Startup messaging

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.

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Thanks!

@aprildunford

aprildunford@gmail.com

RocketWatcher.com