Familiarity with a technology is nice, but sometimes a fresh perspective and a willingness to dig deep is just what you need.
“No matter how well you know your product, using words to articulate its value is not always an easy task,” says Oudi Antebi, vice-president of Marketing and Strategy with Toronto-based Panorama Software Ltd.
With branches around the globe, including the United States, Israel, Paris and London, Panorama is a leading provider of business intelligence (BI) software — highly sophisticated technology for gathering, providing access to, and analyzing the kind of data that helps global organizations make better business decisions.
And while Antebi’s dilemma may seem counterintuitive, it’s actually a common one for marketers attempting to position a complex product with a long sales cycle. This is especially true when both sales staff and prospects are looking for strategic, actionable information to cut through the technical alphabet soup the R&D department always cites. It’s a challenge that can only be solved by a unique combination of critical analysis and strategically crafted marketing collateral.
Prior to joining Panorama, Antebi was responsible for marketing Microsoft’s business intelligence applications, overseeing the planning, strategy and launch of the software giant’s first BI solution: Business Scorecard Manager 2005. To introduce this new product — and concept — to enterprise customers unfamiliar with its potential, Antebi needed mountains of customer-facing material and sales readiness material, from introductory web pages to case studies to whitepapers. On a tip from a colleague, he contacted Tribal Communications.
While Tribal partner and creative lead Pete Kloppenburg freely admits his team didn’t have any background in BI technology, he says they had worked with other equally multifaceted technologies, making this new area a logical extension. Additionally, Kloppenburg says, they’d never been ones to shy away from a challenge, especially if it meant a chance to work with both Microsoft and the hard driving Antebi.
“When we first engaged Tribal I told them I wouldn’t fund their learning curve,” says Antebi. “But they said, ‘Don’t worry about it — we’ll do our homework.’ And indeed they did,” he says. “They ramped up in a few weeks by reading analyst reports, reviews, product information, data sheets, interviewing staff — you name it.” Starting almost from scratch, Antebi says Tribal ultimately delivered messaging and positioning for the product by learning about the BI space, the software itself, analyzing the market and, perhaps most importantly, bringing an outside perspective that was crucial in defining Scorecard’s value proposition. “They absolutely became very knowledgeable in the space of business intelligence,” he says.
Antebi later moved to Panorama Software, which was in the process of developing new sales methodologies to support changes to its position in the market. Almost immediately, it was apparent he needed a communication team that could quickly grasp the company’s positioning and needs, and produce highly polished material. So he called Tribal. By now enterprises had grown more familiar with the idea of BI, so what Panorama needed was a more concise articulation of its value proposition, and a variety of sales materials to support and convey this value to targeted decision-makers.
“When I come to Tribal, I typically have a concept in mind and I share it with them on a conference call,” Antebi says. “They absorb, learn, read, and come back to me in a matter of days, and we do a brainstorm to align our ideas. Once we agree, they start writing, with occasional review sessions to make sure they’re conceptually on track, and my original thoughts are incorporated throughout the process.”
One of the first deliverables Antebi commissioned was a “Why Panorama?” whitepaper. “What I really appreciate is Tribal’s ability to take a defined value proposition and translate it into a longer document, where that value proposition guides its creation,” Antebi says. “While that might sound trivial, I’ve had other vendors write whitepapers just focusing on the technology. But because Tribal comes from a more strategic place, they understand that customers need to hear exactly how the product can help them.”
Around the same time, Panorama was engaged in a complex internal process to define the long-terms goals that would drive product research and development, eventually emerging with a handful of general concepts. To transform these ideas into a new vision document, vision paragraph, and vision statement, Antebi again turned to Tribal. The result was Panorama’s “Vision for the Future,” a text the company still uses today in all of its slides and marketing collateral.
“Here again, Tribal’s ability to understand our business, brainstorm, and flesh out ideas, made it possible to start with a few words thrown on a whiteboard and finish with a positioning statement that’s easy for us to articulate and easy for our customers to understand,” Antebi says. “It’s one of the best documents they’ve ever done for us.”
Most recently, Tribal has helped Panorama reach its favoured contact at any prospective customer: VITO. That’s VITO, as in the “very important top officer” — the one individual in any company who ultimately gives the thumbs up to a major sale. “When we decided to follow this sales methodology, I read the (Selling to VITO and Getting to VITO) books by Anthony Parinello, and the first thing that came to mind was, ‘Tribal can do this,’” says Antebi.
In just a few days, Tribal was up to speed and producing “VITO packages” that were fully aligned with the new strategy, including letters, voicemail scripts and user-centered sales sheets outlining Panorama’s solutions to specific business pains. “It was great to see how Tribal could be flexible, and was eager to learn new concepts,” says Antebi. “Again, it was a great set of deliverables.”
In fact, Antebi says this flexibility and responsiveness has been crucial to a successful collaboration with Tribal that now stretches across two companies and numerous projects. “Unlike big companies where you definitely get the sense of handing work off to a third party, here it really feels like extending your team with new marketing specialists,” he says. “We will absolutely keep using Tribal for our most strategic and important marketing projects.”
