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20 Minutes on Messaging for Startups
April Dunford @aprildunford
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My Background
• Big Companies• IBM (Launch and growth of InfoSphere, 5 acquisitions)
• Siebel (Global Marketing Financial Services)
• Nortel (head of incubation)
• Startups• Janna Systems ($1B exit to Siebel Systems)
• DataMirror (exit to IBM)
• Infobright
• Watcom (yay, Waterloo!)
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How I Define Marketing
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Messaging is Really Important
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Why is it So Hard?
Based on this
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Why is it So Hard?
Effects all this
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3 Steps to Good Messaging
Answer these questions:
1. What the heck is it?
2. Is it for me?
3. Why buy it from you?
(In this order!!)
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Paris Hilton Marketing
beautiful but makes no
sense
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What You Do?
Netflix – Watch as many movies as you want for one low monthly price.
SalesForce.com – the world’s favorite CRM software as a service.
Wikipedia – A free encyclopedia built collaboratively using Wiki software.
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You do WHAT?
Sun Microsystems – Innovative products and services that power the network economy.
Sterling Commerce – helps companies optimize and transform their dynamic business network to accelerate revenues and reduce costs.
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Step 1: What the Heck is it?
Keep it brief
Use simple language
Put it front and center
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Segmentation is not a Dirty Word
Market to Everyone, Sell to No One
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Explicit Targeting is Powerful
ThinkGeek: Selling geek t-shirts for programmers, linux
hackers, and open source geeks.
VS
Customink: your t-shirt expert for teams, schools, companies
and individuals.
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Go Deep – The Janna Example
CRM for Investment bankers:
• Use cases, day in the life of a banker
• Demos, example data
• Whitepapers, articles, opt-ed
• Sales Enablement: the IB dictionary
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Step 2: Is it for Me?
Be explicit about who you target
Use their language
Go as deep as you can
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Why Buy from You?
The terrible secret they don’t teach you in engineering school
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Why Buy From You?
The terrible secret they don’t teach you in engineering school:
Customers Don’t Care about FEATURES
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Why Buy from You?
Value Features
Make sales more productive Integrates customer data from any source, show relationships between customers.
Deploy new applications 20% faster
Extract and transform data from heterogeneous sources
Resolve IT issues faster Monitor cpu and memory usage in real time.
Pay off your debt sooner View all account information in one place, graph spending patterns.
Sharper, more realistic images Megapixels
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Step 3: Why Buy it from You?
Value not Features
Focus on Differentiators
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Tell them a Story April
How great messaging turned the “worst idea ever”
and “complete frikkin’ crap” product
into a billion dollar business.
