Startup messaging

20 Minutes on Messaging for Startups
April Dunford @aprildunford

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!)
2

How I Define Marketing
3

Messaging is Really Important
4

Why is it So Hard?
5
Based on this

Why is it So Hard?
6
Effects all this

3 Steps to Good Messaging
Answer these questions:
What the heck is it?
Is it for me?
Why buy it from you?
(In this order!!)
7

Paris Hilton Marketing
beautiful but makes no sense
8

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.
9

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.
10

Step 1: What the Heck is it?
Keep it brief
Use simple language
Put it front and center
11

Segmentation is not a Dirty Word
12
Market to Everyone, Sell to No One

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.
13

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
14

Step 2: Is it for Me?
Be explicit about who you target
Use their language
Go as deep as you can
15

Why Buy from You?
The terrible secret they don’t teach you in engineering school
16

Why Buy From You?
The terrible secret they don’t teach you in engineering school:
Customers Don’t Care about FEATURES
17

Why Buy from You?
18

Step 3: Why Buy it from You?
Value not Features
Focus on Differentiators
19

Tell them a Story April
20
How great messaging turned
the “worst idea ever”
and
“complete frikkin’ crap” product
into
a billion dollar business.

Thanks!
@aprildunford
aprildunford@gmail.com
RocketWatcher.com
21

Startup messaging

by April Dunford on Jul 22, 2010

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