Internet Tech Boston

One of the biggest obstacles to successful  sales and marketing efforts is the constant fear of owning up to real or perceived product shortcomings. When faced with the inevitable question from a prospective client regarding functionality, the knee jerk reaction is almost always – “Yeah, we can do that.” This leads to the age-old struggle between sales and delivery. Delivery teams feel that sales has over-promised with no regard to how their empty promises affect the rest of the team. Sales feels that Delivery teams are sandbagging and whining about having to do their jobs. This continues until all engineering and developer resources are tied up in custom jobs, and all hope of actually improving the product to add new features for future customers goes out the window. If this vicious cycle repeats indefinitely, it will surely prohibit the company from being truly successful.

Moshe Engelberg, PhD, MPH proposes an alternative approach in a white paper titled, Marketing 101: If You Can’t Fix It, Feature It.

The underlying principle is simple and powerful: What you may treat as a “negative” — a liability — may in fact be your greatest asset. Instead of hiding it or trying to change it, lead with it. Don’t hide from the truth, which is usually what your target audiences think about. Disarm the negative perceptions by putting them on the table, front and center. In other words, if you can’t fix these differences, feature them.

Why this Works

Take a step back and look at competing wants. Sales wants a product that demo’s well (i.e. easy to sell), has lots of features (i.e. can be sold into a wide range of customers), and is easy to implement (i.e. they get their commission faster). Delivery and Engineering want reasonable expectations (i.e. something they’re familiar with) so that they can deliver a good product (i.e. bug-free and bullet-proof) and make clients happy (i.e. reduce complaints as much as possible).

When sales does not expose product limitations appropriately, the product does not demo well, it is harder to implement, and it results in unhappy clients. Everyone loses. If we replace the “Do you want fries with that?” sales approach with the “Feature It” approach, then everyone WINS. The customer’s expectations are met appropriately and the project completes quickly with minimal amount of customization. The client is happy that they got exactly what they bought. Sales is happy that the client is happy and paid in full. Delivery is happy that they’ve launched another successful project.

This is a flavor of High Probability Selling, in which marketing generates interest in only the prospective clients that truly WANT what it is your company is selling. By featuring your product’s limitations, you attract a prospective client list that does not value what your product does not do. Conversely, they are more interested in what your product DOES do.

In summary, don’t hide from giving customers the truth. Tell them what to expect up front, tell them why it’s a GOOD thing, and then focus on delivering high quality, repeatable results.

Even though I couldn’t draw a straight line if you paid me, I’ve been known to read a design book from time to time. It’s important stuff to know if you working in online marketing. A colleague of mine loaned me John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity. Capped at 100 pages on purpose, the book is an in-depth analysis and thoughtful masterwork on the underlying concepts that constitute simple, useful design. Geared a little bit toward product design, Maeda frequently references the simple design of the iPod as well as anything from Bang Olufsen as examples of simplicity well executed. The book is constructed around Maeda’s 10 Laws of Simplicity, ordered in terms of most tangible to most esoteric.

Maeda stays true to the topic throughout the book, keeping his chapters, his examples, and his lessons simple. It’s a good, quick read and I’d suggest it to anyone who is involved in design, usability, or art direction in at least some capacity. Coming from a non-designer, I would say this is a must-read book for all designer types out there – especially in this new Web 2.0-age of less-artsy and more user-centric web design.

If you haven’t the time to read the 100 pages, here are the Ten Laws of Simplicity:

1. REDUCE. The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
2. ORGANIZE. Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
3. TIME. Savings in time feel like simplicity.
4. LEARN. Knowledge makes everything simpler.
5. DIFFERENCES. Simplicity and complexity need each other.
6. CONTEXT What lies in the periphery of simplicyt is definitely not peripheral.
7. EMOTION. More emotions are better than less.
8. TRUST. In simplicity we trust.
9. FAILURE. Some things can never be made simple.
10. THE ONE. Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

Maeda’s 10th Law resonated completely with Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, particularly his instruction to “omit needless words.” It’s my fervent hope that If I keep studying, I should be able to draw that straight line someday.

The company at work at, PermissionTV, has been using the Agile Software Development with Scrum methodology since January of this year. Our engineering team, the group responsible for the overall development of our Video 2.0 online platform, first introduced PTV to this way of organizing and prioritizing software requirements, in order to bring some order out of the sometimes-chaos that envelops a start-up company’s product roadmap.

After observing some good results, I went to a training workshop to receive my own ScrumMaster Certification. I’ve brought an Agile Project Management Scrum Methodology to the Professional Services team – an attempt to deliver multiple projects with shifting deadlines and changing priorities. While not completely geared for client-side development work, Scrum has brought transparency of my group’s day-to-day activities to the senior management team. These are the guys that always seem to think that projects are “easy,” “will be done very soon,” and that our overall work troubles aren’t a “big deal.”

I am pleased with the early returns that Scrum has provided. As soon as the team broke out each project into discrete chunks of work (aka “stories”), the rest of the company started to see just how much work we had to do. Now, if they want to horse-trade and shuffle priorities, they at least know, in excruciating detail, the trade-offs they are making with respect to all other client deliverables.

Turns out that maybe my team’s job is so easy after all . . . .

Two nights ago I attended the 2008 What’s Next Forum and Technology Awards Ceremony hosted by the Massachusetts Innovation Technology Exchange (MITX). The Technology Awards “recognize and celebrate innovative [marketing] technologies developed in New England.” My company, PermissionTV, was nominated as a finalist in the “Video” category. Although we didn’t win, it was a great event and it was nice to be considered for the award given the exceptional companies and great talent that was assembled.

Despite a brief interruption due to a fire alarm (the event planners must have loved that), there was still enough time for a short panel discussion on whether software licensing and service fees could be affected by competition in the form of ad-supported online software services. In particular I found Baba Shetty, Chief Media Officer at Hill Holiday to have some insightful remarks. Baba stated that while the Internet has enabled a “seek out or keep out” permission-based ad model that by definition should lead to higher ROI on targeted online ads, corporations are currently suffering with “an outdated marketing infrastructure” that prohibits them from realizing the full benefit of internet marketing and ad-serving technology. I took his comment to mean that the majority of people in marketing these days would still rather focus their time and budget on mailing postcards and attending trade shows. It’s what they know and are comfortable with. This sentiment was echoed by Jeff Bussgang, General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, who pointed that while it’s “easy to get into experimental budgets,” there still has not been widespread commitment from corporates to create an Internet-centric marketing or advertising strategy.

Based on my experiences formerly leading an Interactive Marketing Agency and currently with an Online Video Delivery company, I tend to agree. Interactive is still seen as a “tack-on” to the overall marketing plan, instead of a core delivery and metric model to both online and offline tactics. This reality is not caused by deficiencies in the technologies or products available, but rather in the people who are charged with their implementation and use. For those corporations that have the right personnel in place, they are able to reap the benefits – but from my vantage point, the widespread revolution of internet-based marketing is still a few years away.