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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
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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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9 COPYRIGHT 2011 FIREBRICK | FIREBRICK.COM
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…
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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.
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New Positioning Model
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New Positioning Model
Shift the focus: “me” orientation to “buyer” stimulus
Product-Centric
Buyer-Centric
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7 Positioning Rules
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Rule 1: SMB is Not a Market
SMB
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Rule 2: Who is your “Mary”
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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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Rule 3: Own a Problem
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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
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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
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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”
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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 XYZ company
Monitor
Keep Tabs
Broader, More Complete View
Correlate
Sift Through Noise
Consolidate
See Everything
Add real-time, active monitoring
Automate, streamline collection of log and 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
••
•
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Why Customers Choose ABC Company
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
Launch Strategies
42 COPYRIGHT 2011 FIREBRICK | FIREBRICK.COM
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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