Know Who You Are

At DecisionPoint, one of the stress releases that we used was to tease each other about our actual and “perceived” shortfalls. In some cases, we joked with individuals because they were from other countries, memory lapses due to age, and many other things. While this may seem cruel to people outside of the company, it was our way to maintain our sanity in a very tense situation. During the joking, we all used a common phrase to respond to each other, which was “know who you are…” In other words, we were all comfortable enough with ourselves that we accepted our limitations.

I use this story as an introduction to the struggles that we faced at DecisionPoint with marketing our product. Overall, our solution was pretty simple by design. As stated before, the goal was to allow customers to implement a data warehouse in record time to facilitate the type of robust reporting and analysis that helps personnel at the customer site find financial anomalies. The goal being that end users could help to maximize the financial performance and efficiency of the organization. Yes, it was a revolutionary idea, but we felt we could change the data warehousing market significantly.

Even though we had a bold new idea and strategy, we still faced a problem at DecisionPoint. Throughout our history, the fact was that we didn’t “know who we were”, or more aptly stated, we didn’t accept who we were. It would prove to be a significant Achilles heel for us, and caused us to stumble several times throughout the company’s history. I often think back of what might have happened had we “known who we were”, accepted that, and used a strategy more in line with what we were. Regardless, I learned a big lesson from this that I think is very important to understand.

Unfortunately, the world of high technology has become one of taking very simple and basic concepts, and marketing and selling them to be much more than they really are. No matter how good our solution was, it always had to be positioned larger than life. It’s expected not only by the industry, but also the analysts that follow the industry and write reviews on new products. We at DecisionPoint fell into that trap several times. Every sales and marketing regime that we had at DecisionPoint would fall prey to this. The solution had to be marketed and sold to be the cure-all for financial anomaly detection and resolution. In some cases, we even built specific products that were marketed to help with Sarbanes/Oxley compliance (SOX), even though our product only helped with a very small part of SOX compliance. As we found out, bigger and more complex was not always better, and it worked against us in many of our sales cycles.

At one point, I did a study of the different types of customers that bought our product, and the marketing message that we were using at the time. In just about every case, customers bought our solution for exactly what it did, which was facilitate efficient financial analysis to improve the financial performance of the corporation. Rarely did they buy it due to the grandiose positioning we were using at any given time. In many cases, we drew false conclusions about the effectiveness of our sales and marketing programs as it related to revenue because we didn’t look closely enough at why customers were buying our product. Customers needed something simple, but effective, and the customers that understood what the solution was truly capable of bought the product for exactly that purpose. We ended up spending a lot of money on “marketing spin” for a product that was so simple and basic in principle. It was a big mistake.

The lesson learned in all of this, and my advice to people considering a startup is very simple. Know what you do well, accept that, and create your sales and marketing programs that exploit that. Don’t try to be more than you are. At the end of the day, grandiose positioning may get you in front of more customers, but the sales people need to be able to understand what you do well and position it appropriately. If the marketing message doesn’t match what the sales people need to sell, you end up training them on a lot of positioning that does not help them more effectively sell your products. It takes a lot of intestinal fortitude to accept what you do well, and position it in a way that it can be effectively sold. If you try to over-position what you do, it just confuses not only your sales people, but also the customers that are considering whether to buy your product or not.