How many times have you heard “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”? It comes from the mainframe era, and by 1978 a trade magazine was already calling it the conventional wisdom among computer buyers. It was never an IBM slogan. It’s usually told as a joke about cautious buyers, but it’s also one of the best summaries of B2B marketing I know. The IBM name didn’t make the computer any faster. It made the person who chose it feel safe.
By the time a product is ready to launch, most of the engineering is done. What’s left is deciding who you’re talking to, what you’ll say, what promise sits behind it and whether the organization is ready to deliver. Get one of those wrong and a very good product can still struggle to find its customers. These are the things I’ve seen matter most.
Know who’s in the room
In B2B the buyer is rarely one person. Take an industrial condition-monitoring system. The maintenance manager starts the conversation, the technicians use it, IT checks it won’t open a security hole, the plant manager decides and procurement signs. The technician wants alerts that don’t cry wolf, IT wants security and the plant manager wants payback. A brochure written for one of them leaves the others unconvinced.
At Sidense, where I led marketing and product management from 2014 to 2017, we sold memory designs that chip companies built into their own chips. Engineers evaluated us, purchasing handled the licence and business units held the budget, but the person most able to stop a deal was often the VP of engineering, who had to accept the risk of putting a small supplier’s memory inside their chip.
Don’t forget the customers you already have
Where a customer stands with you changes the conversation more than almost anything else. Someone new to the category needs convincing the problem is worth solving. Someone using a competitor needs a reason to switch and a safe way to do it. A former customer won’t listen until they see what has changed. Current customers want more value and a clear upgrade path.
When I set revenue goals by customer type, current customers often carry more than half. Yet many launch plans read as though all the money is coming from new names, and existing customers sometimes hear about a new product after the press release. That’s a good way to annoy the people who pay the bills.
Back up every claim
A messaging framework is often drawn as a house. The roof is one sentence in the customer’s language that anyone in the company could repeat. Under it sit a few key benefits, and under each benefit the proof: test results, pilot data, certifications and references. A useful check is to ask whether a competitor could claim all your benefits tomorrow. If one could, you’re describing the category rather than your product.
In Canada, the Competition Act also requires a performance claim to be based on an adequate and proper test carried out before the claim is made. Sidense customers asked for every kind of proof, and a claim without silicon data from the right process wasn’t taken seriously.
Brand is a promise you have to keep
Engineers often hear “brand” and think of logos. I find it more useful to think of a chain. The identity is how customers recognize you, the promise is what you say they can count on, and the experience is what they get, from the first call to the last support ticket. Reputation builds when the promise and the experience match over time.
Do engineering buyers care? More than they admit. A CEB study of 3,000 B2B buyers found that 86% saw no difference between suppliers worth paying for, and that personal value, such as career safety, had twice the effect of business value on their decision. When specifications look alike, a strong brand lowers the buyer’s personal risk, which brings us back to IBM.
Sidense was on the other side of that saying. Chip companies many times our size had little reason to trust a small Ottawa supplier with something as sensitive as security keys. The foundries made the difference. TSMC and others did their own due diligence on our designs, and passing their quality programs acted as an endorsement. Over time, delivering what we promised did the rest.
Customers also judge the promise on their own terms. In 1994 a mathematics professor found that Intel’s new Pentium sometimes gave wrong answers in division. Intel’s engineers judged the flaw rare and at first offered replacements only to customers who could show they needed one. To customers, it sounded as if Intel had decided who deserved a working product. Intel ended up replacing chips for anyone who asked and took a $475 million charge. As Andy Grove, Intel’s chief executive, put it, “We presumed to tell somebody what they should or shouldn’t worry about.”
The box on the dock
When I was VP of Marketing at Ross Video, I was proud of our products, and the openGear platform won a Technology and Engineering Emmy in 2016. They were also shipped in plain brown cardboard boxes, like everyone else’s. In many customers’ organizations the first people to meet the product are on the receiving dock, and a brown box says nothing about the quality inside. Apple takes the opposite view, and I’ve kept every box I’ve ever received an Apple product in. Packaging, documentation and the first support call are all part of the brand, whether or not anyone in marketing designed them.
Check you’re ready
About a month before a major launch, I like a readiness review where each function, from engineering and operations to sales, support, legal and finance, confirms it’s ready or says what’s missing. A red item means fixing it, moving the date or scaling the launch back. These reviews only work if people feel able to report bad news, and that depends largely on how the leader reacts when they do.
Most engineers know failure mode and effects analysis from design or manufacturing, and it works for launches too. Rate each way the launch could fail for severity, likelihood and detection, and deal with the highest scores first. The Pentium story is a good argument for agreeing your response plan before launch rather than improvising it.
The test I use
Imagine your buyer explaining their choice to their boss. Has your launch given them the words and the evidence to do it?
If you’re working through a launch and would like a second pair of eyes, get in touch.
