I remember helping tear down a booth at one of the inaugural cloud tradeshows in NYC in 2010. It was the first wave of anything-as-a-service, XaaS, and the guys a few booths down were playing a song by their in-house band, “all the asses are in the cloud”. You had your SaaS, your IaaS, PaaS, BPaaS; the alphabet soup bowl was overflowing with the promise of the Next Big Thing and earning that walkaway “F You” money at a young, arrogant age. A few years later some had been in the right place, right time, but a lot more than event booths had been torn down by the unforgiving demands for real revenue and profitability lacking in so many ill-conceived business models.
I had just joined a company struggling to identify where we fit in this mass of “aas”’s. We were a development platform with an app engine, a data modeling service, a BPM modeling tool, integration tools. We had slides and white papers that enterprise architects and techies loved, and we had some fundamentally elegant and unique nuggets hidden in our seemingly bottomless bag of tricks. What we didn’t have at the time was a clear, differentiated value message that spoke to those responsible for budgets and investments. We were attempting to sell to both IT and Business Leaders with a hopelessly complex, “stop us if you see something you like” barrage of features and functions.
The team recognized this and created a series of simple, value focused messages: time to value in deploying new solutions, “leave and layer” rather than “rip and replace” deeply rooted enterprise backbone software. Outsource security, performance, scalability, reliability, maintenance, and service levels… all messages that became table stakes for the new providers in this market. We also created use-case demos for selected solutions, rapidly building prototypes in funded pilots or “proof of value” projects. We embedded all of this into our solutions slides, overhauled the website, and trained our sales team and solutions architects to position and execute this approach.
The company was early stage with fewer than two dozen sellers globally, but our pipeline grew once this new messaging was in place and we found ourselves having significantly better conversations with people in power. I will never forget a presentation I audited where the CIO of a global transportation manufacturer stopped our demo of a POC application after the first 20 minutes. We had built a prototype in eight weeks with one architect and a few developers that his team had been struggling to complete for over two years. He looked around the room, asked his people a few questions, and requested proposals on his desk in two days that culminated on one of our largest sales that year.
Unfortunately, our story did not end with the pot of gold we all had dreamed of. Although we gained sales traction, some guys at little companies like Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and others figured the market out and leveraged their resources and incumbent relationships to bleed out or buy most of the upstarts. We became one of those battlefield statistics as the number of “asses” began consolidating and converging in a tidal market shift that continues today.
The point here is that although we could not afford to work with the industry leading methodology, messaging, and training vendors we were able to focus on capturing our core value in a compelling story for both business and IT. Companies in a similar early stage can embrace this core value selling approach and gain competitive advantage while creating a foundation for further investment as they grow. Drury Advisors has developed a simple, affordable service to assist in this process. (You can see more here if interested: http://www.druryadvisors.com/services/value-selling-for-the-smb/).