GracefulFlavor

OK, sit down. Have a coffee. You’ll like this.

If you’ve ever tried to make heads or tails of enterprise software marketing, you might be able to finish the rest of this article for me. If you haven’t, then you’re about to be subjected to a Byzantine, intentionally-complex world in which I firmly believe the goal is to obfuscate, confuse, and buzzword-ify as much as possible so that the consumers of such marketing – meaning, the actual customers – are forced to do a number things and endure an unnecessary game. I’ll explain more later.

Foremost, I’m no dummy. I’ve worked as a director of product management for a small but enterprise-focused company pretty much right out of college, and currently I serve as a senior product manager for quite a large one. Meaning, I have experience with this stuff, I live and breathe it every day, and it still confuses the hell out of me. And I’m not afraid to admit it.

I don’t think I’m alone. Not by a longshot. This is a call to reason and sanity for enterprise software marketing. I’m hoping somewhere in this diatribe I’ll make Seth Godin happy.

I’m going to pick a smattering of enterprise software vendors and provide a clip from their product marketing pages. You just need to get a taste of what I’m talking about here. Please don’t click away; this won’t last long. I promise.

<Product A> activates Business Service Management (BSM) by providing a shared set of enabling technologies that bring business relevance to your <Product A> and third-party IT solutions by providing a single, federated configuration management database (CMDB), business service model, and common views that provide business relevant views into IT management.

Thank god I have enabling instead of disabling technologies.

BTO focuses on areas such as project and portfolio management, quality management, service management, and application change management. By doing so, it ensures that IT investments always deliver positive business outcomes. In addition, BTO supports an integrated lifecycle approach for SOA governance, quality, and management.

What’s a “positive business outcome”? Is that when you go to the bar after a long day of ensuring value alignment with the infrastructure and realize after the fact that you skipped out on the bill?

<Product B> server management and IT infrastructure management products provide IT administrators with a comprehensive solution for managing business-critical servers and operations in their environment. Designed to simplify the entire server lifecycle, the suites and solutions provide deployment, management and monitoring functions from a centralized console—automating operations, improving system availability and reducing overall infrastructure costs.

What. The. Hell.

I did not make any of that up or alter it in any way whatsoever. What you see there is actual, customer-facing marketing that is attempting to explain the features, benefits, and value of each vendor’s software products. For real. This is what they are using as web-based sales collateral. This is what they want their customers to see. Each vendor thinks this OK. This is supposed to be enticing.

The weirdest part: nobody deviates. Every single vendor in the enterprise software space has pretty much the same buzzwords smattered throughout their marketing in various patterns. The confusion level is equally high for all vendors, and there seems to be a staunch refusal to resort to simple, understandable language so that the clutter is cut and real communication occurs. It’s like price-fixing, only with befuddlement.

This “marketing” is such a mess that I firmly believe that intelligent, reasonable, high-functioning human beings can’t make heads or tails of it most of the time. I also believe this is by design. Why would a company want to do such things to their customers when there are clearly simpler ways to communicate a piece of software’s value? For starters:

1. To fall in line with analysts, the captains of enterprise software guidance. Analysts coin-terms, identify trends, and wrap insane labels around common problems every day (Gartner, I’m looking at you), so their parlance becomes, via downward trickle, everyone else’s.
2. Because any given vendor’s competition is doing it, and if enterprise buyers are geared towards buzzword soup and you’re not playing the game, well then clearly you have no idea what you’re talking about, you can’t relate to real enterprise application problems, and the chances of you landing a POC (er, proof of concept) are right around zero, you tiny-brained animal food trough wiper*.
3. To make enterprise software problems appear horribly, hopelessly complex to the degree that customers need things like process re-engineering, business technology optimization, business service management, business process management, and IT—business alignment if they even want to sniff the idea of getting their problems solved. These are big problems, boy howdy, and big problems JUST DO NOT have small solution dealies. No sir. 
4. To sell professional services engagements. Look, if a customer who has problems with complex names turns to look at software with complex marketing so that his problems can be solved by software with complex value propositions, do you think for ONE SECOND he likes the idea of installing and configuring this stuff himself? Of actually using it in the real world to get real results? In many cases, no. Hire some professional services help so that someone who has half a clue gets you off the ground, and, as a bonus, you gain someone to blame if things get worse or don’t improve. Neato.

I can’t get my head around it. Invariably, when push comes to shove with customers, they don’t speak this bullshit to you. They talk to you in plain English, because where the rubber meets the road and real results must be had and real money is spent, there’s very little willingness to suffer mealy-mouthed suit-jive. Customers are paying vendors big dollars, and at the end of the day, they will be listened to. In real, plain English.

Maybe all of this stuff makes sense to everyone but me. Maybe you’re reading this and thinking, “This guy is a complete idiot! Any dummy knows the difference between ASM, ADM, BTO, BPR, BPA, BSM, BPM and APM! How can this Moe work in software product management?”

Or, maybe you’re like me and you are nodding while reading this, happy that someone finally is pointing out the bewildering nature of enterprise software marketing and is actually raising his hand and calling shenanigans.

Who knows? What I do know is that when I look at marketing from companies like 37signals, Apple, and WordPress, I’m amazed and left with a very positive impression (and understanding) of what they do and how they do it. And these companies deal with very complex technologies but still somehow manage to have simple, well-lit, understandable marketing.

Also what I know is that simple marketing works, it’s memorable, it’s appreciated. But above all, it’s tremendously hard to do. And don’t even get me started on how good marketing can lead to a shiny happy public image, because enterprise vendors seem totally oblivious to this. Or they don’t care.

Regardless, I wish enterprise software vendors would take notice. There’s upside** to be had here for a pioneering enterprise vendor to break the cycle and actually connect with customers via its marketing.

And look: I know that these technologies in a corporate datacenter need to be called something. I get that. I know it’s difficult to take complex ideas and make them simple, but babymosesinabucket, is this the best the industry can do? An industry full of smart, talented people who optimize and deliver proactive, business-facing value to line-of-business leaders responsible for the effective alignment of IT services and processes to the business charter?

Apparently so.

*Best. Movie. Ever.

**That’s very close to a buzzword. I know and apologize profusely. Part of me died when I wrote it.

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