The biggest trap we fell into at DecisionPoint was having sales people convince us that if we built something, they would sell a lot of it. More often than not, the opposite was true. The phrase I remember almost every sales person saying to me was “if we just had X, I could sell more product”. So, we would go off and build X, and it would not help them sell our products any better than they had in the past. I spent more time at DecisionPoint building products that were never sold, also known as shelf-ware, than I ever anticipated I would build in my entire career in the software industry.
When you follow the needs of sales too closely, your product portfolio does increase. However, this also increases the amount of time, money, and people that you have to sustain to support the new product portfolio components. Rarely can you build and market something, and then just suddenly drop it. You have typically spent a lot of money not only in building the product, but also marketing the product. When you’ve spent that much money, which for a startup is significant, you don’t want to just throw the work away.
The other non-tangible side of this equation is the impact it has on morale. Generally, when engineers work on something, they work on it in hopes of seeing it used at a customer site to help the customer improve their business in some way. As an engineer, when you continue to build product that never gets sold, it gets demoralizing over time. You look at every new project with a great deal of suspicion as to whether it will ever see the light of day at a customer site. This, in turn, makes you approach every project very cautiously. And, while you would like to be able to think you would give it your best effort, you probably do not. It’s not to say that engineers become lazy, but after a while, they get gun shy wondering when the rug is going to be pulled out from under them next. Eventually, this leads to a huge rift between sales and engineering. Sales keeps asking for new things, and the logical engineering response is “you didn’t sell the last thing I built for you, what makes this any different?” Over time, it leads to engineers believing that sales people will never be able to sell what they build, and sales people believing that engineers never deliver what they truly need (which seems to change on an hourly basis).
On the other side of the coin, marketing lives in a world of “never good enough”. No matter how good your product is, and how well you market it, someone always seems to be doing it a lot better and faster than you can. I find that marketing departments will often have to “keep up with the Joneses.” While some of this will fall back to engineering in the form of product enhancements, most of these have more to do with how to better market the product that you have.
At one point in DecisionPoint’s history, we decided to completely re-brand the company and the company’s products. This included a new logo, a new company name, a new tag line, a new web site, new collateral, etc. All of it was in the guise of giving the company a new image. At the time, we were doing just fine as far as revenue goes. Customers were buying our products, and having a lot of success with them. However, no matter how much revenue you have, it could always be more. No matter how much collateral you have it could always be better. Looking back at it, we got too caught up in comparing ourselves to other companies rather than just continuing to do what we were already doing well. You do want to keep an eye on what the competition is doing, but you should use that as just one data point when it comes to your marketing strategy. Too often in the software world, companies are too focused on comparing themselves to the competition rather than emphasizing what they do well independent of any comparisons.
Probably the best way to tell the marketing story and lessons learned is to go through the different logos and company names that we went through at DecisionPoint. While all of them represented change in the company, none of it fundamentally made a difference in our ability to sell our software to customers. As you will see through the various examples, the names changed, but the core value of the product stayed the same. Describing the same thing differently with a new fresh face doesn’t always mean that you will be better at selling your product.
The above logo represents the first branding of our products and the company. This particular logo has an interesting heritage. The “cat scratch circle” as it has been referred to was actually inherited from Sequent. Prior to the spin-off of DecisionPoint, Sequent re-branded a data warehouse database product called Redbrick, which was later bought by Informix, which later was bought by IBM. Sequent’s version of Redbrick was known as DecisionPoint, and the “cat scratch circle” was the logo. By the time that DecisionPoint was spun out of Sequent, the re-branded Redbrick product was no longer being sold. So, since all of the logos and trademarks were already owned by Sequent, we decided to inherit the name and the logo. When we were spun out of Sequent, we discovered that the name DecisionPoint was already being used in other countries. So, we formally registered as DP Applications, Inc. but doing business as DecisionPoint. This is also when we developed our first tag line “decision making by the numbers”. In usual startup fashion, the company name, logo, and tag line were all “free” so they came at a very good price.
The second variation of the logo was also fairly cheap. We added some color to the “cat scratch circle”, and made the letters appear more dynamic and aggressive. Again, the cost was right as it was all work that we could do internally without spending money.
The logo above was the first time we spent significant money re-branding the company. At that time, we had a marketing manager, and had just received a large influx of cash from our investors. Our marketing manager decided that it was time for a new image. We spent a lot of money with a firm to come up with a new logo, and new way to show the company name, a new tag line, along with all the usual types of collateral like a web site, brochures, stationary, envelopes, etc. The logo actually was from a picture of a light shining through a crack in a cavern illuminating a spot on the cavern floor. The logo color didn’t have an official name, but was referred to by its Pantone Matching System number, which is owned by PANTONE, INC. The number was PMS 384 or PMS 386. I can’t remember which it was, but the color didn’t even have a name. The grey shape at the bottom of the logo was actually gold in color. The theme was that our software provided the light that shown through the darkness to help you find the pot of gold in your financial information.
At the time, this investment seemed like the right thing to do. We had received a fresh round of cash from investors, so it seemed like a good investment of money. As stated many times before, the investment really wasn’t justified by the return we received on that investment. In addition, the original tag line that the agency found for us was “Now You Know”. Only after everything was done did we discover that it was already being used by another company, and that’s when we defaulted to using “Uncommon Insight”.
The logo above represents what you do when you want to try and define a new market for your software. Each time we had a new management team come into the company, they always were looking for a way to re-brand the company that would draw attention from potential customers. Also, as stated previously in this book/blog, marketing folks are always trying to catch the attention of industry analysts by defining a new sector within an existing market. The structure of the logo changed, but more importantly, we changed the tag line. Up until this point, decision support software was largely defined as passive, which means show me what happened. We were trying to define a new market to make decision support more active. This meant that it would retain its current passive nature, but would also help in molding how you ran your business in the future with analysis based on prediction. In other words, the ability of people to perform the analysis of data to predict future events in the business. Unfortunately, this lead to the “double whammy”. We didn’t attract any more attention from industry analysts, and we didn’t attract new customers with this new concept. I think one of the most important lessons learned from this experience was that it is very hard for a small company to define a new market. Because you are small, and only have a few customers, you don’t have the clout to define a new market. However, larger companies with larger customer bases can define new markets fairly easily.
The last two logos were the ones used by the final management team before we were acquired. At first, we went back to the basic logo with no tag line. Then, it was decided that the word Applications had a somewhat negative connotation in the software industry. So, we switched to the DecisionPoint Software name. Once again, new web site, new brochures, new stationary, new collateral, etc. But, once again, little return on investment in this area.
Overall, the lesson learned for me when it came to marketing was that you need to be clean, but you don’t need to be great. Fancy logos and tag lines aren’t what sells your product to customers. The people within your company, and their ability to convince customers that they need your software is really what is important. Potential customers may go to your web site to get information, but at the end of the day, they buy software from people they trust, and people that can convince them the software will make a difference in their company’s success. No amount of fancy logos and pictures can replace the face to face contact that gives a customer a comfort level that they are buying a good software product from a quality team of people.
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