How To Rework Up-front Positioning
In this morning's post ("Help! My Customers Don't Get it"), I published an email from a former BNET colleague where he complained about getting assigned to low-level contacts in his larger prospects. The colleague is Travis Van and he used to write the Catching Flack blog, which was (in my view) one of the best blogs that's ever appeared on this site.
Travis himself is one of the smartest guys in the PR business and his new company is a freakin' stroke of brilliance. However, even though he's incredibly talented, it's often difficult for creative people to market their own stuff. The reason is simple: you get so close to your creation that you can't see it from the outside.
So I'm going to do it for him... and I'm hoping that he'll report back to me on whether my revised approach worked or not. So then...
Travis's new company is ITDatabase, and it provides an incredibly valuable function for high tech firms that need to contact the media and develop productive relationships with them.
I can tell you, with all seriousness, that when I was in high tech marketing, I would have practically killed for a cool product like this. Any high tech marketers reading this post should stop reading this post and go over to Travis's site and check it out.
However, not everyone in the business world is as savvy as you Sales Machine readers, which is why Travis's firm needs some better up-front positioning. Here's his current top-line message, with a my critique [in brackets]:
If you're serious about tech marketing and PR results [1], you know that you're only as good as your information. [2] ITDatabase[3] is the only research tool designed specifically for the tech industry.[4] It gives you relevant, actionable information[5] for your marketing and PR efforts without all the noise [6].
- [1] What is meant by "serious" and "results"? How serious? What results?
- [2] What is meant by "good"? Morally correct? What kind of "information"?
- [3] "ITDatabase" sounds "plain wrap" because all IT groups use databases.
- [4] This is confusing. The tech industry has hundreds of research tools.
- [5] What is meant by "relevant", "actionable" and "information"?
- [6] What does this mean? That it runs quietly on my computer?
High tech firms like [reference account] use our software to double their sales by targeting media sources that reach the right customers and prospects.If Travis leads with this message, I guarantee he won't get assigned to a junior evaluator. He'll be talking to the head of marketing or the head of sales, pronto.
Once you're in the account, he needs to work with the contact to identify the types of media sources that they'd like to reach, and to quantify the financial impact -- in term of sales revenue -- of reaching those sources more frequently and more effectively.
The entire sales process should be built around uncovering those financial hot spots until it becomes wildly clear that they'd be financial dunderheads if they didn't buy.
Even so, I must say that Travis's basic idea is so clever, and so needed, that he could probably make it successful anyway. The new messaging will just make it easier to develop some of the larger accounts.