Product Matters

Still here at the Gartner Local Briefing. In a session with Richard Fouts about customer win rates. Sharing Win/Loss Data Sales teams tend to advertise their wins, yet contain their losses. Why is this so? Q:  How many global IT companies conduct win/loss on an enterprise scale? Less than 5%? About 10%? About 20%? A: Less than 5% Why? CEOs and Sales people say "I know why we win/lose".  Some politics are touchy; people don't want you to expose what they did well/not (especially in competitive environments).  "I clicked the won/loss checkbox in Salesforce.com" One company evaluated their win/loss data. They looked at 140 wins, and 55 losses. Looking at this data, they noticed a correlation between the wins and the fact that they beat their competition to market with compelling announcements in over a third of the scenarios. An IT services firm attempted to sell a more sophisticated solution. Upon evaluation of the win/loss data, they fo...

Sitting here in a local Gartner briefing in San Francisco, where they're describing the Marketing Investment Model. As usual, a lot of sensible information presented that is unfortunately not always followed. One of the interesting aspects that was discussed was the typical marketing message style employed throughout the tech industry. "At [company name], we..." "We work the way you work..." "We're platform agnostic..." "Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce..." OK, I inserted that last one...but you get the point . Many companies employ a very passive message in an attempt to put prospective buyers at ease with the promise of flexibility. This boils down to: "Don't scare away any prospective buyers; let's appeal to them all!" What often transpires, however, is that companies fail to sufficiently entice a buyer with a clear, firm, confident, focused position bolstered with a sound approach and success stories. When...

Recently I opened a Word document from Outlook. I worked in it for a while, tracking changes, etc. Then I did a "Save As...". The prevous three Word documents I had saved automatically went to my Desktop. However, because this one originated in Outlook, I didn't notice that the destination folder was set to "Outlook Temp". Needless to say, I went looking for it. Lo and behold, Word didn't have any recollection of this being a recently-opened document. So I couldn't open it from Word. Very lame Word. Very lame . Suspecting something was amiss, I opened another document from Outlook and did a "Save As..." and then noticed that the save folder was set to "Outlook Temp". No problem, I thought. I'll just go to that folder and fetch my file. Actually, this turned out to be a problem. I searched in vain for "Outlook Temp" via Spotlight to no avail. I searched for the file name in Spotlight. Nothing. I then went back t...

Over the past few years, I've championed the idea that smartphones are by-and-large consumption devices; not creation devices. Someone asked me recently: Do you send email from your smartphone? Isn't that creation? I suppose that it is. But I typically send bite-sized emails, SMS, and Tweets; not long-form content. But when you also share photos and videos and links and likes and plus-1s, smartphones are clearly creation devices. This reflection challenged my previous perspective from thinking of content exclusively as robust documents to include rapid-fire info-blurbs. Where now is the dividing line between smartphone content creation expectations and those of laptops and desktops? This question prompted me to try the previously unthinkable; to write a blog post on my mobile phone. This is clearly long-form, but still distinct from the rich authoring experience I enjoy on my full-fledged computers. Perhaps then the discussion ought not be about content creation, but...

Heading out of the 2012 Gartner Portals, Content, and Collaboration conference in Orlando in about an hour. Over-all, a good experience as this was my first Analyst-led conference. Had face time (actual, not the Apple variant) with several leading analysts in my space, including Nikos Drakos, Susan Landry, Jeffrey Mann, Carol Rozwell, and Tom Austin; which proved collectively useful in some unexpected ways. Some sessions were good, especially The Social Workplace: Rethinking Communication and Collaboration in the Age of Social Networks . Others, however were simply too rudimentary. This seems to be the common trend with conferences that cater to both customers and vendors alike; the majority of sessions cater to the neophyte customer who knows very little about the space. It would be helpful if conferences had multiple tracks; "I'm New", "I'm Buying", "I'm Selling", and "I Want the Bleeding Edge". They should also include dedica...