We’re all familiar with this story.

A business is at the top of its game, makes a trajectory-decision based on an assumption, and subsequently misses the mark. In this case, the business is Netflix, the assumption was about its customer base, and – as we all witnessed (and were perhaps, as Netflix customers, privy to the news via e-mail) – Netflix missed the mark.

A year ago, if anyone had said that within the span of one month, Netflix would lose 800,000 customers and its stock would plummet, that person would have been laughed out of the “society of business punditry.” Netflix was the game-changer of how people consumed movies – arguably responsible for the closure of Blockbuster Videos around the country, as well as much of the Internet’s traffic. There was basically no current competition for Netflix; the business was at the top, gaining two-plus million new customers every quarter. Things were golden, until…

…until a haphazard blog post announced a price hike of 60%.
…until CEO Reed Hastings issued a disarmingly casual “I-messed-up” e-mail.
…until they decided to split the service into two different services
     (instant streaming staying as Netflix, and “Qwikster” for DVDs by mail).
…until they retracted that decision.

Netflix had a good business model. They had loyal customers. They had happy stockholders.

What went wrong?

First: Netflix made an assumption about their customer base, and this assumption was egregiously incorrect. They assumed that their customers were passionate enough about Netflix to stick by the business – that no matter what, these customers wanted their movies and would continue to use Netflix’s services. Although Netflix was right about their customers being passionate, they didn’t realize the passion would be railed against the company itself. In response to a price hike and change of services, Netflix’s customer base passionately informed the company of their disappointment and disapproval, and 800,000 of them jumped ship.

Second: Netflix employed poor communication and execution of the changes in service. Whether or not the new business model was good or necessary is one thing, but the way Netflix both announced and unveiled the changes fell short of their game. The announcement of changes first came through a seemingly slap-it-together blog post late at night, which sent the Internet ablaze in fury. Then Reed Hastings sent out an e-mail one might expect from a college buddy rather than the CEO of a company.

Finally, they retracted their decisions within a month of the first announcement. In the meantime, amidst all of these embarrassing communication flubs, the Qwikster website was not ready when the service launched, and the Twitter account was already in use by a drug-using teenager with foul language. All in all, the launch was sloppy. It seemed uncoordinated – like a last-minute decision gone awry.

We could spend all day disputing and defending the good and the bad and the ugly of Netflix’s recent business decisions, but I’m more interested in discussing the implications every business can take from this situation.

So what can we learn here?

What we can learn is that when you’re on top – when you’ve positioned yourself as a leader in your market, even if its just your local market – each decision must be well thought out (and hopefully the right one).

In the fast changing business world of today, it’s sometimes necessary to make drastic changes to a working business model. But before you are ready to go to the presses (or your customers) with these changes, make sure the model is carefully thought through in minute detail. Not analysis paralysis – but at least a thorough vetting with trusted voices. You have to at least try to do everything right or don’t do it at all.

If you are going to make business decisions based on assumptions, make sure they are the right assumptions. Validate them. Test them. Make sure you have the data to back it up before you go ahead and change your business model.

Once you have your facts in place, make sure you communicate well to all affected stakeholders. When you’ve amassed a loyal customer base, you need to keep them by respecting them, and respect comes through how you communicate. When all of these factors are set in place, ensure that your new business model is ready to launch from all sides of the company. You can’t cut corners – the market is too demanding and too connected for that.

What’s a 1 Pager?

A “1 Pager,” also known as a cut sheet or a data sheet, is a [not surprisingly] single page of basic information about your company and product, that is usually sent in advance of, or “left behind” after a sales call.

The reason it’s important is not so much because anyone ever reads it. Nicely printed collateral in a sharp looking folder doesn’t really matter much anymore – most of your prospects will probably get their info from your website instead.

So what’s the point?

Developing the 1 Pager, more than other collateral, lets you capture your value proposition and the supporting details, while limiting you to the front and back of a single slice of paper. The challenge – and the value – of the 1 Pager is in narrowing down what you want to say to fit on one piece of paper.

As I’ve talked about in an earlier post, “Simplify for Understanding,” a lot of the time, less really is more. Jerry Seinfeld joked he could spend hours getting a punchline from 8 words to 5 words. It’s easier to write 10 pages than one really good page, because it forces you to be tight and succinct on what you want to say.

The real power is not in the 1 Pager, but in “zeroing in” on the essence of your message, without all the extra words, cutting straight to the bottom line.

Crafting a 1 Pager

The format of a 1 Pager is up to you or whomever designs your marketing collateral, but the structure should be something like:

• Company name and logo
• Tagline
• Your one or two sentence Value Prop statement, which is really a modified version of your Offering Concept Statement, adapted for use outside of your organization
• Features and benefits of your offering, to your prospective customer
• Some sort of proof statement – not a full blown case study, but a quote or example from a past/current customer
• Some sort of chart emphasizing your value proposition in I³ terms – what’s new about your offering, how it’s truly useful to your prospect, and what’s exciting about it for them.

You might end up with a 1 Pager that is actually a powerful piece of collateral, that you want to use as the basis for your website, in training your salespeople, and so on… but the real value is not in the document itself. The real value is in the process of nailing down what you really want your prospects to know – focusing and simplifying that message until it’s “short and sweet,” and being able to communicate that message efficiently and effectively.

When you think about your competition, you most likely think of other companies with similar offerings to yours. These are your direct competitors, but they are certainly not your only competitors.

A more complete view of “who else” and “what else” is vying for your target customers’ attention (and budget dollars) requires that we look at alternatives – other ways to solve the same problem you solve.

Let’s look at competition earlier this decade in the Sales Force Automation and CRM space. Companies that equipped sales professionals with leather planners and filing systems or Palm Pilots (remember them?), integrating information through Microsoft Outlook, were looking to improve their sales force productivity. They were using alternatives to Salesforce.com or Oracle/Siebel’s CRM software.

They were addressing the same general problem of keeping track of customers, but not necessarily solving the problem in the same manner (or even as effectively) as Siebel or Salesforce.com.

Overlooking this point is a frequent source of much pain, for market planners and sales teams alike.

Before your offering existed, it is highly unlikely that your market was simply not addressing their need in some other way. Companies were doing bookkeeping long before and even during the advent of back-office computing. Many markets would show similar adoption behavior regarding new processes, systems, and product acceptance.

Often, when examining a competitive landscape, it is too easy to simply look at obvious peer group competitors. This often leads to making a case as to why your particular product offering is better, faster, or cheaper.

Imagine you were trying to talk your grandmother into getting an iPhone, discussing its relative merits over Android or a Blackberry… and she points across the room and says, “What do I need a new phone for? I’ve got one right over there on the wall!”

Companies often lose sight of the larger issue – the possibility that your prospects already have a way of doing things in a way they perceive as better or at least “not broken.”

You are not just competing against others offering similar products or services; you’re competing against every other way to “get it done,” possibly including the toughest competitor of all, “The way we’ve always done it.”

If so, what is your compelling story for change and transformation? What is your message to the marketplace – the message that counters the “status quo?”

What is your “You should switch now!” value proposition?

There are no magic words to cause your target customers to instantly come running to buy your offering. No subliminal messages or secret code will automatically make them realize they need the product or service you’re selling, much less that they should do business with your company, but a carefully crafted value proposition will let them know how your offering is valuable and relevant to them.

When a company’s leaders choose to launch a new product or service, they [should] have a specific market in mind. Market intelligence and identifying unmet needs in the marketplace led to the decision to build and launch this new product, so your value proposition should highlight the specific product/service benefits that most sharply meet those unmet (or under-served) needs.

To sell the product or service, state the benefits of your product or service to the target market in a way that helps them understand your offering– succinctly and powerfully. In essence, you have to communicate the product’s value to them with some urgency. Assess what attributes will be of highest value to the target customer– this is the value proposition’s “DNA” or core message.

In other words, a value proposition is the articulation of the promises that your company is willing to fulfill for its target market.

In the context of investing in a new product or service, one has to take a product to market with some type of purpose and message and this is the value proposition: “For the sake of whom are you offering what?”

This doesn’t mean making assumptions about a specific customer’s needs– there is no substitute for collaboratively solving a customer’s problem. A true solution-oriented sales professional will find out what a particular prospect’s issues are before assuming they have a situation-specific value proposition for that customer, which requires a meaningful two-way conversation with the customer. Then, the salesperson can match your offering’s benefits to a prospect’s needs and deliver a value proposition that states what the product is and why it would be important to a particular market.

Your salespeople should view their customers as allies, not adversaries. You aren’t looking to win something at your customer’s expense, but to consult with them to identify and deliver relevant solutions, figure out how to make it relevant and further, and whether it will continue to be relevant in target market.

If you build it, they will come.

We have probably all learned by now that this is just not true. Great or stellar product features are not enough. Being better is not enough. Even being the best is not enough. The imperative for today’s companies is to build a stellar message to accompany your stellar product in the marketplace. Your product cannot and will not sell itself, no matter how good it is. While marketers are trying to manage word-of-mouth (i.e., “buzz marketing”) and other viral marketing techniques, these have less relevance for business products and services and we’ll see how later.

Additionally, your prospect is too busy to really study your offering to see relevant attributes that you know are great. Keep in mind the realistic potential of the promises that firms can reasonably make to their target audiences. That is – refine your messaging so that it becomes a powerful marketing and sales tool.

By translating your refined and dynamic value proposition into what we call “Sales Cases” for your direct sales teams – your product and its grounded message will enter the marketplace with a strong messaging foundation.

A simple and refined I³ Value Proposition describes your product’s promises as an Innovative, Indispensable and Inspirational solution. The Sales Cases draw on the I³ Value Proposition, providing sales professionals with a well-developed marketing message targeted to the needs of specific customers, in the dimensions of decision making that organizations typically use to make purchases: namely, business, technical, financial, competitive and overall decision cases.

Don’t make the mistake of going to market without a polished messaging platform – one that flows from brand, positioning, and tagline to business focused cases as well. Take the time to understand why the product is valuable to prospects and make a clear case as to why the product is Innovative, Indispensable and Inspirational.

Does your messaging make the value of your offering readily apparent to your prospect? Or are you waiting for them to figure it out themselves? (Hint: They won’t. Do it for them.)

Former Avaya CEO Louis D’Ambrosio’s frames strategic planning this way: “We’ve established three key priorities: strategy, execution and culture. What’s most important is the interrelations between the three.” Given the formation of the your go-to-market strategy and its objectives, actions and resources, four question areas will arise:

• What major issues must be faced?
• What key decisions must be made?
• What information are we missing?
• What expertise or “know how” will we need to carry out this plan?

First, identify major issues as they surface, noting where “gaps” still exist. These issues are either internal or external roadblocks to success. Some issues will require conversations or actions to mitigate their impact on your plans. In other cases, these issues might not be obstacles but rather create other, unintended complications. For example, a particular launch may negatively affect a long-term partner because it has competitive elements within it. This doesn’t necessarily hinder your go-to-market efforts, but it has ramifications in other aspects of your business.

All issues require one or more decisions – even “do nothing” is a decision. So, break down these major issues into key decisions that need to be made while going to market. Frame the decision along with its stakeholders and its impact on the key factors in the overall strategy.

Finally, what information and expertise is needed to execute your plan? How will you fill these gaps? All elements should be articulated and measured in terms of their relationship and interrelation to the strategic and tactical objectives of your go-to-market messaging process.

In previous posts, we’ve looked at your historic customer‒ who you’ve sold to before, aligned prospects‒ who you haven’t dealt with before but you think would be receptive to your offering, and negatively aligned customers‒ who you’re better off not selling to. Considering those three, you should be able to distill all that down to a few key attributes and zero in on your target‒ your ideal customer.

It’s worth noting that you might, in fact, have multiple targets. Much as you’d have concentric circles in an archery target, you may have your main target, the bull’s eye, and surrounding that, those that are not quite the bull’s eye but are still also valuable targets.

To make sure you hit that target, you need to get to know that ideal “bull’s eye” customer, and there are several things you want to look at. Whether you’re in B2B or B2C, at the end of the day, the person who makes the purchase is a person. It is a human being‒ not an organization, not a company, not a household, not a family‒ a person. It’s always going to come down to somebody, somewhere deciding whether or not to buy what you’re offering.

The first thing you want to look at is what the personal or business objectives (or maybe both, in B2B) of your target market are. What are they trying to accomplish? Those accomplishments tend to look like either pain reduction or pleasure enhancement, but basically, broadly speaking, they are trying to do something within a certain period of time. If someone is buying an iPad, for instance, perhaps their objective is to lighten the load of the technology they have to carry around with them in order to have the internet at their fingertips wherever they happen to be.

Secondly, they have problems‒ unresolved issues. By that I don’t mean personal issues, necessarily, unless the solution you’re selling happens to be counseling for troubled psyches. The point is that they are trying to resolve something that they perceive to be increasing in pain‒ it is a bother for them, and that’s what they want to get rid of.

Challenges are things that are more aspirational in nature. They’re things that it may look like problems on the surface, but really have more of a measurement or goal associated to them. For instance, somebody who wants to lose weight, at the first stage they just want to get started on the weight loss process, but at some point it becomes more about getting fit, and the challenge is how do I get fit, and they move from losing weight to getting fit. It’s more positive. It’s an objective that actually is something they can get a little bit excited about.

That brings us to the fourth dimension in this‒ fears. Your ideal customer has fears. What are they afraid of? They’re afraid of yet another weight loss routine that will not work for them, or another lawn care service that will fall short of their expectations, or cost more. You have to understand this in the context of your ideal customer. You won’t resolve that fear for everybody, depending what your selling. If they’re afraid they can’t afford a new car, and you’re selling new cars, you have to break through that fear. Kia did that very well with their “hip-hop hamster” commercials, going right at the used car market, saying, “You can go with this, or you can go for that,” ‒and that’s an important message in marketing.

Lastly is opportunities, which could be business pleasures‒ market share gains, revenue success, those kinds of things, or it might be personal‒ looking for a promotion, or a way to look better to your boss. It might be where a company wants to do something that would otherwise cost them a lot of money to accomplish, so the opportunity would be to take advantage of what’s in front of them, and if you can show them that while you are, for example, looking at ways to save money on your human capital, if you have a service or a solution that actually makes hiring better people cheaper, better, faster, that’s an  opportunity. They want to grow their company, they’re seeking to exploit an opportunity.

How well do you know your ideal customer? What are their objectives, problems, challenges, fears, and opportunities? How can you shape your offering and messaging to meet those?

Have you ever thought about which customers you shouldn’t deal with?

All sales aren’t equally beneficial to your company, so it’s worth taking a look at which customers are actually negatively aligned with you. Which customers don’t you want? Which ones are you selling to now, that you might actually be better off not selling to at all? The surprising thing is, you may be putting a lot of energy into selling to more of those customers than you know.

For example, if you are selling a commodity product with some value added services, but your messaging is still price oriented, you’re going to attract people who don’t value those value added services – they’re just negatively aligned to you.

They won’t appreciate the things that cost you more money to deliver, while continually hammering you to lower prices, thereby eroding your margins — even your ability to afford the value added services in the first place. These value-added services are the ones you’re offering to attract customers that are aligned to where you want to be.

Are some of your current customers negatively aligned to you? Could your historic customer be limiting your ability to reach better-aligned prospects –your ideal customer? Have you looked at your messaging to make sure that you’re not actually attracting the wrong kind of customer?

Free eBook: Know Thy Customer
Carefully crafted messages alone won’t sell your product or service. You must target your message for your best audience and through the most effective venues for that message.

If you have a solid grasp on your current customer base, the next major thing to look at is, who else could align with your offering?

Aligned prospects are those potential customers that you haven’t dealt with much – but who could become customers. If you’ve identified key attributes of your historic customers, you could actually start looking for other groups of prospects who share those attributes. For example, who else is in that geographic area, or in that industry, that you have access to, and think you might be able to connect to your story?

If you’ve been selling to CFOs in Industy X, you might be able to sell to CFOs in Industry Y. Or, if you’ve been selling to women through grocery stores and you want to have a direct-to-consumer offering via the web, then you focus on women. That would be a case of alignment.

You’re looking for those customers that naturally line up with your historic base – and more importantly – that line up to what you’re offering. If you’ve been selling accounting software to small businesses, and selling directly to their CEO, and you want to move upstream, you may not be able to get to the CEO of larger companies. Perhaps the best aligned prospect would be to market to the CFO at those larger companies because that level would be analogous to the smaller company CEOs. That is where you would start looking for opportunities for alignment.

Bottom line:
1. Identify the attributes of your current customer base.
2. Look for those attributes in other markets or other customer “pools”.
3. Align to the newer prospects – adjust your messaging and programs and…
4. Drive new revenue into your company.

Often, businesses don’t take the time to define who their ideal customer is.

Not simple stats on the status quo of current customers – but thinking through who their “ideal” – best – perfect –want more of these – customers are.

To define your ideal customer you first need to have a firm understanding of who your historic customer is – no time travel required. I simply mean the type of customer you’ve done business with until now. Really, that may encompass two phases of looking-back time. You’ve got the customer you’ve been dealing with most recently, and then there may also have been the “good old days” of a customer that used to buy from you in greater numbers, perhaps because of some trend in the economy or other circumstance that allowed you to tap a greater– or just different – customer base than you have now.

How far into history you want to go is up to you, but obviously, if you’re IBM, you don’t need to go back to when you made typewriters, but you might want to go back and start thinking about anywhere near the target market you’re looking to be in. Where have you had success before? Develop some characteristics around that market. For example, if it’s a retail service or product that you offer, what is the demographic that has typically purchased it? Have they been making this purchase directly from you online, through supermarkets, or at flea-markets?

Start putting down identifying markers such as age, gender, and other descriptors for the individuals who have bought from you historically. If you’re not sure who this historical customer is, maybe it’s time to create a survey or some other [obviously legal, inoffensive, non-intrusive] way. You could use low-key polls, such as through your Facebook page, or have a full-blown survey company take a statistically valid sampling of your customer base – but one way or another, understanding who they are is essential.

For B2B companies, it’s a little easier, but again, you need to slice and dice. Consider geography– where are the companies that are buying from you? What industry are they in? How big are they? Who, within those companies, is actually buying from you? (Is it the purchasing manager, the CEO, or the secretary?) Of course, it depends on what you sell – but really think this through.

All of this just gives you a framework of understanding your ideal customer. So, what you need to do is take a look at that, and start trying to draw out commonalities – those things that represent the success factors behind the sales you’ve been making.

If 70% of your sales, historically, are purchased by women, then you know that you have a product that skews towards women. That may be “duh” obvious, if it’s a product specifically designed to do that, but where it becomes an opportunity is when you discover things about your customer base you didn’t know before.

When was the last time you really looked at your customers and how they function?

If you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t much matter which direction you take the organization. Objectives are necessary in order to have a clear and clean cut view of where the organization is going.

There are strategic and tactical objectives, which document the future of the firm or a specific market roll-out. They should be built around concept of messaging must be central, so both strategic and tactical objectives support the validation, communication and execution of the product’s Value Proposition– representing a set of promises that your target market will agree is innovative, indispensable and inspiring.

Strategic objectives are the high-level goals that drive strategy and long-term direction. These include corporate goals (which lay out the major, grand-scheme plans of the organization), financial goals (the key financial metrics that drive the firm’s success), and market impact goals (the key metrics that will allow you to measure your position or success in the marketplace, such as market share, markets served, number of customers, etc.)

Tactical objectives aren’t tasks, per se, but are more immediately tangible than strategic objectives. They reflect the key areas of project management, overall efficiency and time management, and translate easily into “to-do list” items for your Action Plan, and benchmarks for your timeline.

Keep objectives as clear and specific as possible. Use time-bound targets that are as measurable as possible. For example: Sell 100,000 units by May of 20xx for revenue of $$$ million.

IT Industry research leader, Gartner, Inc. comments on the importance of tying goals to actionable strategy and results: “Aspiring ‘to be the market leader’ or ‘to be seen by our clients and partners in their success’ is admirable, but lacks the specificity and clear linkage to action and measurable results to propel go-to-market efforts.”

Do you know where you’re going? Have you established major strategic objectives as well as tangible tactical objectives? Are these goals clear, specific, and measurable?

As you formulate and refine your value proposition, the best thing you can do for it is to simplify. There are few practical steps will help you get to the “pearl of great price” of your offering, and really let it shine. By this, I mean highlighting and not hiding the true main point (the net-net “goodness”) that proves most compelling to prospects.

Simplify by reducing the number of features or benefits in your story. Obviously, don’t reduce the actual features that make up your offering, but do reduce the number of features you communicate. Even this may seem counter-intuitive, in that it is easy to feel that “more is more.” However, given the crowded marketplace and ever increasing levels of market noise, it is a strategic imperative to deliver a simply understood story to your market.

I find that the more complex the product, the less effective it is to deliver the proverbial “fire hose” of information to an already overwhelmed audience. The point of reducing the number of features communicated is twofold: to force you to evaluate which features really matter to prospects, and to enable you to deliver those points more clearly.

Simplify by reducing the number of words you use to communicate a feature. Use simpler language such as “this means…” and “this doesn’t mean…” to frame key points. There is a time and place to introduce the twenty-page PDF with detailed schematics and charts… it just isn’t at the front end of the communication and sales process.

Simplify by reducing the use of jargon and dense wording. I don’t mean language that’s simplistic or condescending— I do mean language understood by a non-technical executive who understands business terms and concepts.

Finally, simplify by reducing the number and depth of slides in your PowerPoint presentation. The old adage of “tell them what you’re going to tell them; tell them; then tell them what you told them” is a simple and still effective way to approach any presentation. The middle part is where many business product and services companies fall into their own snare of complexity.

PowerPoint is a wonderful tool to capture and share new ideas—and is also a collector of “dust balls” of too many ideas and details. We’ve all sat through (or given) one-hour PowerPoint talks that left everyone, including the speaker, more confused than when the talk began. You can clarify and simplify any presentation (or document) by taking this simplification test:

• Can I capture my essential offering in one slide? You can state your Value Proposition (using the Offering Concept Statement) and add a few short clarifying bullets—but that’s it!
• Can I describe what my product does in one slide of less than 50 words (adding up all the bullets)?
• Can I describe, on one slide, what our product/service brings to the market that is new, useful and exciting (your offering’s I3 dimensions)?
• Can I describe, on one slide, what in our company’s history points to our distinct ability to deliver this specific value proposition (credibility from your corporate foundation)?
• Can I describe, on one slide, a way of looking at our offering financially that is compelling—emphasizing a key financial benefit or dynamic unique to your offering (Cost Effectiveness from your Corporate Foundation)?
• Can I describe, on one slide, what in our present people, processes and resources points to our distinct ability to deliver this specific value proposition (Capability from your Corporate Foundation)?

Be direct. Be clear. In short—keep it short. Your prospects will appreciate it and understand your story better as a result.

We tend to think of “mission” in the singular. “Your mission, should you choose to accept it…” and such. As a marketer, however, your mission is two-fold – you have both the corporate mission, and your product’s mission to consider.

The corporate mission is your company’s overarching mission – why you are in business. Most likely, some version of this is already spelled out somewhere, in a “Mission Statement” or similar declaration of purpose and/or vision for the organization.

Your product’s mission is, similarly, why it exists.

This isn’t a recitation of what your product does, but rather, why your company funded its development, and what the overall expectations and requirements for it are. These expectations are at least financial, market impact (share, prominence) and organization (reduced cost to deliver, replace older technology, etc.)

Look at both of your statements and ask yourself, “are these aligned?” – do they look like they belong together? It doesn’t matter whether you are in a position of authority to change your corporate or product mission – what matters is that you note the degree of or lack of integration – and start thinking about the ramifications of these distinctions.

A tightly aligned corporate and product mission (and by “product” I mean product and related services that together make the “offering”) can just mean that your company is newer and has fewer product extensions… or … your company has a very tight overall focus.

A loosely aligned mission profile isn’t necessarily “bad”, but could mean challenges ahead for acquiring resources to fulfill your product’s mission. An example of this would be a packaged software vendor launching a Software as a Service (“SaaS”) offering. The culture and norms in such an organization could be at sharp odds with a nascent product group – pushing the envelope and making everyone uncomfortable. However, if this company’s Mission was tied to delivering Business Process enablement via technology, services, “any means necessary,” – the new product offering might actually be a very consistent and meaningful addition to the company’s capabilities.

The point here is to be aware of both your larger corporate mission, and specific product mission, and how they fit together. How much sense does this offering make in light of the company’s general mission? What impact does this have on your go-to-market strategy?

“Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing.”
—Seth Godin, author, “Purple Cow”

Product excellence and possessing stellar sales teams are “givens” in today’s B2B world. Existing business literature and marketing “science” have created a global economy in which product and sales excellence are now considered the baseline or “table stakes” for business—the minimum for companies to enter the game.

In a world where most players are aware of the baseline for competition, you need to meet that baseline level of performance to simply close the first deal or attract any market interest at all. Promises of excellent customer service or product excellence, by themselves, just don’t cut it as differentiators, even if you are strong in those areas (as demonstrated in the video in my last post). They’re the foundation of good business, but think about it<— you lay the foundation of a building, and what do you have?

A well-fortified hole in the ground.

You don’t stop there, of course— you keep building on that foundation. It’s what you do above the ground—beyond the minimum prerequisites of good customer service and basic functionality —that people notice.

These givens are the “infrastructure” of current business practices, which serve to elevate the importance of strategic messaging to a higher plane.

The entire organization and its culture must center upon the message of the company and its product. While at first blush, this might sound like a dangerous disregard for those fundamental, “real” aspects of business value— quality, features and support— it actually affirms these attributes.

By pulling the entire organization together around the message the company wants to communicate, “disconnects” in quality, features and support become even more evident and urgent. As champion NASCAR crew chief Ray Evernham put it, “Everyone should feel as if his signature is on the finished product.”

• So, what should the business product or services vendor do?
• How do you make messaging— the communication of value to the marketplace— an integrative process (vs. simply another functional process)?
• How do you build your go-to-market process and plan around your messaging?

“Innovation, as a goal, is overrated.”

Wait, what?

Jonathan Fried of 37 Signals made that bold claim in a recent Inc. Magazine video blog post, and I think there’s actually a lot of merit in what he’s saying, as a general rule.

To be new, or to be flashy, just for the sake of being new and flashy is not, in itself, of benefit to the customer. However, to solve a problem in a fresh new way would mean that until now, the problem had been “solved” in an inadequate fashion, or somehow suboptimally. It’s not just putting the same solution in a new box, but actually thinking through how to make this or that work any better.

Fried’s own company, in their flagship product, Basecamp, took the idea of project management and team collaboration, and made it simpler, faster, and less expensive, and in that way brought some new ideas to the familiar one of teams working together. Now, ideas like teams being able to document their discussions, and or being able to manage a product plan on a big whiteboard, had existed long before Basecamp. But what Basecamp brought to it was speed, elegance, and simplicity, in a web-based solution, that was new to many people who could discover it and reap the benefits.

So innovation as a goal IS overrated, but having said that, innovation as a challenge for an organization or product manager, to really think it through and come up with a true new, better way to solve an existing problem, IS a desirable goal.

It’s not enough by itself, of course. It has to provide utility, as Fried points out, or usefulness over time, which I often refer to as Indispensability. Then, what grabs the attention from a marketing point of view is that it does so in some way that somebody who understands what that product or product family is would actually be impressed by it– the “wow” factor, or the Inspirational factor.

All three together would yield an I3 Value Proposition, something that’s truly new and fresh, something that’s very useful, and something that’s done with some art to it. Those three together form a value proposition that at least grabs the attention of your intended audience, and makes the case to them that they should at least be considering what it is that you’re offering.