Ah, the joys of ivory towers and navel-gazing. 

I’ll confess to having a liberal arts undergraduate degree and an enjoyment of literature, and I still sometimes experience acid flashbacks to my days of consulting (usually brought on by low oxygen levels in conference rooms), wherein we’ll make up great-sounding terms like “service-oriented application paradigm” and “transitive virtualization”.

But time and time again, as proven (positively) at VMware and Netscape, and (negatively) at Inktomi and Raychem (among others), simple words work better than hype.

Now, don’t get me wrong. C-level discussions have to be strategic in nature. If you’re chatting with the CEO / CIO / CFO etc, you can’t spend too much (any) time talking about RJ11 jacks, Host-Bus Adaptors, 802.11, or deep tech.  In fact, you may need to open your presentation with some hyperbolic terms that are featured on the front of analyst reports, purely because they’ve been asked “What are you doing with Transitive Virtualization” by their board, and they need an answer – and if your slide deck is titled appropriately, you’ll get their attention.

But I’d argue that deep inside every C-level executive is someone who (A) thinks that they’re still faking it, and are worried that they’ll be exposed, and ( doesn’t know what Transitive Virtualization is, and would be happy to learn in prosaic terms, so that they could then have a real discussion about how it applies to their immediate needs, eg they’re about to spend $30mm building a new building, can they avoid that cost?

My fear is that too many marketers don’t validate this situation for themselves.  Instead, we sit in our ivory towers, gazing at our navels (and analyst reports), and create the message we envision is appropriate.

Sometimes, we even do “research”, in that we ask analysts, or the nearest, loudest, highest-selling salesperson. (Hint: that salesperson sells because of who they are, not what their slides say. In fact, they barely use slides. Slides are for the less-skilled salespeople to read, and for customers to distribute internally to others to read. The more hyperbolic the slides, the faster people inside the prospect company will trash ‘em as “oh gosh, more BS”. If you have to use salespeople’s input, go to the highest deal volume rep, not the highest sales).

I’d urge marketers to instead use actual prospects and customers to test slides. Ask them only three things:  does the opening slide capture your attention (why)?  Does the deck explain what we do & why it matters to you successfully?  If we passed it around to your team, would they read it / get value / understand what we do, or would they trash it?

Again, I’ll try to avoid moralizing excessively – and in fact, have recognized that my own tolerance for hype is lower than many (I’m just reconciling myself to the fact that “workload management” may be a valid descriptive computing term). But that’s my point: my opinion is almost irrelevant. As long as my audience likes what I have to say, we win. So I field test. You should, too.

--------
blog.stupidmarketing.com is now also a podcast! Click on the "play" arrow...

Download | Duration: 00:04:08

Please buy my book.  http://buynow.stupidmarketing.com -- and tell your friends!