Due to dog days of Summer this post is a bit tardy, but finally here I am, Chris Halli well, back with the last entry in this series on technology messaging.
One of the reasons I have at times ducked out of opportunities to participate in positioning and messaging exercises is the pain of getting and keeping the technology business team on message. A recent post here on the subject of technology messaging laid out a rationale for message focus to get heard, remembered, repeated, and rewarded with competitive advantage -- and yet lack of focus is the single most common reason that technology company messages get lost in the hype clamor.
What are the forces of de-focus? The technical folks want development investments to cover as many situations as possible and are proud of the many (many) fine features engineered into the product. The sales team wants a winning story for every customer situation, figuring that the more customers you can appeal to, the better the chance of selling something (it's a numbers game.) Management wants a BIG market and a varied usefulness story to tell the money men because the broader the market, the more opportunity for potential return. No one on the team is going to drive toward focus unless they have personal and painful experience with the frustration of talking to everyone and being heard by no one.
It is only marketing, one of the less powerful members of the team unfortunately, that (may) stand up for focus. To champion the idea that selling to fewer means selling more, or that saying less means being remembered takes leadership skills, the patience to educate, thick skin, and a dose of determination. I invested my time in this blog series to give you (and remind me) of the reasonable arguments that can be effective in getting the team to value message focus.
Even when the team sees the futility of "being all things to all people" the challenges of getting to consensus on the messages can be formidable. This task is made more challenging because of the organizational disconnects in most high tech companies, most particularly the disconnect between "strategy" and "marketing communications". It is crisp strategic focus that drives message focus and yet these two things are typically done by different sets of people in totally different contexts.
So, here are my words of advice, what I do when forced to tackle the technology message focus bear: meeting planning and message policing.
Messaging process planning and leadership is critical. It means getting the right people in the room at the same time, generating or summarizing the strategy, reminding about the rationale for focus, and then driving the team to derive effective messages from the strategy. Message policing is creating a set of core "controlled" documents (described in my post on message media) that ensure the focus message is reinforced in ALL communications, including all detailed technical communication. My experience is that small high tech teams are better at creating focus messages than they are at maintaining focus/consistency, while big high tech companies are better at centralized control mechanisms, but not so good at focus messaging because there are so many voices involved. Finally, if you do hire a consultant to help you with messages, hire them to facilitate this process, not to generate the message.
I hope you have enjoyed this series on technology messaging. In the next week or so the Technology Marketing Center will start a stream on selling to the government/military -- not a bad thing to know when these markets are the only ones spending money...
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