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Alliances and Partnerships: Getting By With a Little Strategic Help From Your Friends

By John San Filippo, jmsb@johnsanfilippo.com

www.johnsanfilippo.com

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When I was at Symitar, I was constantly approached by vendors who all asked me the same question: How do I become a Symitar business partner?

It seems to be the common thinking among fintech vendors that if they can just team up with a big core processor, the gates of heaven will open up and … well, I don’t really know where I’m going with this metaphor, but you get the picture. They think great things will happen.

The Path to Success

And sometimes they do. SMA Solutions (full disclosure statement: a customer of mine) is a Symitar business partner for both its OpCon and Ascern products and from what I’ve seen, the partnership has been very fruitful for both parties. But for as many core partnerships that I’ve seen blow it up, I’ve seen at least as many completely fizzle.

What makes the difference between success and failure?

I can use SMA Solutions as an example. I think there are two things that make SMA’s OpCon a high performer as a business partner product:

1. It’s a product that actually makes Symitar’s Episys platform better. Obviously you can run Episys without OpCon, but those who use OpCon can’t imagine life without it.
2. OpCon is truly a best-of-breed solution. There are a lot of job schedulers out there, but none that I’ve seen can touch OpCon in terms of total cross-platform IT automation.

It’s important to keep in mind, too, that when you’re the subordinate partner in such a relationship, you’re always going to give up something – and I’m not just talking about revenue. I’ve seen partnership deals structured where the core vendor takes exclusive responsibility for sales. The problem is, that core vendor’s sales team may be pimping a hundred or more different products and unless yours is a big moneymaker, it may not get the love you think it deserves.

Consider the Alternatives

Fortunately, Symitar had another option: its Vendor Integration Program (VIP). IMHO, VIP is nothing short of brilliant. All core vendors offer some sort of program for third-party product integration. However, with the exception of VIP, they are all very exclusionary. Specifically, they wouldn’t dream of allowing in a vendor whose product competes with one of the core provider’s products.

Not so with Symitar’s VIP. They’ll let any vendor in that has a client sponsorship – even if that vendor competes directly with one of Symitar’s ancillary products. Symitar recognizes that clients are going to buy what they’re going to buy, no matter what. VIP creates a win for everyone involved and also puts a little extra coin in Symitar’s pocket. The vendor gets a certified integration and they’re name associated with Symitar – plus they keep control of the sales process and don’t have to share any revenue.

What About Peer-to-Peer?

As I mentioned earlier, third-party vendors are always anxious to partner with a core processor. What’s always baffled me is why more third-party vendors don’t partner with each other in some sort of a peer agreement.

Think about it. One reason a core partnership is valuable is because it assures the financial institution that what they’re buying works with what they already have. For example, if a vendor is partnered with Fiserv, the Fiserv bank or credit union knows the product will work with their core platform.

So why wouldn’t this same logic apply to two third-party products. The ABC Widget Company teams up with the XYZ Dongle Company so that their widgets and dongles integrate well. Then when ABC’s customers go shopping for dongles, they know the smart money is on XYZ, and vice versa. Seems simple enough.

If you got three or four related vendors teamed up, you could really create a juggernaut. At least that’s the way I see it.

It’s Still a People Business

The right business relationship can give your company a real strategic advantage. Maybe that’s the reason that strategic alliance is one term for such relationships. Unfortunately, most companies I’ve encountered manage these relationships with a very tactical hand.

Maybe strategic alliances are handled by the VP of sales. Maybe they’re not handled by anyone in particular at all. How can you expect to create strategic alliances if you don’t approach them strategically? If you’re going to take this seriously and really leverage your business relationships to their maximum potential, you need a specialist – part artist, part technician and part BSer – somebody who knows how these relationships work and more important, knows how to make them work.

Somebody might punch me in the head if I use the term “paradigm shift,” but let’s just say the right relationship can change everything. Devote the resources to strategic alliances accordingly.

That is all.

Countdown to GAC: My 15 Years of Hits and Misses

By John San Filippo, jmsb@johnsanfilippo.com
www.johnsanfilippo.com
Subscribe: www.tinyurl.com/jmsbblog

In less than three weeks, the 2015 installment of the CUNA Governmental Affairs Conference will take over the Washington, DC, convention center and all surrounding hotels (not to mention Shelly’s Backroom). For vendors, it’ll be a two-and-a-half-day, non-stop schmoozefest. Give or take, this will be my 15^th GAC (pronounced G-A-C, not gack).

For anyone who sells into the credit union space and hasn’t heard of GAC, I first have to ask you, WTH? Then I will tell you that GAC is the granddaddy of all US credit union conferences – although I say that with one caveat this year. In Denver this July, CUNA is combining America’s Credit Union Conference (their other big conference of the year) with the World Council of Credit Unions (WOCCU) annual meeting. Especially if you have something to sell to an international market, this could turn out to be a pretty big deal.

Anyhow, back to GAC.

If you’ve never exhibited at GAC, you’re probably wondering why you’d want to blow five or 10 grand or more to show your cool technology at a governmental affairs conference. The answer is simple: All of the C-level people that you’ve been itching to meet will be there. Sure, there will be plenty of board members and their spouses trolling for pens and squeeze balls, but there will also be enough CEOs, COOs, CIOs and C-whatever-Os to go around. Trust me on this.

Over the years, I’ve talked a number of GAC newbies into exhibiting at this show. How many do you think have regretted the decision? None of them, of course. (Or I wouldn’t have asked, right?) It doesn’t matter what you’re selling. If you’re selling it to credit unions, you should be at GAC.

In fact, to be perfectly honest, you don’t necessarily have to exhibit – or even pay for a badge. I know a number of companies that show up in DC with meetings and dinners already scheduled with GAC attendees. Even for them, it’s a great show.

Many years ago, when GAC was still at the Washington Hilton and the exhibit hall was thus in the basement, I had a brilliant idea (believe it or not). This is when I worked for Symitar the second time. I’d just gotten a great deal on this very classy looking wooden booth and we’d decided to use “tools” as a theme for the graphics, as in, Symitar gives you the tools you need to be successful.

I had already decided I wanted to do something different for our booth drawing. I don’t remember what the 2001 equivalent of a Kindle or iPad was, but whatever it was, I was tired of seeing it given away in booth drawings. So in keeping with our booth theme, I held a drawing for a set of Black & Decker cordless power tools. I actually had them on display in the booth to get people excited.

And, man, did they get excited. In fact, our booth was a nuthouse for three days straight. It was awesome.

On the other hand, my biggest GAC flop happened my third time back at Symitar. I regrettably decided to get cute and clever, and created a cartoon character named Symon. The idea was, you could come by the Symitar booth, pick up a picture of Symon, email me a digital pic of Symon somewhere in DC, and the best pic would win something cool – although I honestly don’t remember what. Maybe a Kindle or an iPad.

This stunt was doomed from the git-go. First, nobody knew how to pronounce Symon's name. My intention was that his name would be pronounced just like Simon. However, since he was Symitar’s mascot, many people felt compelled to pronounce his name Simmon. Ugh.

Fortunately, we were able to announce a first-place winner. What I never told anyone publicly is that the same person came in last place. In case you’re really dense, what I’m trying to say here is that only one person took part in this fiasco. My bad.

So here are the three lessons I hope you learned from indulging me today:

1. You should be at GAC. Even if you don’t have the budget to exhibit, show up and hang out. You’ll be glad you did. Find me at Shelly’s and I might even buy you a cigar.
2. If you’re going to have a booth drawing, make it for something unusual. A couple of years after the power tools, I gave away a remote-control Corvette at the Bluepoint Solutions booth with similar results – even though our booth was in a tent outside at the Hilton and snow was beginning to melt into the back of the booth. (No joke.)
3. People are busy. They come to DC with schedules already packed solid. If you expect them to do anything more than throw their card into a fishbowl – like taking pics of your stupid cartoon character – you’ll probably be disappointed.

That is all.

The Mind-Numbing Tedium of Product Names, Taglines and Conference Themes

By John San Filippo, jmsb@johnsanfilippo.com
www.johnsanfilippo.com
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I’ve been blessed with the ability to write high-quality case studies, brochures, white papers and other lengthy marketing documents with relative ease. No, I can’t churn them out as quickly as Kim Kardashian can churn out selfies or Kanye Kardashian can churn out stupid comments, but I am reasonably proficient.

Which projects give me the most fits? Oddly enough, it’s the ones that involve the fewest words. I’m talking about things like product names, taglines and conference themes. If you’ve ever been in a position to come up with one of these, you know how frustrating it can be.

Product names are especially problematic. Sure, the name you choose will probably not move the sales needle – unless you choose something really stupid. But beyond having to come up with a reasonably good name, you have to come up with an original name – at least if you want to avoid trademark trouble down the road.

One shortcut to product naming nirvana is to make up a word. For example, I firmly believe that Google is the greatest product name ever. Since it’s a made-up word, it was certainly easy to trademark. Plus, it has the added advantage – and a very important advantage, IMHO – of working great as a verb. Today if you don’t know something, you Google it. It even sounds fun. I honestly believe that’s one of the reasons Google has been able to maintain its search edge over Microsoft. Really, who wants to Bing anything? I know I don’t.

In any event, trademarkability should be your primary concern when naming a new product. The United States Patent and Trademark Office provides a plethora of useful information on the topic. You can find it all by clicking here.

Naming add-on modules, on the other hand, is quite easy – as long as you follow the Really Big Chicken Sandwich Principle. Never heard of it? Click here and start paying attention when the video hits the 30-second mark. The lesson: Just call it what it is. For example, when Symitar developed a tapeless backup solution, I named it Episys Vaulting. Simple.

You can find plenty of advice online on how to develop a good tagline. Forbes provides such advice here and Inc. provides more here. If you need more than that, go ahead and Google it. (I wouldn’t recommend Binging it.) If you want to skip all that reading, I believe that it can all be reduced to this: Choose a tagline that speaks directly to your value proposition. For example, when I was at Bluepoint Solutions, I came up with Powering the Paperless Credit Union. I still like that one.

Of course, for every rule, there are a million violations. Avis Car Rental has gotten plenty of mileage out of “We Try Harder.” I think that’s one of the weakest taglines ever, but Avis made it work. Go figure.

Every year, I dreaded coming up with a theme for the Symitar conference. And every year, I thus pled my case to the powers that be for a themeless conference. And then one year, it happened. We got rid of conference themes for good.

Guess what. With that burden lifted from my shoulders, I realized just how important a conference theme can be! That’s right. I got what I wanted – and then decided I didn’t want it after all.

What I realized is that a conference theme –even if it’s a theme that’s repeated from year to year – provides a framework upon which you can build your user experience. The conference theme, corny though it may be, guides the attendee journey and allows you to reinforce your brand by reinforcing that theme. Bottom line: I know it’s torturous, but don’t skimp on the conference theme.

That is all.

Don't hate me because I'm beautiful. Hate me because my marketing is kicking your ass.

By John San Filippo, jmsb@johnsanfilippo.com
www.johnsanfilippo.com
Subscribe: www.tinyurl.com/jmsbblog

No, that's NOT me!

Every year, Jack Henry & Associates has a huge sales meeting in July. And like most huge meetings, this one comes complete with keynote speakers.

I’ll be honest with you. In all the years I worked for JHA, not every sales meeting keynote speaker really resonated with me. For example, there was the guy who tried to climb Mount Everest – but failed. Or there was the guy who got up out of his wheelchair and walked across the stage like it was the first time he’d walked since his accident. People gasped in amazement, but I knew better. I’d hung out with him at the hotel bar the night before.

However, during the 2007 sales meeting, at the Gaylord Hotel in Grapevine, Texas, the keynote speaker spoke words that forever changed my life. No, I don’t remember the theme of his talk, nor do I remember the amazing achievement that propelled him into keynote speakerdom, nor do I even remember his name. What I do remember is hearing what has become my Golden Rule of marketing. This is what the man said:

You should hate your competitors and your competitors should hate you. If your competitors don’t hate you, you’re not working hard enough.

Let that sink in for a moment. Doesn’t it make you tingle?

Sure, I know hate isn’t a good thing. I remember my mom telling me I should never hate anyone. I remember countless nuns and priests telling me the same thing over the years. Yet here I stand before you, a self-avowed hater.

Okay, okay, I’ll let you in on a little secret. I don’t really hate anybody. But that’s not the point of the Golden Rule. If you thought it was, you weren’t paying attention.

No, I don’t hate anyone – but you can bet your sweet bippy that I want my competitors to hate me. I work very hard to make sure my competitors hate me. I hope my competitors lie in bed at night popping Rolaids because of me. I hope they cringe at the very mention of my name. That’s the way I approach my own business, and that’s how I approach my customers’ competitors, as well.

So why do I want people to hate me? Simple. I let the hate motivate.

Think about it. If your competitors hate you, what does that mean? It probably means you’re doing well. In fact, it could mean that you’re doing very well.

So what does it mean if your competitors hate your marketing? The better question is, what does it mean if your competitors don’t hate your marketing? The short answer is, it means your marketing is kind of stinky.

Back when I was in charge of Symitar advertising – i.e., back when Symitar actually advertised – I made a point to focus every ad on factual information. For example, for more than a decade, Symitar didn’t lose a single client in a competitive take-away situation. That made for great ad material.

It was only after I left Symitar that other core processors began to tell me how much they hated my advertising. I remember running into one rep from another core processor at GAC in 2004. “Every time I saw that Symitar had come out with a new ad, I’d think, oh, s#%t, before I even read it,” he told me. I’d call that mission accomplished.

I’ll leave the decision to hate or not hate to you. But I will tell you in no uncertain terms that if your competitors don’t hate your marketing – obviously not all of your marketing, but at least some of it – you’d might as well just take those marketing dollars and flush them down the toilet.

That is all.

Anatomy of a Case Study: Wooing Prospects With Surgical Precision

By John San Filippo, jmsb@johnsanfilippo.com
www.johnsanfilippo.com
Subscribe: www.tinyurl.com/jmsbblog

Case Study
noun

1.      the act or an instance of analyzing one or more particular cases or case histories with a view to making generalizations

2.      a detailed analysis of a person or group, especially as a model of medical, psychiatric, psychological, or social phenomena.

3.      an exemplary or cautionary model; an instructive example.

You’d never be able to tell from reading these boring definitions how critical case studies are to your collateral arsenal when you’re marketing financial technology – or really when you’re marketing any B2B product, for that matter. The reason these definitions don’t do case studies justice is that all three of them ignore the most essential component of an effective case study: human emotion.

Perhaps surprisingly if you’ve seen some of the convoluted case studies floating around out there, the formula for eliciting this outpouring of human emotion is actually quite simple and quite repeatable.

Act 1: The Problem

Start any case study by identifying the problem – or ideally, the set of problems – with which the subject of the case study was faced. You need to be careful here, though. Your solution may solve a boatload of problems, and you certainly can’t dig into all of them in 900 words.

The perfect problem for a case study is one that is a) significant and b) common. But what if you have to choose? What if one problem is more significant and the other is more common? You might be tempted to focus on the more significant problem. Don’t. What’s the value in touting how you solved a problem that nobody else has?

A common problem lets you establish a bond with the reader – which is the whole point of the case study. By the time you’ve laid out the entire situation, the reader should be thinking, I can totally relate to that. In fact, I’m experiencing that problem right now.

Act 2: The Solution
Here you simply tell the reader in very straightforward terms how the subject used your product to address the problem. There’s a big temptation at this point to add marketing words to the story. Marketing words are bad in case studies.

What are marketing words? Here’s an example: Last National Bank used the incredibly mind-blowing power and flexibility of Product X to solve the problem. In a case study, this next version will do just fine: Last National Bank used Product X to solve the problem. At this point, the reader will fully understand and appreciate the significance of Product X solving the problem without you adding any fluffy marketing words.

Act 3: The Results

Now the question you need to answer is: So what? What’s the big deal? Show me the money!

Exactly how you showcase the results will vary from product to product. For example, if you market an IT automation product, you might be able to show results in terms of hours saved. If you market home banking software, you might be able to talk about increased customer/member adoption. You get the picture.

The problem is, not every products lends itself well to measurable, empirical results. For example, suppose you’re marketing a fraud-prevention product. It’s pretty much impossible to measure how much of something didn’t happen. But maybe you got high marks from your auditor for deploying Product X. That’s a result a lot of people would like to achieve.

Don’t Blow It
There are a few common mistakes that seem to creep into a lot of case studies. The biggie, as I mentioned earlier, is the use of marketing words. Your role in a case study is to step back, get out of the way, and let the customer tell their story. Sure, you guide the story, but the customer still tells it. When you start using marketing words, you essentially steal the story away from your customer. Shame on you.

I’ve seen some “case studies” that were nothing more than question-and-answer interview pieces. Maybe this would work if you had a couple of thousand words to play with, but there’s no way you can tell a complete and compelling story in 900 words by simply typing out customer answers to four or five questions.

Lastly, don’t get too clever with document features, e.g. charts, graphs and grids. I’m not saying to never use them; just don’t feel like you’re required to use them. Remember, you’re telling a story – or more accurately, your customer is telling a story. Anything you add that doesn’t contribute directly to the telling of that story is a waste of your time and, more significantly, a waste of your prospect’s time.

That is all.

Don’t Let Your Goals Screw Up Your Opportunities

By John San Filippo, jmsb@johnsanfilippo.com
www.johnsanfilippo.com
Subscribe: www.tinyurl.com/jmsbblog

From an early age, we’re all taught that it’s important to have goals. The more detailed the goals, the better they are. And the more closely and single-mindedly we pursue them, the better we are. Sound familiar?

That may seem nice on the surface, but it’s my sincere belief that this is a flawed approach to life – and I’m absolutely certain it’s a flawed approach to marketing.

My issue with goals is that they’re based on a snapshot of the world as it exists today and at best a SWAG (that’s short for scientific wild-ass guess) at what we think the world will look like tomorrow. The problem is that, as anyone who’s been alive more than 15 minutes knows, things seldom turn out exactly the way we expect. That means the goal you set for the future probably won’t be appropriate for the future once it arrives in the present.

What’s worse, if you’re single-mindedly pursuing your goals, that doesn’t leave you any “mindedly” to address opportunities as they pop up. And that’s usually how opportunities appear – they just pop up, like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man popping into the head of Ray Stantz.

When you get to that fork in the road, are you going to choose your old goal or your new opportunity? Opportunities are riskier than goals, to be sure. But with great risk come great rewards, or some crap like that. There are probably a hundred pithy sayings I could dig up to convince you that opportunities are worthier than goals. Only you can decide what’s right for you.

I know what you’re thinking right about now. Okay, Johnny, this sounds like a load of philosophical BS. What does it have to do with marketing?

If you read my blog last week, you saw my list of eight things that marketing is and isn’t. Numbers one and two were marketing is not a process and marketing is reactive. Blindly following a process is the marketing equivalent of single-mindedly pursuing a goal.

For example, one former employer of mine required marketing to be planned and budgeted (pretty much down to the penny) in one-year increments, with virtually no wiggle room. Six months into it, something would invariably happen that nobody expected.

So rigid were we in following our plans that it would be a struggle to deal with any new situation. To add to the frustration, it was a separate and equally difficult challenge trying to find the money to deal with the new situation. Our perpetual goal was to stick to the plan, and the plan always ended up sucking.

When I say that marketing is reactive, what is it that marketing is reacting to? Opportunities, of course. Granted, these opportunities may come disguised as challenges, obstacles or downright disasters, but trust me – any sudden, unexpected change in the marketplace is definitely an opportunity for the one who figures out how to best respond to it.

Am I saying you shouldn’t have goals? No, not really. What I am saying is that your goals should be broad. Your goals should lead you in a general direction, not to a specific GPS coordinate. And most important of all, you should constantly tweak and massage your goals as new data comes pouring in. That way, when opportunity does come a’knocking, you’ll be ready to respond quickly and decisively, and more to the point, you’ll be ready to trounce your befuddled competitors.

That is all.