Part 2: Winning marketshare and influencing the analysts

Let's move to how to drive your software product to success, and the impact of the nature of influence.
Well, as I mentioned earlier, it all does come down to influence. And what we try to enable our clients to do is five things.

We help clients:

• To influence prospects to become customers.
• Software vendors and systems integrators to become partners.
• The best and brightest in the workforce to become your employees.
• People with money and access to money to become your investors.
• And garner outside thought leaders and influencers to become advocates for your company.

What is the greatest challenge that software companies face in regard to the industry analysts?
The greatest challenge with the analyst is getting the analyst to understand what the technology vendor is offering and the software vendor having to put that in context with what the analyst thinks.

Everyone thinks, "We need to go and make these analysts understand this technology. We need to give them the Holy Grail of our product." But the industry analysts are not going to get this; they understand the market in their own unique way.

It is possible to change their minds over time, but in general you should try to take what your ideas and your products are and put them in the context of what the analyst already understands. That requires a fundamental knowledge of what the analyst thinks of the market. It's as much applied behavioral psychology as anything. You've got to get inside their head, you've got to understand how they think.

But if you do a good job of presenting something to them within their context you can have nearly instantaneous benefits. They'll start writing about you, putting you on their short lists of companies to watch for, and saying good things about you.

Does clever count in the competitive marketplace?
A lot of what we help our clients to understand is that the business value they bring to the marketplace is not in how they do what they do, but it's in what they do. We talk to our clients a lot about how to focus on "what" not "how".

A lot of the tech companies and founders want to talk about how clever their software is and how clever they were for inventing it. But the real value and what causes businesses to buy technology-based solutions is all about what the application can do. They want to know what problem the program will solve for their business.

And does this go along with why software companies must sell ideas?
Exactly. The basic nature of what software companies do is intangible. There's nothing you can really reach out and touch or see about software. It's the embodiment of knowledge wrapped up in ones and zeros that solve a business problem.

When you're selling ideas the two places that are most important are politics and software. The software world is all about ideas and it comes down to your ability not to coerce, not to really even convince people but to subtly influence people that the thing you're doing is better than the way someone else is doing it.

It really has to do with the ability to do battle on the field of ideas, not on the field of reality.

And does the selling of CEOs as celebrities go along with that, making them fashionable to seek out or buy from even if their software isn't the best product in the arena? Does it brand their company?
Absolutely. We call that thought leadership and there are companies that spend a lot of money making sure their company CEO's are established as that. And they spend a lot of resources making sure their leaders are seen as thought leaders.

Earlier you talked about Oracle, is Larry Ellison a good example of CEO branding as a thought leader?
Yes, he's a great example. They've done a very good job of branding Larry Ellison with the same brand as Oracle, so Oracle has this brand as a company that has Larry Ellison as a person. And Larry Ellison has the same branding in some ways as Oracle. It holds true for Bill Gates, Scott McNealy and the CEO's of the mid-tier companies who are the heir apparent to these guys. They are waiting to step into that kind of thought leadership role.

As a former Gartner analyst and current Master Strategist where do you see the next explosive growth?
Twice a year we do Market Views where we do an in-depth analysis of a marketplace looking at the business value proposition behind the marketplace. For instance, why are people buying solutions in this marketplace, what are they expecting, what problems are being solved, how much are they willing to pay for this, and what is the ROI they're getting when it's done?

The most recent one we chose is on Human Capital Management because we firmly believe it is the next place for explosive growth in enterprise software.

You have relationships with customers through the software called CRM or (Customer Relationship Management), business partners through PRM (Partner Relationship Management), and suppliers through SCM (Supply Chain Management) and marketplaces and exchanges. The thing we've never really done a good job of as an industry is looking at the relationships we have with our employees. This has never really been addressed.

HCM (Human Capital Management) is probably about a billion dollar area this year, but we think in the next three or four years it will explode to be in the ten to twenty billion arena. It's going to be an interesting marketplace in growth.

And what about the buzz around wireless and its growth?
The hype around wireless right now is amazing. Most folks talking about wireless, including Venture Capitalists, investors, telecom companies, the business and trade press, etc., are excited about what you do with wireless, not wireless itself.

But, they can't help but talk about the technology, not what you do with it. Guess what? It's all about software. The same with broadband access. When broadband access becomes ubiquitous it's going to explode the opportunities to sell more software.

Broadband gives you access to things that software enables. Wireless and broadband and the Internet are all about the platform, but the use of it is driven by software. Ultimately it always comes back to software. And again, software reigns supreme!

Thanks for the supreme insight, Bill - we'll be watching for the next tornado in the tech world!