Marketissimo | Startup Marketing Tips & Advice

Upcoming Event: Execution of Alliance Strategy - Precision or Alchemy?

Great alliance strategies hold tremendous promise for companies seeking to expand their product offerings, market reach, and geographic boundaries.  However, poor tactical execution can sink even the most creative strategies, at significant cost to your alliance efforts. The Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP Silicon Valley) has put together a panel to share experience about this important topic, which will be held on Tuesday, February 16, from 5:30pm to 8:30pm at Stanford University, Palo Alto.

We are pleased to announce that Jeff Ellis, Managing Partner of Startup Ramp, will moderate this panel. The featured panelists include Stanford University Professor Raymond Levitt, also author of Executing your Strategy—How to Break It Down and Get It Done; BTS San Francisco General Manager and Executive Vice President Dan Parisi; and BEA Systems' former Senior Director Sales and Alliances Lane Nonnenberg.  We are looking forward to this exciting event.

If you are interested to learn more or attend this event, please go to the ASAP registration page.

Accelerating sales and growth through partnerships and channels

Are building partnerships and channels a key strategy for your company to accelerate sales, enter new markets, deliver new products, and drive overall growth?

Startups are understandably focused on proving out their sales and marketing model or internally building technologies and solutions.   However, as your company evaluates its growth alternatives, it is important to thoughtfully consider and evaluate the benefit of partnerships and channels sooner than later.  Partnerships and channels can provide:

• Faster access (and at lower costs) to customers, new markets, segments, and geographies  

• Complementary products and services that help drive your sales

• Needed sales and engineering resources, capital, and expertise

• Differentiation from competitors

• Validation of your business with the investor community

• Strategic funding and downstream potential exit

As you evaluate whether partnerships and channels can help you achieve any of the above goals or other strategic objectives, it’s also important to assess whether your company’s culture supports or can support partnerships?  Does your company have the expertise and experience in developing effective partnerships?  The CEO and management team may understand the value of partnerships, but is this value embraced throughout the organization?  Developing a strategy is just the first step. How to execute a partner strategy, develop effective partnerships and channels, and achieve projected growth – that is the great opportunity.

Do you have your VC pitch ready?

Your pitch to Venture Capital firms should answer one essential question: Why should I give you my money?

I have created VC slide decks that answers this question through the following 11 sub questions. The answer to each question becomes a slide. Here you go:

1. What customer problem do you solve?
2. How does your solution or product solve it?
3. How big is the market for this?
4. Who is competing with you and why are you better?
5. How do you plan to sell your product?
6. How do you make money with this?
7. When do you expect a return?
8. Do you have an experienced management team?
9. What are the key mile stones and when will you reach them?
10. What do you want to do with our money?
11. So, why again should I give you my money?

By answering each question with one slide you should have a nice and short story that you can tell and that VC's will remember. This also means you won't end up with 28 or more slides. Keep it simple, short and compelling.

The goal - get them interested, get them thinking about it, get another meeting.

It is all about Positioning

A few months ago I asked an executive of a startup company what they do. He said: “We are the global leader in software-as-as service for ….bla, bla, bla”.  Throughout my career I heard similar statements over and over again.  People work lots of hours on wordsmithing a sentence that is pretty much meaningless to the target audience. Your target customers only wants to know:

- Is this for me?

- Can this help me to make my life easier, better, more exciting, etc.

- Does it save or make money, improve quality, etc.

- How does it work?

- Is it worth the money and effort?

There is a great book called Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout and I found one quote in the book that tells it all:

“Positioning is not what you do to the product, it is what you do to the mind of your audience”

So, don’t look at your product, think about your customers and prospects and how they will use it. You just have to “position” a picture that shows your audience that life will be so much different, better, more efficient, etc. when they use your product or service. And a great way of doing this is by telling a story. My next blog will be about story telling marketing. Stay tuned.

Is Camtasia the next American Idol?

Do you know Camtasia? It sounds like the name of an American Idol contestant, but it is not. Anyway, Camtasia is my idol. It is a video capturing and editing tool that makes it fairly easy to create product demos and videos. Here is why I think Camtasia is a great marketing tool for start-ups:

• You can create low-budget videos in a few days
• You can easily combine product screen recording with other graphic elements
• You can easily edit the timeline and overlay your marketing message
• Audio can be recorded separately and overlayed with music
• You can easily export the video to Flash, Mov or other formats
• It is "Do-it-yourself" - you don’t have to be a flash designer
• You can easily edit the video as things change (which happens quite often in start-ups)

And I am not getting any commission for saying this, I am just a customer. And I write about this although I never talked to the Camtasia guys – they didn’t even have to sell it to me. Isn't that what you want from your customers?

Do you really know what your customers need?

Many startup companies LOVE technology, they create lots of features, and talk about it.  As we all hopefully know by now (see my other post about customer focus), customers don't buy the product features, they buy the VALUE of the product. So, in order to build and market the right value you need to really understand what customers need. I just got this graphic that illustrates the issue that different people within the organization have different understandings of the customer needs.

Disclaimer: I did not create this graphic, somebody sent it to me. And I would like to recognize the unknown person who created it - great job!

Are you a customer of your own company?

The key of doing great and effective marketing is to understand your customers. Besides doing research, focus groups and ongoing interaction with your customers, you should think about these three questions:

1. Step into the role of your customers and ask yourself: Would you buy your product, honestly?

The answers will help you better understand why people buy and why they don’t buy.

2. Do you use your own product?

It always amazes me how many companies find lots of excuses for not using their own products – probably the same reasons why their customers don’t. 

3. Are you selling a product, or are you selling the value (of the product)?

People don’t buy products; they buy the VALUE of the product. Don’t market and sell features, sell the value of the features.

Answering these questions will help you be more effective in your marketing activities and also to improve your product or service offering. Be your own customer - everyday!