Reflections on the evolution of marketing in IT
Yes Yes. It is reflections. I will not list the items "39 things that will increase your sales by 235%." Instead of 39 and 235, you can substitute any other digit. Every sane person understands that limited to his limbs lists "how to's" or "hautusov", as I myself call them, will not help in a particular situation. On this occasion, there is a good statement by one scientist :
“It’s not so easy for a modern person, tempted by technical progress and crushed by the power of ubiquitous technologies, that practice is not a set of algorithms, operations and actions, but it’s necessary to include a deep understanding of what is happening and produced into the very essence ”.
So here. In my humble understanding, a deep understanding of phenomena and processes occurs when a person practically works in a certain field, gains certain experience, then talks about his experience, and other people already draw some conclusions for themselves. Therefore, I actually want to talk about my 10 years of experience in sales and marketing in IT. At once I will make a reservation that it is a question of the western market. We haven't had much to do with the Russian market yet.
')
It's simple: when in the late 90s people graduate from a linguistic university, a teacher of English and German, it’s clear that you don’t want to work as a teacher. And even the end of the magistracy does not contribute to this desire. It was possible to try to dump somewhere that many classmates were striving for, and what some did, but this option was not for me. To cut a long story short, my work in IT , started as a translator, gradually grew into sales and marketing.
The situation at that time was very favorable for people who speak English. The end of the 90s is the beginning of zero. In the western world, the topic of outsourcing is widely promoted. The sensible brains of developers from the post-Soviet space are very demanded. There was a handful of small and medium-sized companies that labored at project auctions, or simply found customers in some other way. Some of the overgrown ones who managed to get resources for themselves (what a terrible word for people) offered (and still offer) not custom software development services, but just brains. Naturally, these companies needed sales managers who could snatch a project at an auction, or successfully sell these same human resources. Immediately, I’ll make a reservation, in those years I had little idea what it was possible to do in IT not just custom projects and sell developers, but also make my own (!) Products. Do not let you customer, and want, decide and make your product. And even with this success. But I am running ahead. It has only become clear over the years that selling outsourcing or brains and marketing your product are two big differences, as one of the classics said.
Let's talk a little bit about outsourcing. What sales were reduced to:
1. Hang out at online project auctions. Promise to make the most at a minimum. This work is very similar to what she does in the eastern bazaar: she praises the goods with all her throat, she is not ashamed to lie and promise more than can be done. After all, the main thing is to snatch a project, and how then there, and how to deal with such a terrible thing as “shift requests” is the tenth thing. Somehow. Sometimes it was really settled when the client realized that he really began to want something a little different, and more effects were needed, and sometimes not. Again, at that time I didn’t understand why these clients didn’t know exactly what they needed from the very beginning, and why their requirements were changing. It sounds funny now when spaceships, etc. and when agile became mainstream.
2. Mailings. They are email marketing, they are also direct mailing. Take a database of some approximately suitable prospects and are flushed bulk. Mailings are still used by Hindu development farms. When I stumble upon this spam in my inbox, I am surprised every time: is there still someone who responds to such suggestions.
3. The notorious cold calling . So much praised in a variety of booksellers for sales. As far as I know, cold calling still could work normally in Europe. In the USA, people are so intimidated by vtyuhivaniem anything that is very difficult to reach a living person. I have never seen a sensible thing come out of a cold calling, although there are myths that someone supposedly picked someone up somewhere.
4. Online social networking. With the advent of networks like Linked In or XING, the opportunity to contact potential customers has become more focused. Fill out the profile with the necessary search words like “software development outsourcing”, and you will either find you, or you will have already contacted those people who are more or less approximately interested in development services. It must be said that this method is the most civilized - and the most successful of these three.
Of course, from projects and clients obtained in such ways, sometimes long-term happy relationships were obtained, which eventually could lead to new projects and new clients.
For me, the whole fatality of the situation was precisely this. Just imagine. You found a client, agreed with him about the project, established a relationship - and once, he must be given away. At least, at first, my work was arranged like this: brought a client ... and now give it to another, who will communicate with him in the course of development, unwind on new features. And you swarm on. And so it would have been like a human being, and not as a seller at a market, to work normally with a person. Subsequently, I happened to work in a mixed model, and extracting new customers, and working with old ones.
But it's not about that. Gradually, the understanding came that you cannot offer anything new and unique. Though how long you stand and praise your brides, and in India or let's say in Ukraine, and even sometimes in Russia, brides are cheaper. Cheat less. Or more promptly.
Or another moment. There is a project. The client is ripe. And the authorities tell you such a phrase that, they say, we do not have free resources, however. And you do not care about resources, because, I apologize, you are not paid a percentage of each resource that is not available.
In general, this whole outsourcing cart ran into one or another contradiction. Boredom and lack of interest appeared more and more like asphalt under a drying pool ... until one day Misha Dubakov invited me to TargetProcess .
Life in a grocery company seemed like a fairy tale. This job was not already called a sales manager, but an account manager. Everything was as it was dreamed of: the CAM person comes to you, he is interested in the product himself, you help him figure out whether the product will suit him or not. And most importantly - the product is always available, it has its own unique features, people themselves look at the site and decide for themselves whether they are interested or not. There is no need to push anything, hallelujah, conscience rehabilitated.
For those interested in the technical component, I will say that a constant influx of leads is provided by SEO and all sorts of referral sources. In the outsourcing industry, leads from the site are rare.
In general, there is a moral side of the issue. Who will you like humanely more: an oligarch who has poured oil under him, or a person who has thought up CAM and did something useful for other people? Here you go. After all, oil is oil, and so it will be bought, where do without it. But it is much more interesting to get acquainted with the craftsman, to find out how and why he decided to do something. Everyone is obsessed with post mortem books about Steve Jobs. Well, it was necessary to be able to create a whole stratum of civilization out of its products, one cannot but give it its due.
This is the evolution of marketing. And any, not necessarily even in IT. There is such a stage when the product is just needed and does not need advertising. There are resources such as oil, gas and non-ferrous metals that are not particularly marketable. And there are also human resources that can be boring and uninteresting to sell. I rummaged in my memory here, and I don’t remember something that some kind of soft dev outsourcing company carried a unique story or message to the world. Sorry for the bluntness, but the farm they are a farm. Romantic halo around them, no matter how hard you try, well, does not appear.
Ultimately, any product ends up seeking to associate itself with something that goes beyond purely utilitarian tasks. Swiss watch manufacturers sponsor tennis tournaments. Recall washing powders, razors, anti-perspirants, etc.
So with IT products. People are tired of obsessive suggestions. Their rational perception channel is overloaded. They are tired of making decisions with their brains alone. After all, man also has a heart and a soul. A fairy tale, in the end, is needed, at least some kind, and not a horror film.
An example that has already become a textbook: 37 signals, which seem to have understood the theme of fairy tales before everyone else. Scandalous chronicle here is not particularly attracted. Here is another. The story of the work of ordinary geeks, how they live their lives, what and how they do in their daily work. Millions of similarly simple geeks unwittingly align with a team of 37 signals and become their fans. Not that there is a clear connection with the figures in sales reports, but in some mysterious ways this mass of fans creates hype and numbers.
37 signals is the company that made itself exclusively on storytelling. In terms of properties, their products are far from the best of similar other products. But nonetheless.
It's not even the point that, they say, you need to write blogs, you have to write all sorts of ways to's like “how we did this and that”. The most important thing is that when you do your favorite thing, sooner or later there is a desire to talk about it. By and large, you write for yourself and not for others. So that in my head it is better to put everything in its place, make some kind of retrospective and move on. It is already a personal affair of these same others to benefit from your stories, to get aesthetic pleasure, to think “and they are great,” “it's exactly like ours,” “I also want it so much,” etc.
Here we are on the sly and tell us about yourself. In blogs on your website , on Twitter, on Facebook. On Habr here a little bit too.
“It’s not so easy for a modern person, tempted by technical progress and crushed by the power of ubiquitous technologies, that practice is not a set of algorithms, operations and actions, but it’s necessary to include a deep understanding of what is happening and produced into the very essence ”.
So here. In my humble understanding, a deep understanding of phenomena and processes occurs when a person practically works in a certain field, gains certain experience, then talks about his experience, and other people already draw some conclusions for themselves. Therefore, I actually want to talk about my 10 years of experience in sales and marketing in IT. At once I will make a reservation that it is a question of the western market. We haven't had much to do with the Russian market yet.
')
It's simple: when in the late 90s people graduate from a linguistic university, a teacher of English and German, it’s clear that you don’t want to work as a teacher. And even the end of the magistracy does not contribute to this desire. It was possible to try to dump somewhere that many classmates were striving for, and what some did, but this option was not for me. To cut a long story short, my work in IT , started as a translator, gradually grew into sales and marketing.
The situation at that time was very favorable for people who speak English. The end of the 90s is the beginning of zero. In the western world, the topic of outsourcing is widely promoted. The sensible brains of developers from the post-Soviet space are very demanded. There was a handful of small and medium-sized companies that labored at project auctions, or simply found customers in some other way. Some of the overgrown ones who managed to get resources for themselves (what a terrible word for people) offered (and still offer) not custom software development services, but just brains. Naturally, these companies needed sales managers who could snatch a project at an auction, or successfully sell these same human resources. Immediately, I’ll make a reservation, in those years I had little idea what it was possible to do in IT not just custom projects and sell developers, but also make my own (!) Products. Do not let you customer, and want, decide and make your product. And even with this success. But I am running ahead. It has only become clear over the years that selling outsourcing or brains and marketing your product are two big differences, as one of the classics said.
Let's talk a little bit about outsourcing. What sales were reduced to:
1. Hang out at online project auctions. Promise to make the most at a minimum. This work is very similar to what she does in the eastern bazaar: she praises the goods with all her throat, she is not ashamed to lie and promise more than can be done. After all, the main thing is to snatch a project, and how then there, and how to deal with such a terrible thing as “shift requests” is the tenth thing. Somehow. Sometimes it was really settled when the client realized that he really began to want something a little different, and more effects were needed, and sometimes not. Again, at that time I didn’t understand why these clients didn’t know exactly what they needed from the very beginning, and why their requirements were changing. It sounds funny now when spaceships, etc. and when agile became mainstream.
2. Mailings. They are email marketing, they are also direct mailing. Take a database of some approximately suitable prospects and are flushed bulk. Mailings are still used by Hindu development farms. When I stumble upon this spam in my inbox, I am surprised every time: is there still someone who responds to such suggestions.
3. The notorious cold calling . So much praised in a variety of booksellers for sales. As far as I know, cold calling still could work normally in Europe. In the USA, people are so intimidated by vtyuhivaniem anything that is very difficult to reach a living person. I have never seen a sensible thing come out of a cold calling, although there are myths that someone supposedly picked someone up somewhere.
4. Online social networking. With the advent of networks like Linked In or XING, the opportunity to contact potential customers has become more focused. Fill out the profile with the necessary search words like “software development outsourcing”, and you will either find you, or you will have already contacted those people who are more or less approximately interested in development services. It must be said that this method is the most civilized - and the most successful of these three.
Of course, from projects and clients obtained in such ways, sometimes long-term happy relationships were obtained, which eventually could lead to new projects and new clients.
For me, the whole fatality of the situation was precisely this. Just imagine. You found a client, agreed with him about the project, established a relationship - and once, he must be given away. At least, at first, my work was arranged like this: brought a client ... and now give it to another, who will communicate with him in the course of development, unwind on new features. And you swarm on. And so it would have been like a human being, and not as a seller at a market, to work normally with a person. Subsequently, I happened to work in a mixed model, and extracting new customers, and working with old ones.
But it's not about that. Gradually, the understanding came that you cannot offer anything new and unique. Though how long you stand and praise your brides, and in India or let's say in Ukraine, and even sometimes in Russia, brides are cheaper. Cheat less. Or more promptly.
Or another moment. There is a project. The client is ripe. And the authorities tell you such a phrase that, they say, we do not have free resources, however. And you do not care about resources, because, I apologize, you are not paid a percentage of each resource that is not available.
In general, this whole outsourcing cart ran into one or another contradiction. Boredom and lack of interest appeared more and more like asphalt under a drying pool ... until one day Misha Dubakov invited me to TargetProcess .
Life in a grocery company seemed like a fairy tale. This job was not already called a sales manager, but an account manager. Everything was as it was dreamed of: the CAM person comes to you, he is interested in the product himself, you help him figure out whether the product will suit him or not. And most importantly - the product is always available, it has its own unique features, people themselves look at the site and decide for themselves whether they are interested or not. There is no need to push anything, hallelujah, conscience rehabilitated.
For those interested in the technical component, I will say that a constant influx of leads is provided by SEO and all sorts of referral sources. In the outsourcing industry, leads from the site are rare.
In general, there is a moral side of the issue. Who will you like humanely more: an oligarch who has poured oil under him, or a person who has thought up CAM and did something useful for other people? Here you go. After all, oil is oil, and so it will be bought, where do without it. But it is much more interesting to get acquainted with the craftsman, to find out how and why he decided to do something. Everyone is obsessed with post mortem books about Steve Jobs. Well, it was necessary to be able to create a whole stratum of civilization out of its products, one cannot but give it its due.
This is the evolution of marketing. And any, not necessarily even in IT. There is such a stage when the product is just needed and does not need advertising. There are resources such as oil, gas and non-ferrous metals that are not particularly marketable. And there are also human resources that can be boring and uninteresting to sell. I rummaged in my memory here, and I don’t remember something that some kind of soft dev outsourcing company carried a unique story or message to the world. Sorry for the bluntness, but the farm they are a farm. Romantic halo around them, no matter how hard you try, well, does not appear.
Ultimately, any product ends up seeking to associate itself with something that goes beyond purely utilitarian tasks. Swiss watch manufacturers sponsor tennis tournaments. Recall washing powders, razors, anti-perspirants, etc.
So with IT products. People are tired of obsessive suggestions. Their rational perception channel is overloaded. They are tired of making decisions with their brains alone. After all, man also has a heart and a soul. A fairy tale, in the end, is needed, at least some kind, and not a horror film.
An example that has already become a textbook: 37 signals, which seem to have understood the theme of fairy tales before everyone else. Scandalous chronicle here is not particularly attracted. Here is another. The story of the work of ordinary geeks, how they live their lives, what and how they do in their daily work. Millions of similarly simple geeks unwittingly align with a team of 37 signals and become their fans. Not that there is a clear connection with the figures in sales reports, but in some mysterious ways this mass of fans creates hype and numbers.
37 signals is the company that made itself exclusively on storytelling. In terms of properties, their products are far from the best of similar other products. But nonetheless.
It's not even the point that, they say, you need to write blogs, you have to write all sorts of ways to's like “how we did this and that”. The most important thing is that when you do your favorite thing, sooner or later there is a desire to talk about it. By and large, you write for yourself and not for others. So that in my head it is better to put everything in its place, make some kind of retrospective and move on. It is already a personal affair of these same others to benefit from your stories, to get aesthetic pleasure, to think “and they are great,” “it's exactly like ours,” “I also want it so much,” etc.
Here we are on the sly and tell us about yourself. In blogs on your website , on Twitter, on Facebook. On Habr here a little bit too.
PS The bulk of our clients and prospects English-speaking. Therefore, most of our notes are in English. It is even embarrassing to somehow tell Russian clients that it is more convenient to communicate in English. Here they are the consequences of existence in English-speaking space. Although outside the city of Minsk.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/146111/
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