Three months ago, I wrote about how quickly the storage industry was changing.  I commented on how the fundamental concepts you need to know to be in a conversation about storage are really different than they were just 3 or 5 years ago.

Last week I attended BriForum (great event focused on virtual desktop technology) and was reminded again of how quickly things change.  It came in the form of questions from prospects who came by our tradeshow booth.

Earlier in the year, the questions we got the most were:

“So what do you guys do?”

“Oh, so you’re like ABC?”

Except it’s like we’re selling zebras and ABC is basketball hoops.  Prospects had no sense of our part of the industry and a large part of our interaction with them was around education.

Now – just a few months later – it’s:

“What makes you different from XYZ?”

“Oh, so you’re like ABC?”

It’s a good sign for us, because now ABC is horses.  We’re selling zebras, and someone’s saying, “oh, I know what zebras are, they’re like horses, right?”  XYZ is cows.  We’re being asked how zebras are different from cows.

The technologies we’re being compared to are in our space.  This is good news.  

It means we’re in a maturing part of the industry, one that is sussing out who the players are, and what the right technical solutions are.  A part of the industry that is determining how we talk about value and what category our solutions fall into.  It means our customers are getting better educated before they find us.  A lot of things make Infinio different from our competitors and now that can be a larger part of our discussions with customers.

It’s been really interesting to actually see this happen; previously I had always sold and marketed technologies that were already part of existing industries.  It’s also been challenging to keep up with the marketing as the industry matures.  We have to quickly shift from “this is what server-side caching is” to “this is why our technology is better.”

I’m holding on for the ride.

There’s a hashtag I’ve seen a few times that looks like this: #whatsysadminsdo or #whatdbasdo.  If you’re not fluent in twitter, it’s basically “what <<job title>> do”. (Like #whatlawyersdo or #whatdoctorsdo.)

I think that many of you who read this blog have no idea #whatdoessheryldo.

Some of you in my industry are familiar with technical marketing; also I have gotten some notes on Facebook from people who work in different industries and appreciate this blog. But for every one of those is someone who sees me socially and says “Your blog makes me feel dumb.  I have no idea what you are talking about.”

My sister, drDiva, doesn’t get it either.  When I was a sales engineer, she could understand that I was the technical person who worked with the salesperson to explain the technology during a sale.  (Quite a distillation of SE-ing, but useful for the Thanksgiving table.)  But as a product marketer, I befuddle her. I explain what I do, and she understands the “launch” function (that is, creating documents and noise when we have a new product), but wonders how there enough work to do to keep me employed after launch.

(For the record, I have no idea what drDiva does.  I mean, she’s an anaesthesiologist so I know she administers drugs to put people under, but other than that, no idea.)

Last week was a great week – the kind of week you hope is what your job always feels like.  So, here’s a crack at #whatProductMarketersDo or at least #whatDoesSherylDo

1. Presented a webcast with one of our founders, sharing the results from a recent lab test of our product.  Our product showed significant performance benefits with typical enterprise environments.  70 people attended.
2. Met with the sales team to introduce a new framework for how we talk about performance and results.  This involves setting expectations with a customer before they evaluate what the entire spectrum of performance results looks like and where they might fall.
3. Took the performance/results framework and began to update our evaluation guide to reflect this new model.
4. Met with our VP of Sales to present the newest version of our “pitch” deck and competitive sales resources.
5. Wrote a draft of a paper that discusses our product’s architectural advantages.
6. Wrote my blog post for this week.  (I blog here and on Infinite I/O.)
7. Participated in a call with an analyst firm who is working on a paper about us. Provided the basic pitch and joined in discussion on structuring the paper.

Whew – what a week!  Good thing it ended in a 3-day weekend.  I love my job these days but that is a lot of brain power.  And now you know #whatdoessheryldo.

One solution to a Rubik’s Cube

At work, we’re overhauling our website, and in a meeting someone asked, “do we call ourselves a product or a solution”?

“Solution – of course!”  part of me answered.  Solutions signify value!

“Really?” said the other part.  I’m not so sure we have a solution.  We have a product.  And it can solve problems.

When I was at Dell, I worked in a team called “Solutions Marketing.”  It’s kind of funny because at Dell there were dozens of teams with that moniker.

• Some marketed solutions that were Dell products coupled with other vendors’ products.
• Some marketed solutions that were Dell products angled towards a specific use case.
• Some marketed solutions that were Dell products angled towards a specific vertical market.
• Some were doing the technical marketing work in a lab to support these efforts.

It was trendy to be in “Solutions Marketing.”

We talked about what it meant to offer a customer a “solution” versus a “product.”  How it more directly addressed their needs and aligned better with their their requirements.  “People don’t buy products,” we’d say, “people buy solutions.”

Fast forward, and here I am at Infinio.  We have one (awesome) product.  It gets deployed in one way, where it’s either on or off.  It solves (hard) problems.  Are we marketing a product or a solution?

Does it matter?

Let’s look at some examples from my consumer life.

1. Keurig coffee maker.  I’d say this is a solution.  I have a problem – I like coffee and I hate to wash coffee pot parts.  The Keurig solved this for me.

2. Soft corners to babyproof furniture.  This purports to be a solution, but really it’s just a product.  And it doesn’t work too well – given the overhangs and shelves on our furniture, they keep falling off when we open something.  (Thankfully, babyDiva is made of steel.)

3. Donuts.  Every Friday, Alan brings in donuts for the team.  They’re fantastic.  They light up our day.  And they are definitely just a product.

IT people are sharp.  If they have a problem, they’re going to look for a solution, and whether we call it a solution or call it a product, they’ll find it.  It’s not 1999.  People have access to so many more online resources to research technology.  What we call it is probably not too relevant.

Sure, a “product” has more of the reputation of being something the customer has to do more work to implement.  But again, it’s 2014.  IT people are going to read up on what it takes to make something work no matter what we call it.  (And really, are donuts that much work?)

I think we can help people find us by showing them how we can work in their industry (financials), in their environment (e.g., with NFS), with their application (e.g., virtual desktops).

But I don’t know if that means we call it a solution.

I’ve lived in Boston for nearly 15 years, and it took me a while to understand the subtleties behind the subway.  Quincy Market is not in Quincy.  The Silver Line is not a subway.  I *love* public transportation and as such, I’ve ridden the subway in many cities, both in the US and abroad.  None of them are organized the way Boston’s is organized.

In Boston, you don’t take the subway North or South, you either go “Inbound” or “Outbound”, that is, you are either going towards the city center or away from it.  So in the morning, I get on at Park Street and go “Outbound” to Alewife.  At night I get on at Kendall and go “Inbound” to Park Street.

The weird thing about this is that if you are at any terminus, you go “Inbound”.  Both the trains going North and the ones going South are going “Inbound” until they hit the center, then they are both going “Outbound.”

It’s weird.

I bring all of this up, because “Inbound” and “Outbound” are also marketing terms that can be equally confusing, depending on what direction you are facing.

Classically, outbound marketing is what you think of when you think of marketing – sending messages, documents, advertisement OUT to the market.  Inbound marketing was the function that communicated from product management back into engineering; inbound marketers wrote things like marketing requirement documents. They faced IN towards the product developers.

But marketing has changed a lot in the past decade – fueled mostly by the Internet.  We all know this, but to net it out: customers are significantly more educated than they used to be.  In fact, they’re 57% of the way through the buying cycle by the time they reach out to us for information.

So some would say that the traditional outbound marketing is dead.  While rumors of its death may have been exaggerated, there is a new trend emerging – “inbound marketing.”  This inbound marketing isn’t the inbound marketing that communicates with engineering, it’s called inbound marketing because it’s purpose is to generate inbound interest in a product or company.

The idea behind inbound marketing is that today’s customers are educated, Internet-savvy researchers.  (When’s the last time you bought something for more than $50 without reading a review?)  So the types of information customers are looking for is different, the location of that information is not just on one’s website, and the other channels that customers look to for information need to be fed from marketing as well.

If customers are nearly 60% through their buying process by the time they come to our site, then we need to ensure that when they go to Twitter, or read a third-party review, or participate in a user community, that they are hearing (good things!) about us.  This is what marketing is about today – interacting with influencers, partnering with communities, providing resources for self-education about ourselves.

I think all of this is really good for customers.  It puts a lot more pressure on us to release a good product, if there is a large community component to successful marketing.

And, I don’t think outbound marketing is dead.  We still need solution briefs and whitepapers and tools that help customers understand the packaging, pricing, ROI, and purchasing options around the product.  In fact, content is central to the new inbound marketing model.  There’s just a new additional layer that ensures that the content speaks to the audience the right way and is in the right places for customers to find it.

Oh, and as for the old definition of “inbound marketing” – I have no idea what people call that now.  Maybe it’s just considered part of Product Management.

If you are not from Boston – take yourself for a ride on the subway – the “T” – next time you are here – just don’t go to Jamaica Plain without an extra nickel.

Last week for the umpteenth (umphundredth?) time, someone referred to marketing’s contribution to a particular effort at work with a hand wave and snickering reference to “marketing stuff.”  

In my last job, I’d regularly proofread and edit technical folks’ papers, which they asked me to do and really needed.  They’d be totally thankful for my work and in the next breath they’d ask if I could beef up their intro with my “marketing fluff.”

Also in my last job, I had responsibility for managing the resources and experience for customers visiting our facility.  My opening hour-long presentation on corporate strategy and history was regularly referred to as “the marketing stuff.”

I know the people I work with respect me, don’t think of me as “filler” so why the derision?

Now I have a dirty little secret – I’m offended when other people do this, but I’m just as bad.  I will often mumble the marketing part of my job title.  “I do PRODUCT marketing,” I’ll say.  I’ll say, “I’m the technical part of the marketing team” or “I’m barely allowed to stay in marketing, I’m so technical.”

I don’t really know where this comes from.  I’m not ashamed of my job – in fact I’m proud that I’ve gotten here.  But marketing carries with it a lack of gravitas, a reputation for being lightweight, a part of a company that college students who didn’t know what else to major in end up.  I got news for you – it’s none of those things.

Here are some of the problems I’ve been working on since I started at Infinio three weeks ago:

• Who will our customers be and how will we find them?
• If we put a lot of engineering resources into a new feature, does the market exist to justify the decision?
• What’s the right balance of talking about the benefits of our product vs talking about the technology?
• What are our competitors doing, how are they talking about it, and how do we differentiate our product?
• Is the vertical market we’ve chosen to focus on the right one?  How do we know?
• What resources do our salespeople need to successfully articulate the value of the product to close deals?  (Oh, and we’re a startup – so that list you made? Great, now go make the resources.)
• What resources do other parts of marketing need to successfully attract new customers? (See above)
• What is the one-sentence, 50-word, and 100-word summary of our company?

(And if you think that last one is easy, try it.  Then show it to 100 people and see what they think.  Then go back to your previous non-gravitas, lightweight job and thank your lucky stars that messaging isn’t your job.)

This stuff is hard.  It’s the part of the company that decides how we are going to talk to the public about what we do.  It can be really technical if you are the person ensuring that the messaging is technically accurate (blended latency vs. average latency vs. latency – which one of these can we say).  It’s a part of the company that has to be really close to customers (imagine writing a case study without knowing a customer really well).

Also, a lot of it is very analytical. We look at models of the market, the programs we are running, the cost of new leads, the close rate of deals, just about anything you can imagine measuring is measured in marketing.  Fun Fact: my teammates use Excel more than they use PowerPoint.

Sure, marketing is also where pithy advertisement sayings come from and it’s where the people are who decide what the giveaway is at tradeshows.  But the former is really, really hard.  And the latter is a tactical decision made in the context of lots of strategic decisions before it.

So enough with the “fluff” and “stuff” when you refer to marketing.  I promise to do the same.

I’m in product MARKETING.