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Wednesday, October 27, 2010

How clear is your message? Not very, I’m afraid.

How Clear is Your Message?

Look at the picture above and tell me what this company sells. 99 times out of 100 people will say “Fish”, and they will be correct.

I think about this a lot. I speak at many SharePoint events around the world, seeing the same SharePoint vendors, many who I have come to consider colleagues. The problem is, I still can’t tell you what their product is. I know the name of their company. I know the people who work for the company. But if you paid me $1,000,000.00, I couldn’t tell you the name of their product and what it does.

Why is this? How can it be that I have seen something dozens of times and still can’t answer a simple question: What do they do.

I attribute this to clarity of message. If I am standing in front of a company booth at an event like The Experts Conference, Best Practices Conference or SPTechCon and I have to ask what you do, it’s a losing game for both of us.

Clarity of message: What do you do? I shouldn’t have to ask. If the company has spent thousands of dollars for a booth, more money for design of the booth, and then is paying someone to staff the booth, there is a total disconnect if I have to ask, “So, what do you do?”

My main emphasis at the moment is as a SharePoint Evangelist, spreading the SharePoint goodness to as many people as possible. If you’d like people to talk about your product, you need to give them something right up front that is clear, consise and unambiguous. What do you do? Please don’t make me ask. Clarify your message before I talk to you and we can have a very productive conversation.

Just my two cents for the SharePoint companies that have good products and can’t understand why no one is talking to them or about them. Look at your message. Is it as clear as the “Meat Without Feet” brand?

 

Please Join the Discussion

7 Responses to “How clear is your message? Not very, I’m afraid.”
  1. Hear, hear, Mark!

    Just about every booth I approached at SPTechCon, I started the conversation with “What do you do?” Like you, I asked this of people I knew as well as of those I didn’t. I brought home a boatload of slick glossies and 5-10 lbs of swag. But, I might be able to tell you names of a 5 of the vendors, but what they do… and how they’re different from the rest… I might be able to tell you 2 or 3.

    Don’t assume your clever name and logo tell your prospects what it is you really do. You got some ’splainin’ to do!

    Blessings,
    Jim Bob

  2. BL in Boise says:

    This certainly isn’t limited to the SP environment. In today’s world, everyone has to be important and we emphasize that by developing complex explanations for what we do. In my opinion, this trend has made it difficult to communicate clearly. For example, when someone asks me what I do for a living, I don’t say, “I provide real-time solutions for automated data systems responsible for processing physical and electronic submissions to a secure data storage environment.” I say, “I fix computers.”

  3. Dave Coleman says:

    A very good point and it was not until i read your piece that i realised that is so true i also approach a booth and utter the words “and what does your company do?”

  4. Kevin Classen says:

    You’re right, we shouldn’t have to ask. What’s worse than having to ask? It’s when their answer is some platitude like “We make tools for improving SharePoint.” Be it content delivery, security, infrastructure etc. It’s as if they’re thinking “we do SharePoint stuff, you’re doing SharePoint stuff, it’ll be a match made in heaven.” I’ll tell you it’s not and those exhibitors/vendors/e-mailers get dropped from my consciousness like a hot potato that’s going to explode.

    Maybe you can knock some sense into their messaging. What problem do you solve? What SharePoint deficiency do you solve. What do you have that I cannot live without?

  5. Shawn says:

    I agree with what you’re saying Mark. The irony is that the same could be said about SharePoint, couldn’t it? What does SharePoint do? It depends who you ask and who you’re talking to.

    For me, while I may not know the specifics of each vendor, I have a general idea many times. The same could be said about SharePoint – I have a general idea, but not all of the specifics. Just as SharePoint becomes easier to understand, I think eventually we’ll get to the same place with some of these vendors.

  6. Derek says:

    I went to a vendor’s booth at SPTechCon and introduced myself. I was just getting to know folks in the community. I had zero intention of buying their product, but I could certainly promote their offering to others in the community that I run into down the road that might be looking for such a solution.

    So, what happened? I get a 10 minute pitch. Never stopped to ask me a question about who I was, what my needs were, what I might do for them. Robo-script spewed from their mouth. I kept trying to interrupt and provide a summary of what I thought their business did, just in case I needed to repeat it back to someone later — but it felt like I never got that part right.

    Lesson for such events: Be proud to tell people about what you do and why others find it important, *but keep it to a minute*. Take a breath. Ask a question to the folks standing in front of you: what do you do? What kind of things are you looking for? Why did you come to this event? See where the conversation leads. Turn someone into a evangelist with a clean elevator pitch.

    I was not a prospect for this vendor, but I could have been an evangelist for them…if I understood what they did.

    Two final points:

    I went by the Metalogix booth. Robert Bogue (great guy) was there and during our conversation he asked me, do you know what these guys do. I repeated the elevator pitch I had learned, “these are the guy you go to if you want to migrate content into SharePoint”. He smiled, said I was spot on, and helped me refine that pitch a bit. Easy.

    Global 360, you ask? Think of us as “workflow on steroids”. Of course, we are more than that, like all vendors are more than their elevator pitch. But it’s a place to start, and something easy to remember. People actually came to our booth saying “you’re the workflow on steroids folks, right?”

  7. spevilgenius says:

    I have been to 2 Sharepoint events and could not really remember more than 2 vendor names. It was sad that that is the case because I am quite certain that there were those that might have had something I could talk about later. As was stated ealier, it is hard to promote what you don’t know! I can bet that I know what “Meat Without Feet” sells!!


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