Can a 10-Minute Read Transform Your Software Marketing?

Let's be real. Just reading our Software Marketing Checklist is no surefire route to consistently eclipsing goal. No more than just reading Dress for Success will give you a more put-together look.

This is designed as a transformational document however, and contains enough of our secret sauce we may not leave it up for long.

Classical Marketing for ENSW

Over 30 years in marketing--the last 20 in enterprise software--I have relied learned from seminal marketing authors and real-life gurus like my boss at the consultancy I worked with in the 1990s. His background was in product and brand management, and the company, used the tagline "Where the Marketing Makes the Advertising Work." Our work was focused on classical marketing planning for industrial companies and products rather than what we called "pretty pictures and funny headlines" offered by competitors.

The company had a proprietary marketing approach influenced by classical marketing and the approach and thinking of Al Ries and Jack Trout. My first boss out of college introduced me to their seminal work, Positioning, The Battle For Your Mind in 1988. Later, their books Marketing Warfare and The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing became central to my work.

Software Marketing Tactics

When I found myself thrust into a role focused on debriefing executive teams to plan these tactical approaches in complex industrial settings--and then executing against the plan, this was a valuable foundation. The more tactical approaches Ries and Trout advocate remained useful as I entered the enterprise software market years later.

Some of the metastrategies used in these settings work very well for the complex, multi-stage long sales cycles typical in enterprise software marketing.

But I found the need to go deeper and think on a more granular level so marketing efforts could flex to accommodate the diverse set of stakeholders, business pain points and competitive challenges. So, other approaches worked their way into the playbook--buying heuristics, bits of neural linguistic programming (NLP), rhetorical approaches used by trial lawyers--all can be useful.

Say what you will about NLP (I am not generally a fan), but the idea of crafting a message taking into account that some people will be predisposed to moving towards something they want or away from something they don't ought to be part of any goal-oriented communications planning effort.

Do lawyers use NLP? Yes. But much of the The Software Marketing Checklist may look familiar to trial lawyers whether they do or do not--because we all share the common denominator of needing to create effective rhetoric.

GET THE CHECKLIST

An attorney may make the case that his client was speeding, but not by that much. Or maybe they were traveling down a steep slope, or were clocked doing 58 within 20 feet of the stepdown from 55 mph to 45. Similarly, a software salesperson may overcome an objection about the subscription price being too high because it is only a one percent difference versus a competitor. On the other hand, if the price differential is an order of magnitude higher, the salesperson can say their product is in a different class, and the competing product is too limited to meet all of the prospect's needs.

This is the type of thinking the checklist is based on, at a high enough level it can be used to:

• Craft compelling, on-target content for use in the mid-funnel on down

• Help sales teams set traps for competitors

• Influence positioning of new products during launch

Why AI Writing Is Bad for Software Marketing

The thinking behind what software marketers put in front of prospects is important. If our checklist was not gated, AI bots could find it and borrow some of the points.

It could not apply them to a marketing effort though.

It will also not reliably generate content that will be informative and valued by senior decision makers, specifiers and influencers that take part in a complex sales cycles.

As we ramp up Rathmann Insights as a resource for enterprise software marketers, our goal is to help you efficiently and confidently explain the value your products and services you create in ways that:

• Get senior professionals to opt into communications to drive top-of-funnel

• Educate prospects about key value propositions for the product category and your specific offering

• Position a product in the mind against competitors

• Preframe prospects with arguments that overcome their objections before they even come up

• Move opportunities through to close

The Software Marketing Checklist is one tool a software marketing team can use to best their competitors who may invest less thought in what they say during go-to-market efforts, or may even outsource to Skynet what they should conceive of themselves (preferably with help from us).

Need help? Book time at this link--I look forward to spending time with you.

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