In the best of times, strategic positioning is a complicated game. In a recession, with budgets getting cut and people anxious about their jobs, it becomes way more challenging. How do you motivate customers to spend money when money is tight? What do you say or do?
The immediate reflex when money is tight is to build your Point That Matters around saving money. And certainly, for many consumer goods, the bottom line is always the bottom line. But in the rarified world of high technology (where we’ve been working for twelve years and two recessions), it ain’t necessarily so…it’s natural to think that in a down economy, economizing would be the winning message. Which is essentially the problem…it’s so ubiquitous that it gets tuned out.
Case in point, we recently ZOOMed VMware, the leader in Business Infrastructure Virtualization. That is a technology that’s built around saving money…the math is simple, you replace three servers with one and cut your cost by two-thirds, right? And the more you reduce, the more you save, right? Definitely.
Problem is, as customer and prospects told us again and again, no vendor ever calls up saying “I’m going to make you spend more money.” Cost savings is expected, it’s table stakes, but it’s not going to close the sale. What the market was excited to learn about VMware was that they added value on both sides of the coin – increasing IT flexibility and reducing costs.
In any economy but especially in a down one, customers want to hear a positive, inspiring message. And when you say save money, what they hear is spend money. So now VMware is talking about energizing business through IT. There are three pillars to VMware’s message: 1) optimize financial energy; 2) shift human energy and 3) save the earth’s energy. Check out the message on VMware’s web site (www.vmware.com) and on airport billboards in major cities. VMware’s message is energizing customers and prospects…and, of course, saving money in the process.
The same was true of another recent ZOOMee, DocuSign. DocuSign’s electronic signature service saves money in all sorts of ways, by taking the time- and resource-consuming process of pushing paper contracts around and digitizing it. That part is a no-brainer, and not a differentiator. Their breakthrough, the thing their prospects were excited to learn, was DocuSign’s ability to track and store signed documents. That’s the thing that made them stand out from the crowd of “money saving” solutions.
Challenging times call for challenging thinking. And we’ve found the first thing to challenge is the conventional wisdom that in a tough economy, saving money is the only thing that matters. It’s important to be sure…but with everyone focused on that, it’s the companies that go beyond conventional thinking and find innovative ways to differentiate that are going to win.
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