During a recent stretch of interviews with a top 5 enterprise technology company, I was asked to put together a presentation on my approach to product marketing for one of the their ITSM management offerings. It was a short deck and focused on inbound-content marketing with the main underlying theme:
Remove the Fear.
Create Reassurance.
Create Reassurance.
Now what do I mean by that? Over the course of my 10 year IT career, I covered a lot of ground. But nothing was more challenging than being asked to lead an Enterprise management software deployment from one of the big vendors. It's the type of software tool that has tendrils and connections into many aspects of your environment. AND requires coordination and cooperation from multiple IT technology silos. When you invest $75K to $150K in one of these tools, you're making a commitment and your job is somewhat on the line. And when you've got a slew of work just maintaining your network and fighting fires, you often don't have the internal expertise or resources to launch an additional project like Enterprise management.
And what support do the big Enterprise management vendors provide you online? The answer is: not much. As I perused the competitor websites, the ability to get substantive, helpful content to help me truly learn and evaluate this ITSM product was difficult to find. The ability to download a trial copy of software was buried in the online content. And it made me realized that not much has changed in this domain since my own deployment in 2004.
And given the changes in online marketing and the web 2.0, I really scratched my head as to why things had not moved forward. Why wouldn't you want your customer to have as much information at their disposal for making an educated evaluation and decision? How does an IT manager make an objective apples to apples comparison between competing products? And why wouldn't IT vendors make this whole education and evaluation process easier? I can't imagine many professionals who would invest $100K based upon a couple of sales demos and product sheets.
Then during a conversation with a pre-sales Engagement Manager, I got some insight. He mentioned that in his role, he is asked to educate and counsel IT customers through the purchase process. He described them as having the "deer in headlights" look and the need to help facilitate the purchase with enterprise architects, line of business and financial people. Reassuring the customer on both the technical feasibility AND the political feasibility of an IT enterprise software deployment.
And it really makes me wonder why technology marketers don't take some of this readily made content, that's already available, and provide it to customers earlier on in the purchase cycle. Admittedly, pre-Sales needs to hold back some value-add assets in their toolbox for their discussion but wouldn't providing some of this information earlier help the sales rep get the conversation started? Is marketing so fixated on giving away $10 Starbucks gift-cards and mugs for events that they don't have time to make this extremely valuable information available to prospects?
I don't know but if my IT job and career was on the line, I'd say please keep your mug and help me make the right IT enterprise management software decision. And the vendor that provided me with more valuable information to help me evaluate choices, would have a leg up on the rest. But that's just me...
