Our guest in this episode of the DevReady Podcast is Ann Pocock, Marketing Strategy Consultant, Marketing Coach and Executive Coach for high-growth businesses at Kinetic Effect. She joins our hosts Andrew Romeo and Anthony Sapountzis as the episode explores how purpose-built and tailor-made coaching and marketing consulting could help unleash the potential in not just an individual but also his/her organisation. The key is to focus on one’s strengths and align the mission with the core values.
Ann says that she has seen it all—having had a broad background and having helped clients from even broader backgrounds—from one client to a couple of hundreds as clients—there has been quite a range in her work. She started in the tech industry and many of her current clients are from the same industry—from cyber security to AIArtificial Intelligence (AI) is a very large and broad spectrum of technologies which most people would be familiar with through... software to IT businesses, among others. Ann emphasizes that the tech industry is ever-evolving and having a beginner’s mind helps not just with that but with every new client because every organization has a different way of articulating the value proposition. Her work in the tech industry has taught her the following:
· Need to always be curious
· Need to be abreast to change in a fast-moving industry
· Need to be comfortable with the unknown and ask questions
· Need to build confidence
· Need to put structures in place to help businesses grow
When marketing tech products and services, simplifying the message is the key. And collaboration comes in handy, says Ann. Her goal is to build a sense of comfort between customer-facing and tech functions. She furthers that putting people in the business into a room to ideate and create the value proposition around your product or your service can be powerful because it brings just an instant sense of alignment and collegiality. Engaging customers in these conversations is equally important, even non-customers because they let you know why they did not pick your product and services and preferred those offered by the competitors.
Brand positioning and value proposition are critical to any business. Having a clear message helps you across all touchpoints, right from the very first version of your website to your proposal deck to the phone calls that you have to make, the pitch deck that you might want to do on a sales call, how you work the room in a networking event, the list goes on and on. The emphasis here is to say the right things to the right people in the right place and at the right time.
Ann says that marketing often is an afterthought for people and by the time people come to realize the importance of marketing it becomes too little, too late. Her advice is to have a marketing strategist or a coach guide the process from the very beginning. Such a coach needs to meet the business owner
where they are and make them know that the process of marketing is not arduous and is rather gratifying.
Topics Covered
- Lessons to learn from a fast-moving tech industry
- Simply the message when marketing tech products
- Engage the customers
- Say the right thing to the right people in the right place at the right time
- Marketing first, the brand first
- The process of marketing
- Review of the customer journey
Key Quotes (Time Stamps)
“Many of my clients are in tech space now—from cyber security to AIArtificial Intelligence (AI) is a very large and broad spectrum of technologies which most people would be familiar with through... software to IT businesses and so on.” (3:09 – 3:17)
· “I always go with a beginner’s mind around it as well because every organization has a different way of articulating their value proposition; the tech is moving at a fast pace so what I might have learned and marketed, you know, a couple or a few years ago, has changed and evolved know. So, each client has a different way of articulating their product’ or their services’ benefits and features.” (6:26 – 6:50)
· “A simple way is: rather than, you know, getting a written summary of product features and benefits and marketing just going away and hoping for the best is bringing the heads into a room and kind-of ideating through how we can turn that more feature-rich language into something that’s benefits and values-oriented so that it lands more with the customers.” (8:01 – 8:30)
· “Putting the relevant faces or people in your business into a room to ideate and create the value proposition around your product or your service can be really powerful because it brings just an instant sense of alignment and collegiality around that rather than these separate functions that do separate things and there be a disconnect as a result of that.” (8:55 – 9:24)
· “Challenging your assumptions is so useful…so useful. I think you can kind of really get your blinkers on and be aligned to that endpoint that you’ve set your objective on and then go, ‘hang on, we’re 6, 12, 18 months down the track and we haven’t spoken to a customer about what we’ve changed and pivoted on in that time.’ And in all likelihood, you miss missing out on what you don’t know.” (11:21 – 11:47)
· “A lot of people think of marketing as being an afterthought because it’s traditionally seen as something more tangible, you know, like a paid ad or a LinkedIn ad or a billboard or something that you can see but it is the stuff—the intangible that you can’t see and that’s going to help you with your product development stage.” (17:39 – 18:02)
· “My role is just to simplify some of the bullshit of marketing for the smaller businesses to do; like it doesn’t need to be… well, it isn’t rocket science in many instances. Sometimes the business might be in that field. That’s what I believe in—making it fit-for-purpose for where they are at.” (21:10 – 21:32)
Social Media Clips (Time Stamps)
· Learnings from an ever-evolving world of tech (4:13 – 5:25)
· How to simplify the message when marketing (6:51 – 10:05)
· Importance of engaging the customers (10:07 – 11:47)
· Relevance of messaging and marketing (14:13 – 17:11)
· How to start thinking about ‘marketing first, the brand first’ (18:53 – 22:06)
· Process of marketing (23:20 – 26:35)
Useful Links
Connect with Andrew Romeo
Connect with Anthony Sapountzis
