Happy (almost) New Year, everybody!
As some of you may know, I am working at ExaGrid Systems doing Technical Marketing. So I’ve been keeping an eye on the trends and products in that space, and will be focusing my blog more on these topics in the coming year. Have a safe and Happy New Year!
Info-Tech is ranked as the Leading Research Firm in the IT & Telecom Research, Reports and Services Market. They recently evaluated six competitors in the disk-based backup market, including Data Domain, Dell, FalconStor, HP, Quantum and ExaGrid.
ExaGrid once again was rated as a “Champion” in the “Leading Vendor” category in their latest version of this report, “Vendor Landscape: Disk Backup”. According to the report, Champions are vendors that “… offer excellent value. They have a strong market presence and are usually the trend setters for the industry. “
According to the report, “ExaGrid is a champion in disk backup due to the combination of its architecture and business strategy. The youngest company in the landscape, ExaGrid has differentiated itself with a unique product offering that brings a scalable storage node clustering (or grid) approach to the backup tier.” Info-Tech also noted that, “ExaGrid has differentiated itself through easy non-disruptive scalability and cost-effective options.”
Click here to download a copy of the full Info-Tech Vendor Landscape.
Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving holiday, with friends and family and great food (hopefully).
I’ve noticed in the past several years that there is more and more talk of Cyber Monday dominating the sales volume rest of the year. Why is that? What role does Marketing play in this fundamental shift in retail and Internet sales, alike?
I have to admit that I’m of two minds about this development. On the one hand, it’s a brilliant achievement of Marketing to have this wide-ranging effect on how and when people will whip out their card. On the other hand, it’s spammy and can be misleading; sometimes the deals aren’t all that great; its just that they are yelled very loudly. Sure, it’s EFFECTIVE marketing, but is it good for the long-term growth and health of the company to have such sales concentration?
I think Marketing organizations should lead the way towards setting internal sales results on a longer-term sales horizon than “right now” and “today”. To the extent possible with seasonal demand variations, smoothing out the bumps and giving a steady flow of sales revenue throughout the year is a worthy goal for any Marketing organization.
I know, I know… I sound like a broken record..but GM deserves a lot of credit for their GM Outreach programs. I attended one of these events, held throughout the country to give the buying public a chance to speak with GM engineers and staff about the products. I had the privilege of meeting Mike Kunis (shown above), one of the engineers who worked on the Chevrolet Sonic subcompact.
Of course these events also mean that GM gets unfiltered feedback immediately on its products, so it’s really a win-win. Here’s a brochure that gives you a good idea what these are all about. This particular collateral was for an event in Naperville, IL.
So how does a huge company like GM pull off one successful event after another all over the country, time and time again? They hired the professionals at the Integrated Events group for the Morley Companies.
The event I attended this past Saturday, October 8th was held at Herb Connolly Chevrolet in Framingham, MA. I even got to meet and have lunch with Chris Connolly, one of the owners of this store whose family has been in the car business for 96 years.
This was a top-shelf event from the start. I received a nicely-formatted HTML email Invitation from GM Outreach Program Headquarters. One really unexpected aspect of this event – executed to the same high level as the event itself - was the catering by an excellent local BBQ joint – yes, there really IS such a thing as a free lunch!
There’s a really useful blog for marketers at http://www.marketo.com/. Personally, I found a recent blog post by Shonal Narayan to be very much in line with my own thoughts on trade shows, and how to make the best of them.
Shonal’s Top 7 list of things to avoid includes:
Going in Blind – Plan, plan and plan some more is a great way to avoid unforeseen problems, or at least be equipped to handle them as they arise.
Under- or over-staffing – Staff levels are success-critical. Regular readers of this blog will recall that I made a similar point with regard to events in my last post.
Talking Too Long – If a very interesting conversation starts at the show, and you can’t seem to end it, gently pass the person off to a knowledgeable technical or sales staff member to move them away from the booth and into a one-on-one someplace comfortable. (You DID book a small room and bring enough staff to make this possible, right? )
Lose Important Feedback or Leads – Have a formal system to capture what you see and hear at the show, including existing customer feedback or success stories, competitive information gathered, and net-new leads.
Losing Earlybird Discounts – This should be an integral part of the planning process.
Have a “Me Too” Presence – Lack of creativity is one of the key reasons trade shows have a reputation for poor ROI among some stakeholders. Another “me too” booth that looks identical to your competition and half the show floor, giving away the same old SWAG as everyone else, will not get you what you need from the show. Make sure your presence stands out to get the best results.
Drop the Ball – This is perhaps the most common pitfall encountered by busy event staffers and planners. You work hard to plan, get the logistics right and have a good show with solid traffic. But some emergency comes up right after the show that makes you slow or forgetful in getting leads into the Sales process for followup, negating the whole reason you went in the first place, and gutting the value of the leads collected.
Read the entire article with Shonal’s take on these points here.
In Part 1 of this post, I looked at the grand scale and and quality of execution at this driving event thrown by the New GM.
To wrap up, I’ll examine some of the key Customer Experience elements of the event, and highlight a few of the takeaways for B2B marketing.
The Customer Lounge was a key element of maintaining the low-key tone of the event. Now, I know it’s just a tent with tables and chairs, some video game kiosks, energy bars and cold beverages. There was an “Ambassador” out front to wrangle guests and answer questions but otherwise left guests alone to relax. I think the standard practice at events would be to put sales messages in front of essentially captive guests taking a break from the heat and sunshine – but GM resisted, to their credit. It was just a place to lounge.
The hub of the event area was anchored by a Customer Information booth that was well staffed by happy faces ready to address questions. How many times have you gone to a big trade show, had a question and couldn’t find anyone to ask?
Another thoughtful touch was the benches sprinkled around the central hub area; sadly, most of them were unprotected from the rather intense sun. So, GM gets a small “miss”.
Well that’s all I have to say about this event. In terms of success from GM’s perspective, I am now seriously considering a Chevrolet of Buick for the first time in…well, ever. A great big “Win” overall..well done, GM!
- Keep guests comfortable, safe and engaged with lots to do
- Have adequate staff to handle the traffic.
- Put the product “front and center” – not the features, not messaging – in demo areas
- Have fun; it shows!
I attended a General Motors event yesterday, and was blown away by the scope and attention to detail of this event. I suppose the scope part is less surprising, given the size of the company. But the attention to detail was pretty obvious. My every step from the entrance to the parking lot to the exit was choreographed and guided by staff and signage. And there were plenty of staff on hand to answer questions – where to go, where to stand, what are the rules. There were also a healthy dose of product specialists to answer questions about the vehicles themselves.
The basic premise of the event is that GM cars are so good, you just have to drive them to be convinced. And with a nice touch of swagger, GM has thoughtfully (and artfully – I’ll talk about that later) provided competitive vehicles to drive and compare against GM vehicles.
Chevrolet, GMC and Buick were all on hand to provide a showroom of their current models, plus a driving experience unlike any other I have seen. The lineup of vehicles available included cars, trucks and SUVs from these GM divisions as well as select competitive vehicles. Now we come to the part where GM was very clever about exactly WHICH competitive vehicles to offer up for comparison to their own.
For example, the Hyundai Elantra was there to compare against the Cruze, but in a lower trim level than the Cruze it is competing with. Chevrolet was only showing their most fully-equipped LTZ trim. Also conspicuous by absence was the Hyundai Sonata, arguably the best new compact car value (and also just plain great, based on my personal experience!) available. GM was careful not to set up a situation where visitors wouldn’t conclude that the GM vehicles were outclassed by the competition.
And, somewhere between Detroit and Boston, a few competitive cars listed on the event website were curiously missing. The Volkswagen CC and Ford Mustang were nowhere to be seen, despite being listed on the Buick and Chevrolet websites as competitive against the Regal and Malibu, respectively. Coincidence? I think not. Perhaps Product Marketing isn’t truly ready for a winner-takes-all head-to-head comparison yet.
GM’s OnStar group didn’t miss an opportunity to cross-promote their offerings, either. They had a tractor-trailer rig with a full wrap branding on hand. Their walk-through tour of OnStar’s capabilities was very engaging and interesting, even though I had no interest beforehand of using their services or products.
Part 2 – A key element of keeping a high level of quality was the Guest Lounge
As you might discern from my last posting, improving the visitor experience particularly interesting to me, whether in the physical or online world.
I came across a very interesting article over at Tech Republic today called, “10 things that will annoy the hell out of your Website Visitors“. I’ll just recap the first several points made in the article here; take a look at the full article if you want to look into this subject any further.
Nonexistent instructions regarding case sensitivity – Tell the visitor explicitly if input must be case sensitive.
Having to guess at formatting of dates, phone numbers, or social security numbers - Be sensitive to input that is associated with special formatting, such as dashes in Social Security numbers or telephone numbers or dashes or slashes in dates.
Misleading “Contact Us” – When … looking for multiple ways to contact the organization … email is only one of those ways. If you have such a link…Take them to a page that shows physical address, phone number, and fax number.
Blanking out an entire data entry form due to one small error - [ This is a particular peeve of mine as well as the article's author] When an input error occurs, try to save as much of the other valid input as you can.
Well, there you have it! Enjoy….
OK… OK… I can hear the questions now…”What useful insights can theme parks POSSIBLY yield for technology marketers?“
Well, I have been noodling this very question over the past week or so while at Walt Disney World on vacation, which also included a day trip to Universal Studios Florida. I’ve come up with a few nuggets, based on my own experiences of how differently these two deadly combatants in the entertainment field market to their guests. It was instructive to think about how one could map this onto how we, as technology companies, market to our existing customers who visit our website.
The key difference to keep in mind (for our purposes, anyway) between the “apples” of technology and the “oranges” of entertainment is NOT the obvious one – the product/service – but rather the captive nature of the audience. There is no competition “one click away” – it’s a pain in the real world to get between the two parks. You’re not going to switch on a whim.
Ok – with that in mind, here are the key takeaways as I see them, and my impression of how these areas are covered by the two example companies:
Well, there you have it. No one said this blog was the Magna Carta… ENJOY!
Many companies are increasingly moving non-critical, and in some cases, business-critical, applications onto shared services like Amazon’s EC2 cloud. However, despite the rock-solid reputation that Amazon has built their business on, there have been so me recent outages that raise troubling questions regarding the stability and availability of the cloud. Bottom line is that some data, or at least access to that data, was lost.
Amazon’s recent troubles started on April 21 began on the EC2 availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region (N. Virginia). The status posting on Amazon’s AWS Service Health page states,
1:41 AM PDT We are currently investigating latency and error rates with EBS volumes and connectivity issues reaching EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 region.
This was just the first inkling of a major outage that would last until April 24th, when the status page reported
7:35 PM PDT As we posted last night, EBS is now operating normally for all APIs and recovered EBS volumes. The vast majority of affected volumes have now been recovered. We’re in the process of contacting a limited number of customers who have EBS volumes that have not yet recovered and will continue to work hard on restoring these remaining volumes.
As you might expect, the industry press noticed. Even the mainstream press found this rough patch troublesome.
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