Dropping Your Pants on the Second Date

I heard the expression "you sell like you buy" from my first ECM mentor back in the mid/late 1990s. Glad to see it still has relevance with the cool kids more than a decade later.

As I enter week #7 as Chief Marketing officer for Nuxeo (Open Source Enterprise Content Management), I am pleased to report tremendous progress on plan approvals, prioritization of marketing activities, even a budget that got all the right heads nodding on version 2. Yay team.

In the last 72 hours I made 4 important decisions on 2010 marketing spend.

2 were YES decisions
2 were NO decisions

Actually - that's not quite right. All 4 proposals were requested by me. Because I know what I want and need. The NOs were not meant to be "NO", more "can you go back to the drawing board".

The 2 yes decisions were made because the vendors listened to exactly what I had to say, wrote down what I asked for, repeated it back to me on the phone or in email, and when the contract was shipped over, I reviewed it, and yelled down the hallway for a PO number.

The 2 no decisions were for vendors who sent proposals that were ever so slightly off - but ultimately very salvageable. I asked them to go back and revise because in one case, the geographical focus was wrong. Right thing, right time, wrong place. In the other case the timing was wrong. Right thing, right place, wrong time.

But in both cases, when the first "No, but ..." came out of my mouth, the guy on the phone immediately dropped the price. As though a discount was going to change something important. I actually thought in both cases that the original price was entirely fair. What I wanted was a re-focus and alternative time-line, not a blue plate special.

Making the service cheaper doesn't make it more attractive. It makes it cheaper. And now I question whether it's worth anything at all.

#MeshMarketing

Disclaimer: I rant because I care

This week I attended quite possibly the meatiest, most useful marketing conference of my career. Massive and unequivocal kudos to the event organizers, presenters, sponsors and volunteers. I will tell everyone I know to go next year.

Every session was delivered by a kick ass, energetic expert with real street cred behind him/her. I walked out with pages of typed notes of things I can actually apply to my business – today. Chatted with some cool and utterly charming new acquaintances many of whom I've gotten to know via online social networks. Such fun to put real live faces and smiles to the twitter Ids.

But. As PeeWee Herman said, “there's always a big but”.

Leaving the venue after a Molson 67 (thanks guys for being great supporters) and moseyed towards the train station, I started getting a little annoyed. And then a bit more annoyed, and I could not figure out why my day of awesomeness had actually kind of pissed me off.

And then it hit me on the train. I didn't get one of my major needs met.

I went to the event with my newbie CMO hat on. Not as one of the wannabe cool kids, but as a willing prospect.

And I wanted to be marketed to.

And only 1 person actually did.

The session themes were all consistent – this is the era of word of mouth, word of click, permission-based marketing, using social networks to know your prospects, being clueful about who's around you. We all sat there in the same room, nodding in unison, tweeting the highlights together. We were all on the same page, weren't we?

Ugh. Painful to realize that no, we weren't.

In July I worked on a pretty cool project helping build out persona research for technology buyers and influencers. I even wrote a sales training storyboard with a CMO character who talked about pain points and priorities and what haunts at night. And wow, now I get to live that character.

So if you were an up and coming PR or creative agency, or a software company building cool shit to optimize web business, or had a new brilliant angle on web marketing, wouldn't you kill to talk to a CMO who is 30 days into a new gig, is doing a thorough review of the entire company go-to-market strategy and has tweeted about working on her 2010 marketing plans? Someone heads down figuring out how take the North American market by storm? Who's working with a team of brilliant developers and business managers focused on growth? Who wants to use digital marketing techniques because they want to be lean, mean and innovative? Someone who came out and spent a full day of her time specifically to find you?

By attending the conference I gave permission to be pitched. By attending the sessions I did I gave permission to hear how you can help me next year. If during the break I asked who your company was and who your audience is, I did because I'm planning a budget, not because you were cute. And in a few cases I did actually say “your company” because what was written on the badge was unpronounceable. Might wanna rethink that part.

I'm a walk the talk kind of person. That's why I loved Barry Quinn's quote during the agency panel discussion. Thanks guys @Mondoville for also finding it entertaining. And to the one person who gave me a card and offered to show me something I've never seen before, I'll ping you next week.

Do Labels Matter? Some Thoughts from a Shiny New Marketing Exec

Yesterday more industry buzz about some of the shifts and disruption in the ranks of the ECM/CMS world - including a couple of comments about my new role as CMO at Nuxeo.

First some good questions posed by Ron Miller, in an editorial for FierceContentManagement: "Does the Open Source Label Still Matter?"

...and then some thought-provoking comments from Tony Byrne in his Trendwatch blog for CMSWatch, "Software Empires Striking Back".

After thinking to myself, "Whoa, like, no pressure, eh?" and crawling out from under the covers, I sat down and really thought about what kind of shift is going on out there.

• Ron is right - the product is the product is the product. Peel back the layer of 'brand' and 'voice' and 'label' and ultimately the issue is that business people are choking on content overload and want things to get better. Good product has to find the audience who needs it. Good product should not have any hidden surprises or catches when someone wants to use it. Good product deserves to be used without the hoops and loops and nightmarish license negotiation and oh-so-predictable quarterly discounting charades that is pervasive across most segments of the enterprise software business. If you like what Nuxeo produces, you just go get it. Here, in fact: http://www.nuxeo.com/en/downloads . Tell them I sent you..because like Ron says, this is how I'll be judged ;-)
  

• Tony is right - Better story-telling doth not make for better software. But good software that doesn't have a good story is a tree falling in the forest. Nuxeo has invested in an ECM foundation that was built for this century - not the last one. Yeah, yeah, we scale big for lots of content and lots of users... but guess what? we scale really lean and small and skinny too. We've entered the world of mobile, social, decentralized enterprises. And their needs are new. This is the part that made me go "hmm" when I started learning about the Nuxeo offering. And beyond story-telling, I'm heads down figuring out the priorities for lead gen, analyst relations, product branding, launch checklists, learning a new WCM application and helping expand the North American team.
  

So do does the label "open source" matter? Well, yes, but not for the usual reasons. Ultimately feature for feature Nuxeo needs to compete on how good it is, not because it has open source as its development and licensing model. Companies in the information economy have specific ECM needs - we have to meet those requirements to do our job.

Where it *does* matter, however, is the inherent flexibility the open source model gives, because Nuxeo is committed to innovation. Our own core development is augmented by partners and customers - it is the living breathing example of the social marketplace in action. The barriers to customer engagement and evolving requirements disappear. Cost and time to market become an advantage as we keep up with the shift in how content is created and consumed across enterprise.

I really recommend you read some of our CEO's thoughts on why this business model works - here's Eric's blog: http://blogs.nuxeo.com/ebarroca/ or follow him on twitter @ebarroca.

A Comfort Zone is Just a Rut with Padding

Wished a friend good luck with her new job earlier this morning and that phrase just popped out of no-where. Now I've been thinking about it all day. She works for the government, and wants to be a writer. She should be: she's clever, insightful, and she wants to be read. So she puts effort into finding an audience. After a few years of mid level clerical jobs, she's finally found a position where she can use her analytical and research skills. We wondered (through our primary communication method - discussion forum private messages) why it took so long.

It's easy to recognize when one is in a rut - crabbiness, impatience, frustration, sensing something is wrong but not sure how to fix it. And then there's the comfort zone - it's the safe, warm place that's a little dull and routine but ultimately good enough.

So when does the comfort zone become the rut?

It's when the fluffy cozy bits start to wear thin and the stubbly edges of the previously unseen rut start to scratch and scuff. It's when a favourite project ends and there's nothing interesting ahead, or a colleague throws you under the bus, or a manager ignores your contribution. Figuring out that you've failed to progress because you've been protected or lied to about what's going on outside. It's when you realize that the form-fitted mattress was filled with air and not substance. It's when you are shocked to realize the cushy title and corner office was just a padded cell.

Update - lent my copy of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers to another friend last night. Handing it over, realized I had dog-eared a page. Looked at what I had flagged. It was the section on the Korean Airline pilots and how cultural norms needed to be recognized and addressed before behaviours could be changed in the interest of air safety.

Now I remember. I read that chapter nibbling on some lovely charcuterie and sipping a rosé, sitting by myself one night in Paris. Just like the chief engineer quoted in the anecdote, many of us get squeamish when it comes to calling out corporate culture as a root cause of fear and failure.

The attitudes, assumptions and ingrained behaviour adopted by the pilots had now become a contributing factor to serial disaster. Even though this very behaviour was expected by peers to fit in and get along in the workplace.

"We took them out of their culture and re-normed them".

Taking individuals out of the comfort zone of a world-view shaped by bullying...exposing them to new ideas and methodologies...breaking stereotypes and dispensing with de-humanizing hierarchy...building an environment where it is safe to speak truth to power.

The Next Adventure in ECM Begins...

The press release makes it official, I've joined Nuxeo – the Open Source ECM company as their first ever Chief Marketing Officer. I am absolutely thrilled to take this next step and explore a new angle on content management. Nuxeo is a small company but they are racking up some pretty impressive customer names, showing solid growth, and investing in some strategic hires over the coming months to expand their development, sales and marketing organization.

My path to Nuxeo was fun. Call it Recruiting 2.0 if you must, but it all happened through the online social marketplace of ideas. A few months ago, Nuxeo CEO Eric Barroca set out to find an ECM marketing professional who could help take them to the next level as a company and brand. Eric himself is an active blogger and twitter user, so he looked around the ECM community networks and well, he found me. He looked at the companies and individuals who were doing the things that he liked and took the effort to personally reach out and extend an invitation to chat.

Honestly, I had no plans to leave my last job. 10 years with an ECM powerhouse and I was pretty happy and busy. But the personal outreach by Eric compelled me to return the call, even after years of ignoring head hunters and recruiters. I called because HE reached out personally – a respected veteran of ECM in a very senior role in a small but growing company. I've been in this biz long enough to know that relationships matter. During our first meeting I mentioned this to him. Had a third party recruiter contacted me instead, I never would have returned the call. He said “I know”.

So why Nuxeo, why now? The Open Source angle fascinated me. Could something really be Free? And Good? And have a nice UI? Maybe I really have drunk the Kool-Aid on the concepts of transparency, openness, flatness, simplification. Over the last 18 months I've been living and breathing the world of Enterprise 2.0 and what it means to be 'Social' inside business and strive for collaboration with customers and partners. It just all makes more sense now.



I started to imagine a world where companies could just get on with it. Get ECM tools that meet their needs. Implement on their terms. Stop playing sales-cycle theatre. Ignore the middle men. No more shameful ROI spreadsheet gymnastics pleading for permission to do the right thing.

Nuxeo has created a gift to the community of people and companies who care about our digital legacy. It is a gift that they've offered freely and openly to companies who are ready to just get on with it. My job – the way I see it – is to be Chief Educator. Tell as many people as we can about possibilities, potential and new ways of working. Companies who survive the uncertainties of today's business environment will do so because they've been creative, they've innovated and they've paid attention to the bottom line.

Still have lots to learn, and weeks ahead will be busy. Check out the Nuxeo site, follow us on Twitter... more to come.