Way back in 2011, I was wandering through a trade show, numb from the identical sales pitches.  Then I saw a booth advertising the “Next Generation Firewall.”  What the heck was that? As a cybersecurity geek, I had to find out more.

I trotted over to the booth, which was hopping with excitement and activity.  I listened to a passionate and absorbing presentation from the company’s founder.  This was the coolest thing to come along in cybersecurity in years.  The company was a startup, named Palo Alto Networks (PAN).  PAN is one of the largest cybersecurity companies in the world today.

While PAN’s technologies did not live up to the hype, their messaging was spectacular.  The concept of a “next generation” security technology was catnip to buyers desperate for something that could stop attacks.  This messaging was so effective, buyers were rushing to buy their products, infuriating PAN’s larger, more established competitors.

The Wall of Buyer Skepticism

When companies (especially startups) bring a new product (or service) to market, they face an imposing set of disadvantages. A lack of people, money, reputation, and customers all conspire to keep paying customers away.  However, the most insidious obstacle is Buyer Skepticism.  As a startup, you are nobody.  Prospective buyers have no reason to trust you.  Why take a chance on a startup when there are larger, more established providers?

Consequently, any startup GTM strategy must address how the company will overcome buyer skepticism.  This was exactly the conundrum PAN faced in their early days.  Their solution was to sneak right past the wall, exploiting one of the most potent human weaknesses: curiosity.

Evaluating a Product

When buyers evaluate a company and its products, they will consider a wide variety of factors.  However, we can simplify these factors into four categories (which conveniently begin with the letter “c”):

• Credibility: Is the company trustworthy? Does it have references?  Do the people at the company sound and look like they know what they are doing?
• Capability: Does the company’s products work? Do they integrate with other technologies?  Do they relieve pain?  Can the company prove that?
• Capacity: Is the company able to deliver what they say? Do they have the people, relationships, and network to function?
• Cost: Are the prices and terms reasonable? Does the company have the financial resources to delivery capability and capacity.

When a company succeeds in all four areas, they usually make the sale.

Most startups and founders focus their energy on building capability and capacity, which makes sense.  Without a product or service everything else is moot.

However, once the product is working and the company is ready to sign up customers, it is critical to start building credibility.

Established competitors already have credibility.  This is why buyers feel more comfortable buying a mediocre product from a trusted brand versus an innovative product from an untrusted company.  Credibility allows a company to pass over the Wall of Skepticism.

Using Curiosity to Build Credibility

Building credibility is exceptionally difficult, unless a startup can overcome Buyer Skepticism.  This is where curiosity becomes your superweapon.

1. Define a strong vision for your products and services
2. Pique curiosity with enticing words and ideas
3. Reassure the prospect with expertise and empathy
4. Close the deal

Let’s step through this strategy.

Define a Vision

Why?  This is the ultimate question all startups must answer about themselves and their products.

• Why you?
• Why your product?
• Why are you better than what is already out there?
• Why not your better funded, more established competitors?
• Why now?
• Why are you doing this?

As the marketing guru Simon Sinek says, “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”  To make buyers curious, you must know why you are interesting.

Consider Disney’s vision statement: “to make people happy.”  That is a simple, strong answer to why: “Why does Disney exist? To make people happy.”  Although, considering the last Star Wars movie, their success in meeting that vision is debatable.

Exploring these why questions helps a startup understand why they are unique.

Action Plan for Building Vision

1. Get your key team members or advisors together
2. Find compelling, concise answers to those questions asked earlier
3. Document those answers
4. Ensure everybody in the company can repeat those answers with conviction

Be careful with your answers.  Keep them concise and focused on customers, not yourself or your investors.

Pique Curiosity

Modern buyers are overloaded with options, sales pitches, and marketing content.  After a while, all the marketing content sounds the same.

Curiosity is both a strength and weakness.  While curiosity can make people seek out answers to vexing problems, it can also make them lower their defenses.  This is why hackers use enticing emails to convince people to click on malware.  Curiosity makes people click.

Startups can exploit curiosity to sneak into a buyer’s mind and past the Wall of Skepticism.  The buyer must see or hear a word, phrase, artwork, or design that instantly makes them think, “What is that?” or “I want to know more about that!”

To accomplish this, a startup must sound intentionally different and unique.  PAN used the phrase “next-generation,” Nike invented the phrase “Just Do It,” and Apple was “Think Different.”  All of these were unique phrases that made people want to know more about the brand.  You do not want to reveal your entire vision, merely tease it.

Action Plan to Create Curiosity

1. What is a word, phrase, or idea you can use that makes people curious?
2. Do those words reflect the company’s vision?
3. How can you deliver those concepts effectively?

Be careful that your words do not create confusion.  Using obscure, obscene, or outlandish phrases may seem funny, but they may repel buyers.

Demonstrate Credibility

Once a curious buyer approaches, you must quickly demonstrate credibility.  This means rapidly accomplishing two things:

• Show you understand the customer’s pain
• Show that you can alleviate that pain

Only a person with extensive domain expertise can do this.  Consequently, startups must place intelligent, experienced people “upfront” to engage with potential buyers early in the sales process.  These “pre-sales” experts must be able to start and maintain engaging conversations with prospective buyers.  Mostly, they must be able to reassure the customer they are capable and credible.

Pre-sales experts are the single most important component of any go-to-market strategy.  It is a perfect role for a founder, which is exactly what PAN did back in 2011.  They deployed their founder Nir Zuk into the booth to talk directly with prospective buyers.  Zuk is a brilliant and passionate engineer, who can instantly create credibility.  Zuk continues to play a key role in evangelizing PANs products to this day.

Curiosity followed with credibility supercharges your GTM efforts.

Action Plan for Intelligence Upfront

1. Ensure the first meeting with all potential customers includes a subject matter expert
2. Ensure these experts:
   1. Communicate the company’s messaging and vision
   2. Show the customer they understand their pain
   3. Demonstrate their ability to alleviate that pain

For more information about building rapport with customers, see How to Get Sales Prospects to Discuss Pain.

Close the Deal

Once the Wall of Skepticism is down and credibility is established, it is all downhill from there.  The final stage is to pivot to a product pitch, reassure the buyer you can solve their problems, and close the deal.

In this final phase, be careful not to destroy the credibility you built.  You want to sound confident, not desperate.  Desperation is repulsive to buyers.  Allow the buyer to drive the product demonstration.  Let them explore the capabilities.  Show confidence in your products, even if they are not perfect.

Once this stage is complete, you should be sending a quote or proposal to the customer, ready to close the deal.

Conclusion

Buyer skepticism is a massive impediment for startups entering the market.  Spending millions on far-reaching marketing campaigns to reach potential buyers may feel like the right thing to do, however it rarely works.  Most buyers are not going to take a small startup seriously, regardless of how many emails you send them.

Conversely, unique, targeted messaging is relatively inexpensive to produce and disseminate and, if done correctly, can be significantly more effective.  This will attract curious buyers, which is exactly what a startup wants.  Curious buyers are open to hearing an innovative, disruptive new approach.  Skeptical buyers are not.

Palo Alto Networks was not the first company to use these GTM strategies.  Many successful companies have employed these techniques.  Curiosity is potent.  If you can make prospective buyers curious and then build credibility, you may see the same explosive growth.

What do you think?  Share your feedback: andrew.plato@zenaciti.com.  If you are looking to develop a creative GTM strategy, let’s chat.  Zenaciti can help.

The post Overcome Buyer Skepticism with a Smart Go-to-Market Strategy appeared first on Zenaciti.

In the early 1980s, computers and their ads were dull, beige experiences populated with dorks in sweater vests.   Apple presented a stark contrast between their vision for computers and that of the computer titans of the time (namely IBM). In a single ad, with a single message (“Think Different”) Apple changed the entire computer market.

Of course, Apple would go on to fire their founder and almost destroy the company, but that is a different story with a different leadership lesson.

However, in 1984 Apple innately understood an important rule of running a startup: do not play your competitor’s game, make them play your game.

Nobody Gets Fired for Buying IBM

When you run a startup, you are always at a disadvantage.  Startups lack the people, money, time, and name recognition that larger, wealthier companies have.  Large companies will always use their dominant position to squash smaller startups.  Any competition with larger, entrenched players is inherently unbalanced and unfair.

Moreover, buyers are also biased to select products and services from larger companies.  Smaller startups are riskier, for the same reason stated above, limited resources.  In the early 1980s, IBM dominated the computer business.  Customers believed it was safer to buy from IBM.  Thus their largeness only helped them to become larger, and therefore overshadow any competitor.

Apple was a small(ish) computer company at that time.  They had a respectable reputation among computer nerds.  Their products were more advanced than IBM and the various PC clones, but they were also more expensive.  IBM owned the market.  Apple was playing a game that only IBM could win.

Enter the 1984 ad.  Suddenly, Apple is the coolest thing around.  Everybody wants one.  Where other computer companies struggled, Apple saw an opportunity.  There was an untapped potential that IBM was not addressing.  Computer buyers wanted to be special, unique, and … different.

Apple’s ad provided the market an exceptionally clear choice: we are cool, they are not.  Contrast is supremely appealing to buyers.  When the choices between options are clear, buyers can associate their identity to the product.  Buyers are not merely computer owners, they become Apple computer owners, which is different, special, and unique.

Apple changed the game.  Incidentally, Apple did the same thing in 2007 with the iPhone.  Which is why the rectangle in your hand looks the way it does.

The lesson here for startup sales and marketing teams is this: do not do what everybody else is doing.  That is a surefire way to disappear into the noise of a marketplace.  You must stand out from the crowd.  Even a poorly organized marketing effort that is unique and attracts attention is better than a well-crafted one that is the same as everybody else.  Be different. Intentionally different.

So, how do you do this?

Cultivating Creativity

For starters, you need creative people and an environment that inspires them.  That is easier said than done.  Creative people are unpredictable, weird, and sometimes terrifying (just hang around any art school for a few minutes, if you need this point proven.)  Anything that is truly unique is inherently scary, because it has no predecessor to prove it works.  This makes it easy for critics to dismiss creative ideas as stupid, dangerous, or destined to fail.

Creativity can be uncomfortable.  Investors, particularly the kind that are convinced they know everything, may aggressively challenge creative messages.  Some investors have this malformed methodology where they invest millions of dollars into a disruptive, creative company, only to then squash all disruptive and creative ideas.  They suffocate their own investments.

Likewise, employees may freak out when presented creative messages.  This is also a fear reaction.  When people achieve a level of comfort in a job, they will fight hard to maintain that comfort.  This means rejecting anything that threatens to disrupt that comfort, like a strange, new idea.

As a leader (founder) you must not only sell your creative ideas to customers, but also reassure the people around you (employees, investors, partners, etc.) that it will work.  You will not know if it works until it does (or does not.)  When people ask for data or proof that your crazy idea will work, you can only point to other instances, such as Apples 1984 advertisement, where a disruptive, creative idea did work.

Unfortunately, not all disruptive, creative ideas work.  The history of marketing is littered with creative ideas that cratered soon after launch.  One that pops into my mind was the LifeLock ads from 2007 where the CEO dared people to steal his identity.  It was definitely different.  It also laid down a challenge for hackers to prove him wrong, which they did…quickly.

Creative Guardrails

So how do you cultivate a creative space without falling into a creative crater?  Guardrails.  Lifelock’s idea failed because it compelled people to do something wrong.  The Lifelock team needed some basic guardrails around their messaging.

This is a funny contradiction about innovation and creativity: to encourage innovation you need to be open minded, but not so open minded you do something insane.  Guardrails place reasonable constraints around messaging to ensure it stays in a productive and practical space.

What do these guardrails look like?  They are unique for each company, however here are some generic ones you can consider:

Example Guardrails

• Do not ask the audience to do anything illegal, immoral, unethical, or disgusting. Lifelock needed to follow this guardrail.
• Do not associate your product with something repulsive, cruel, or oppressive. Apple’s ad did the exact opposite. It associated their product with freedom, beauty, and self-expression.
• Avoid the taboo topics: sexuality, religion, politics.  These topics are too emotionally charged to be wielded effectively these days.
• Do not insult people’s characteristics. It is not funny or clever to insult immigrants, disabled people, or redheads for example.
• Do not trivialize things that cause(ed) people pain, suffering, or misery. For example, slavery is never funny.  Do not ever use it, no matter how cute or sensitive you think you are.
• Tantalize, do not arouse. You do not want your audience feeling uncomfortable, embarrassed, or awkward.  You want them to be curious, inspired, and/or excited.
• Do not use copyrighted content. You can hint at it.  The best way to do this is to use similar words or designs.

Guardrails only can go so far.  And every time you create one, you may find yourself quickly breaking it.  The goal of any disruptive message is to want to make people know more about you.  Whatever images, phrases, or concepts you have, they should all leave your audience asking: “I want to know more about them, they look interesting.”

Conclusion

Thinking differently is vital if you want to stand out from the crowd.  Whatever your competitors are doing, you must be intentionally and overtly different than them.  Otherwise, there is nothing special about you and therefore no reason to select you over a more well-established brand.

The post Think Different appeared first on Zenaciti.

Technically Savvy Buyers can be anybody, with any title, and from any background. That the quiet, nerdy person in the back of the room with pink hair and tattoos might be the real decision maker, even if they do not have the title. Their technical expertise makes them hugely influential. That is the person you need to convince if you want to close the deal.

One way you can tell you are working with a Technically Savvy Buyer is they ask a lot of specific, pointed questions. Answer them honestly. They can see through marketing fluffery.

Recently, I was advising a cloud security startup on their go-to-market strategy. I will share with you the advice I shared with them regarding selling to this prickly batch of buyers.

Things Technically Savvy Buyers Care About

• Why are you in business
• What specific problems does your product/service solve
• How it does it solve those problems (with details)
• Why is your product/service unique or special
• Who else has been successful using it
• What are the risks or potential ways things could go wrong

Things Technically Savvy Buyers Do Not Care About

• Who is on your board or an executive
• Who invested in the company and why
• The awards you have won, especially vanity awards
• How many “influencers” you know
• What you accomplished ten years ago at a different company
• Numbers or statistics you made up that lack evidence
• Any mention of the word “Musk”

Mediocre salespeople sell products.  Good salespeople sell themselves.  Great salespeople sell ideas.

What are you selling? Talk about big ideas, how you solve them. Do not sell your products.  Rather sell an idea that your product helps achieve.  Technically savvy buyers want to have engaging conversations about tech.  They do not want to hear about what you did in the 1990’s at some dot.com.

While you may need to simplify your products for a broad audience, be on the look out for technically savvy buyers. They are more influential than you may think.

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I spent some time surveying the vendor emails I have received over the past few months.  While most of these are innocuous, there were quite a few with a notable aggressive tone.  Here is an example of an email I just got this past week:

 Why won’t you return my emails? Do you want to be a victim in the coming wave of attacks?”

The COVID pandemic and related anxiety are certainly a factor.  However, a quick look back through my old messages to pre-pandemic times still produced some aggressive emails.

Why has email marketing become so agressive?

Harassment Marketing

I believe there is one obvious reason, and two less obvious ones for this uptick in harassing marketing:

• Desperation for sales
• Lack of messaging discipline
• Weak leadership

Lack of sales is the obvious reason.  Marketing and sales teams are under pressure to produce results.  This is particularly true of startup companies.  Desperate companies employ desperate measures.

However, only some companies devolve into harassing their prospects when sales are down.  This is where leadership and message discipline come into play.

There are a lot of executives (especially in the startup world) who only have a single tool in their leadership toolbox: aggression.  I suspect this comes from how they became a leader in the first place; they bullied and shoved their way to the top.  Since aggression worked to get them where they are, they use it for everything.  When pressured to perform, they become aggressive. When challenged, they become aggressive. When they do not know what to do, they … you get the idea.

Unsurprisingly, aggressive leaders who bully others to get what they want will naturally resort to bullying their prospects into buying their products and services.  Aggression begets aggression.

However, we must be careful not to confuse aggression with confidence.  It is one thing to show pride in your products or express faith in a team.  It is something much darker when you send a zillion emails to people threatening them to reply.

So, how do you avoid descending into harassing marketing?  Having dump trucks full of money and not hiring bullies usually does the trick.  However, as that is easier said than done, I am going to shove those two issues aside and focus on the more important issue: message discipline.

Message Discipline

Have you ever read some of the emails and marketing content that startups generate?  Awful does not describe it sufficiently.  It is advanced awful.  Recently, I was reading a company’s “Definitive Guide” and got a headache from the eyerolling.  Pages of banal platitudes and grandiose claims.  For example, it took this “Definitive Guide” over 200 words to inform me that “losing data can be catastrophic to a company.”  The raccoons eating garbage in my backyard know that.

Messgae discipline is a set of basic communication principles that force you to stay on topic and build a lasting relationship with your audience. Let’s take a look at some of the components of message discpline.

1. Less is More

I just got a spam email today that was 1391 words long.  It took a full 6 paragraphs, boasting about the speed of the product, the awards they won, and the amazing track record of their genius leadership.  Ugh.  So many words, so little said.  You could have a product that cures cancer, ends world hunger, and eliminates all forms of human suffering, and people would still not read your 1000-word email, even if you send it to them 50 times.

No marketing email should be longer than three sentences or about 40 words.  If you cannot make your point in three sentences, then it is not worth reading.

Also, if you cannot get your point across in one or two emails, then you never will.

2. Curiosity

Most vendor emails spill out everything about a company, its products, benefits, and reference customers.  Moreover, ludicrous boastful statements like “we are the premier cloud solution for globally dominant brands” just make you sound ridiculous.

You want to make your audience curious. You want them to read your email, and then want to know more. The way to do this is to entice them to come to you.  Do not say what you do, or how great you are. Simply lay out your core value proposition and then invite the reader to come learn more from you.  For example:

API security is difficult. We believe there is a better way.  If you want to know more, let’s chat.

The more mystery you create about what you do, the more likely people will seek you out.

3. Play the Long Game

Quantity of content is not going to compensate for quality.  Sending out wave after wave of emails will not generate business.  Marketing is a slow grind.  You need to calm down and play the long game.

• Do not hit your email lists more than once per quarter. Anything more than that is bordering on harassment.
• Opt-out links must be flawless. If a prospect opts out of your marketing platform you have a solemn duty to never email that person ever again in their life.  It is never acceptable to get this wrong.
• Change your content frequently. Repetitive content feels harassing since people have seen it before and do not want to see it anymore.
• How about dropping the email blasts entirely? Do they really work?  How about blogs? Videos? Or something creative like a mock interview?  Creative ideas can be scary (sometimes insane.) Yet, if you do something different, it will stand out.  Even if it flops, it will make people notice your company.  A good example of this was Zscaler’s booth at RSA a few years back where people smashed firewalls with sledgehammers.  It was a wildly creative concept and supremely effective.
• Keep the email painfully brief and direct the reader to meaningful content. Let the reader come to you.  A person who clicks a link to read your content is inherently more interested.

4. Never Pitch

Nobody wants to hear your pitch.  Maybe that technique worked in 1997. Today’s high-tech buyers are savvier and have more information available to them.

Rather than pitching your product, try discussing the customer’s problems.  In other words, make your marketing about the customer and not about you.  I will eagerly read a “Definitive Guide” that addresses things I am worried about or are causing me difficultly.  Yet, the instant that guide strays from discussing the problem to pitching a product, my interest wanes.

Another way to accomplish this is to ask questions and propose some possible answers.  Keep those answers generic.  Offer the reader good ideas, strategies, and techniques, rather than product talking points.

5. Know the Audience

Who do you want to read your content?  You must know your audience.  What is their job, their experience level, their hopes, their problems, the things that make them laugh, etc.  When writing content, visualize this person and write “at” them.  It is amazing how much better (and concise) content becomes, when you have a clear idea of who you want to read it.

6. Show, Don’t Tell

When the time comes to present your product: show, don’t tell.  Show me how your product solves a problem.  Show the reports. Show the data. Show the screens.

Another way to say this suggestion: do not treat the audience as incapable of comprehending your product.  If you treat your customers like intelligent people, guess what kind of customers you will attract?  (Hint: not gullible idiots.)

Give your audience the freedom to discover why you are better.  This has the added benefit of getting people more invested in your products and vision.  Which gets to the final item on this list.

7. Start with Why

As Master Sinek teaches us all:  People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.  If you want people to be attracted to your products, then you must clearly communicate your vision.  Why did you make your product? What greater purpose does your product and company serve?

Content that leads with vision may feel awkward to you because you live and breathe the product every day.  However, to a prospect who does not know you, vision is the ideal way to introduce yourself.

At ABCTech we believe security is for everybody. That is why we make cloud security easy.  If you need a better way to secure cloud workloads, then let’s chat.

In those three sentences, I now know what this company believes and what they do.

Conclusion

Aggressive marketing does not work.  For every prospect it attracts, it repels many more.  With a more intelligent approach, you can up level your communication and attract a savvier (an wealthier) set of customers.

If you want to truly communicate with prospective customers, you must stop thinking about what you want to say and start thinking about what other people want to hear.

Also, a funny thing happens when shift your focus to other people instead of yourself: you acquire additional leadership skills beyond aggression. Skills such as listening, diplomacy, creativity, and empathy arise from reflection and thinking of others.

As for all those emails you receive from vendors, resist the urge to complain on social media about them. That will not stop them.  It has the unintended effect of giving them more attention (this is the  Streisand Effect.)  What will stop them is to ignore them or use your email system to block their address.

Happy marketing!

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