon Valley

By: Robert M. Wright

2 COPYRIGHT 2011 FIREBRICK | FIREBRICK.COM

Today’s Agenda

What is Positioning?

New Positioning Model

9 New Rules for Positioning

Putting the Positioning Model In Action

Positioning Strategies

Launching Your Story

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Inflection Points = Growth and Disruption

Inflection Points

Fast, More Frequent

Cloud

Mobile

M&A

New Product

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The Problem: Strategy to Revenue

StrategyPoint of Revenue

Takes too long!

Don’t maximize revenue opportunity!!

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The Root Cause is Not A Bad Strategy

Business Model

Product

Go-ToMarket

Making YourStrategy WorkMaking Your

Strategy

Channel


Root Cause: Different Buyers, Competitors

CIO?Cloud Computing Committee?

VP Security?VP Applications?

VirtualizationServers

Cloud ComputingPlatform

Data Center Executive

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The Answer: Making Your Strategy, Work

StrategyPoint of Revenue

“Go-to-Market” Journey

momentum?

ROLL-out? SALES

conversations?

Sales SUCCESSmodel?

REVENUE?accounts?

marketingLEVERS?

Is there a MARKET?

Do I know these

BUYERS?

What is my STORY?

DIFFERENT? resonate?

What is my STORY?

DIFFERENT?resonate?

Strategy Intelligence

PositioningStrategy

Sales Enablement

RevenueOptimization

LaunchStrategy✓

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They All Have Powerful Stories!

What Do They Have in Common?

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Definition of Positioning

…Positioning is in the mind of the

prospect. Its how you differentiate

your solution in their mind. It cuts through the

clutter. If focuses on the perceptions of the

prospect.

“

”

What is

Positioning?

Al Reis

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You Know You Have a Positioning Problem…


Your slide deck is 30 slides1.Long sales cycles and lots of “no-decisions”2.

ask 3 people what you do …get 3 different answers4.

3. Blah, Blah, Blah – you sound like all your competitors

Your company is not considered a player in the market5.

You spent a lot of money on PR and got nowhere6.

Sales will call on anything that moves7.

You don’t have a viewpoint8.


What are Your Challenges?

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Shift the focus: “me” orientation to “buyer” stimulus

Product-Centric

Buyer-Centric

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For Example…

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ProductCentric

BuyerCentric

•Release 1.5 PIM SaaS solution, GeoTagged, XML-based

• “Global brand execution”, synchronize flow of product information

• “User complexity” is #1 CIO issue slowing down IT-as-Service – managing millions of configurations

•Release 5.0 Big Data analytics, Point-in-time recovery, Hadoop, Tiered storage

• User virtualization, Win 7 Desktop migration, Make Citrix desktop virtualization better

• “How can you run your business without all the data”? Emergence of Big Data applications

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7 Positioning Rules


Rule 1: SMB is Not a Market

SMB

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Rule 2: Who is your “Mary”


Examples of personas

“Avniash”

Change-Agent

• Complex organizations

• High pace of change

• Focus on revenue growth, Not cost cutting

• Reports to CEO

• Results-based IT

• Value: IT agility, shared risk

“Aditya”

Early-Adopter

• Regionalized IT ops

• Heritage of experimentation

• Need for game-changer

• Reports to LOB

• Optimize current IT

• Value: technical performance

“Kenneth”

Maintainers

• Business does not rely on IT for change

• Steady state: legacy

• Focus on budget costs

• Reports to CFO

• Resources-based IT

• Value: cut costs, IT operational excellence

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Buyer evolution model

“Mary”1st ten

“Aman”Next 100

“Vijay”Next 50

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Rule 3: Own a Problem


What is the problem you “own”?

“Applications Integration” Company

“Decisioning, Predictive CRM” Company

“Customer Lifetime Value”

Company

“Campaign Management” Company

“Find More Revenue”Company

Product IP Problem Solved

“Hyper-Relational Technology” Company

Before After

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…And connect to a funded initiative

23COPYRIGHT 2011 FIREBRICK | FIREBRICK.COM

Rule 4: Have a Point of View

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Rule 5: Take a Corner of the Room

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Rule 6: Communicate With Stories


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Good Stories Answer 3 Questions

How will my life be fundamentally different? ?3

How are you different ?2

1 ?Why you, now

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Rule 7: No Geek-Speak

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Does your message sound like this?

New Software Development Kit Enables Users, Developers and Partners to Take Full Advantage of Vertica’s Real-time Parallel Processing Engine for Big Data

BILLERICA, Mass., June 20, 2011

Vertica today announced availability of Vertica 5.0, the latest

version of the Vertica Analytics Platform, which offers greatly

improved flexibility and real-time performance for

customers’ most demanding business intelligence and

analytic workloads.

The Vertica Analytics Platform analyzes data on a massive

scale, with several customers analyzing more than a

petabyte of data in real time. Vertica 5.0 delivers improved

flexibility, extensibility and performance in how users

analyze and manage their business-critical information.

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH


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We are BANNING these 5 words


Flexible

Comprehensive

Collaborative

Massive Scale

Agile

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Plain-Spoken Messages in Your Buyer’s Words

PowerAdvocate is an energy intelligence company delivering

supply chain applications that incorporate the world’s largest

FactBase of supply market data, which help energy executives

restructure costs and steer company performance.

Only PowerAdvocate delivers a complete view and in-depth

understanding of the energy supply chain market - every

supplier, every spend transaction, and every commodity – as

well as the data intelligence needed to navigate through volatile

markets, economic swings, and an ever-changing regulatory

climate. With PowerAdvocate, pace-setting executives see

everything to better manage and deliver an order-of-magnitude

improvement in performance.

PowerAdvocate offers data intelligence to chart future growth

and profitability. Executives can see the probability of cost

changes, understand the impact on the cost structure of the

business, and better manage their risk.


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Rules In Action

The Deliverables

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Good Positioning Feeds Everything


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Campaigns

Internal “Rallying Cry”

Direct Sales:Buyer

Conversations

Product Marketing

Online ChannelMessaging

Market Analyst Relations

Thought Leadership/PR

Positioning Story ppt.

Message Guide doc.

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Rules In Action

How To Tell a Powerful Story

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Typical Tech Story“Why we are so great”


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Slide 1: Introducing our

great product

for the cloud,

mobile world

Slide 2: Our great Platform

Slide 3: Our great Monitoring feature

Slide 4: Our great Analytics feature

Slide 5:Stats to back up

why we are so

great

Slide 6: How our cool product works

Slide 7: A few cool screen shots

Slide 8:Logo splash

slide

Slide 9: Our wonderful executives

Slide 10: You would be crazy not to buy our cool product

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Powerful Stories: “Why your company, now”


Slide 1: Big results from customers like you

Slide 2: Recent market dynamics: your world has changed

Slide 3: Causing you a BIG problem

Slide 4: …And you may lose your job

Slide 5: Traditional approaches no longer work

Slide 6: What you need to fix the problem

Slide 7: The Answer: Our company

Slide 8: 3-4 reasons customers like you choose us

Slide 9: Cleaned up the problem: How your life will be different

Slide 10: Call to action

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Rules In Action

Differentiators: Positioning Pillars

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Positioning Pillars Turn Features Into Value Headlines

Secret Sauce

Benefit Statement

Headline

Secret Sauce

Benefit Statement

Headline

Secret Sauce

Benefit Statement

Headline

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Some Examples

Positioning Pillars

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Why Customers Choose Arcsight

Monitor

Keep Tabs

Broader, More Complete View

Correlate

Sift Through Noise

Consolidate

See Everything

Add real-time, active monitoring

to SAP

Automate, streamline collection of log and privileged user data

•

•

Correlation of data

Understand baseline behavior, detect anomalies

Better understand what’s happening

•

•

•

Bigger picture

Marry application, network and physical

Universal Pane of Glass: 3600 view

Multi-system response, remediation

••

•

•

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Why Customers Choose Echelon

First Energy Control Network

Smart, Fast Local Decisions

Share Data Across the Energy

Network

Bullet-Proof Reliability

Go One Step Further

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Rules In Action

Creating Powerful Messages

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Messages the bring products alive

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Category

Who is this for

What is the product

TippingPoint leads the advancement of network security with a modern network

security IPS platform. Purpose-built to protect today’s next-generation data

center, TippingPoint arms security executives with new capabilities to stop

threats faster and protect the highest, multi-gigabit bandwidth networks from

ever-evolving, global security threats.

TippingPoint is a powerful front-line defense that can be rapidly deployed in less

than two hours, providing immediate protection at critical entry and isolation

points in the network. With TippingPoint, your business is protected 24x7.

Further, TippingPoint solutions automate most security functions, freeing

organizations from the growing cost burden and helping security executives

drive to zero administration.

Over 6,000 of the world's most demanding organizations trust TippingPoint to

help secure the networks that run their business.

Business benefits

Business benefits

Business benefit

viewpoint

Aspirational

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Buyer-centric messaging

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Category

Point of view

What is the solution

Business benefits

Big Benefit

Aspirational

Chordiant Software heralds a new era of Customer Experience Management (CEM)

solutions to help global brands multiply customer lifetime value.

Chordiant Software, and its Foundation and Cx Solutions, arms customer service

executives with a suite of predictive decisioning applications to deliver an order of

magnitude improvement in customer experience.

Chordiant gives global brands a unified view and understanding of their customer’s

behavior. Chordiant reshapes the way brands engage customers with Next-Best-Action tm

that dynamically guide conversations across every channel.

These CEM capabilities are transformative in nature, enabling companies to deliver

intelligent conversations based upon analysis of past customer behavior, as well as

current responses and mood. Now, today’s fast-paced brands can engage more

effectively with customers, quickly measure how the strategy is working and change at

new levels of speed and economy. The net result: faster acquisition, improved

competitiveness, less churn, and superior customer service.

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Rules in Action

Managing the Positioning Process

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Intensive, 8-12 week process


BackgroundInvestigation

Nov 4-23

1:1 InterviewsWeek of Nov 28

PositioningWorkshopDec 7-8

Story DevelopmentDec 8-Jan 18

MessagingGuide

Jan 15- Jan 31

PlaybookJan 1 - Jan 31

Focus GroupJan 9-11

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Positioning Workshop Agenda

Day One Day Two

900 – 915 Introductions

915 – 945 What Are We Positioning? 945 – 1000 Define Objectives 1000 – 1030Perceptions/Challenges 1030 – 1130 Primary Buyer

11:30 – 1330Category/Competition 13:30 – 1400 Working Lunch 1400 – 1500 Differentiators 1500 – 1600 Business Problem Solved 1600– 1730 Positioning Options 1730– 1830 Viewpoint

900 – 915 Review Day One

915 – 1045 Positioning Strategy 1045 – 1245 Pillars 1245 – 1330 Working Lunch 1330 – 1530 Positioning Story

1530 - 1700 Use Case Examples 1700– 1730 Next Steps:

Review Cycles/Test

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Rules in Action

Launch Strategies


Key Launch Principles

Journey, not an Event

Unhook from GA date

Time-to-REVENUE, notTime-to-market

Communicate to Multiple Audiences

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