Don't Be Defensive

Organizations must understand the factors driving the cost-
versus-risk decision so they can better manage them.

--Converge whitepaper

Equipping salespeople with the right verbiage can be critical in raising average selling price. Case in point: how to de-commoditize something without sounding defensive. In technology markets, seldom is the value of a product or service intuitively obvious to the non-expert. In fact, the more advanced a technology the simpler it often looks, which often equates to cheaper. If you’re not careful, explaining why there’s value down there, hidden somewhere under the hood, can get really geeky and defensive.

One way to quickly turn the conversation is to bring up the topic of risk. Rather than make it an argument justifying cost, make it a discussion about something everyone already understands -- the inherent tradeoff between risk and reward. That way nobody has to lose.

This is a tactic taken in a recent white paper for one of my clients in the electronic asset disposition business. Talk about a commodity -- this is a market in which many customers expect to pay nothing or next to nothing. After all, don’t recyclers get paid for scrap? Why should the companies giving away their used stuff also have to pay?

By turning the focus immediately to risk, rather than cost, the defensiveness evaporates. Customers can pay as little as they want, depending on how much risk they wish to assume. They just need to know what they’re getting themselves into.

The Global Case

"Our challlenge . . . was to meet the varied . . . requirements of all the different locations, systems, and applications with a single solution . . . ."

--Symmetricom Case Study

I’m often asked to explain the importance of fluency in multiple technologies when many writing clients really only care about one — their own. The fact is, the more global your solution, the more necessary it is to communicate its value across multiple vertical domains, across multiple technology domains and often, of course, across multiple geographic domains as well.

To do that, you need to explain as efficiently as possible, not just your own technology’s secret sauce but also your customers’, and how the two are tightly connected. Hence, the need for broad technology fluency.


Take the recent case I wrote for my client of eight years, San Jose-based Symmetricom. You might call it a “threefor” -- explaining the importance of precise event timing in: 1) control and monitoring; 2) telecom; and 3) Brazil. The solution: a single timing system that can support that country’s largest power utility everywhere.

Saying a solution is universal is one thing, however. Telling a convincing story that supplies the sufficient proof points deep enough and wide enough is another. In the global case, you can’t be confined a particular industry, a particular technology or even a particular country to get what the story is about -- or to write it.

Recession Strategies Part 1

"Experts predict that only 25% of retailers will have an 'above average' holiday season."

--J.D. Associates

Over the next several months I want to highlight particular strategies some high-tech companies are taking to survive (and sometimes thrive) in tough economic times. These cases will be from my own clients in addition to others I’ve identified as especially creative or provocative. Hopefully, this little database of insights will prove useful to those companies looking for an option besides just hunkering down.

Strategy #1 might be called the “80/20” strategy. It’s based on the premise that in every adverse situation there are almost always a few who do very well -- in part because it is an adverse situation. Absent the adversity, doing well would not be “as easy” for them. Examples of that 80/20 strategy in action are all around us. For marketers, the key is to convey convincingly and efficiently how the negative conditions themselves are an opportunity for a potentially very positive outcome.

My client, J.D. Associates, is a provider of point-of-sale and business management technology to retailers. It’s no secret their customers -- retailers -- now face an amazingly bleak Holiday shopping season. In fact, only 25% of retailers are expected to do well this year –- on the surface, not a very appealing story on which to base a campaign. Yet, see how we pulled it off with something as simple and efficient as a postcard. (Click on the images to enlarge them.)

Use Jargon When Appropriate

"Why tech writers use so much jargon, I don't know. Maybe it's self-aggrandizement . . . . Maybe it's laziness . . . . "

--David Pogue

Did you catch the article in today's New York Times by David Pogue ("Tech Terms to Avoid")? His point: that writers like me too often fall into the trap of using a techie word when a good old fashion English word will do nicely and be more easily understood by the intended audience.



My reaction? Well, maybe not.

Here's the list: content, device, dialog, display, D.R.M., enable, email client, functionality, LCD, P.D.A., price point, URL, SMS, support, USB, user, and Wi-Fi.

Here's my take on some of them. I won't go through the entire list, but I think most of these words serve a purpose when used in their techie context.

Like the word enable. Enable has a very useful meaning in a tech environment. Turning something on -- as in throwing a switch -- is different from, say, downloading the client software into my TV's set top box, which enables it.

Functionality -- I avoid using that word as much as possible, but it really is not the same thing as features, which is what David suggests. A lot of functionality doesn't get expressed as an actual feature -- sometimes it just enables a feature.

Price point -- The term serves a useful semantic role. A price and a price point might be the same thing, technically, but a point conveys the added meaning of pricing granularity (another word that might go on the no-no list).

User is also very useful. Customers are often companies populated by users, and sometimes you have to distinguish between them.

Just one more example and then I'll stop -- content. That word means ones and zeros in a form people can consume. Hence, the word covers the territory and is far more efficient than always writing a list (e.g., music, images, text) when you want to be inclusive.

David's point is that you should not use these words in a techie way if you are not talking to a techie audience. But in front of that audience, jagon does serve a useful purpose. (It may also serve a cultural purpose, but that's an issue for another day.) But that's like saying you should only speak French to the French.

It's a matter of what's appropriate. My feeling is that words should be transparent -- the ideas should get into the reader's brain before he/she has time to think about how cute the words are.

By the way, I really liked the piece David wrote a week or so ago about common things people should know when they use a computer or other common digital device (oops!) -- like double clicking on a word to select it.