Time for Software Marketing to Grow Up

To improve ROI, software vendors must switch to sales-based – rather than product-based – marketing.

By Tom Hogan, Catapult Direct

Despite being in its thirties, high-tech marketing is still an industry in its adolescence. And like any adolescent, it’s unsure of where it wants to go but knows better than anyone else how to get there.

Part of the problem is the crowd that Marketing runs with. Marketing hangs out almost exclusively with “Product Guys” – not salespeople. Product Guys are like those guys who go on first dates and talk endlessly about themselves. Finally, as the evening wanes and the date is utterly bored, they smile engagingly and say, “But enough about me.  Let’s talk about things I like to do…”

For these Product Guys, it’s all about “The Product” and its capabilities.  On sales calls, when talking about The Product, they just can’t stop. “But enough about the features, let’s talk specs...”

The campaigns Marketing creates based on interactions with Product Guys and these bad, first date-style conversations are some of the most unoriginal and uninspiring in history. But this problem persists because the people picking up the marketing tabs are, by and large, technologists in love with their own technology. They and their Marketing departments share the belief that their products are so unique and meaningful that they don’t need to be marketed, just explained.

Wrong. If customers were ever inspired or motivated by the tech-speak IT marketers have force-fed them all these years, they aren’t anymore. Jaundiced by years of blue screens and having to kluge together their own “solutions,” buyers have discovered the hard way that the best technology doesn’t always carry the day, that pioneers don’t always make the best providers, and that “second to market” is often a strategic advantage rather than a badge of disgrace.

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