I have seen it repeatedly, 4 years in a row. In 2020, I saw it in the pandemic stress in many execs I captured in the New Normal video series. In 2021, the Moment of Service book I helped IFS with showed me the massive changes in the industrial world as it servitizes. In 2022, the book I helped SAP with showed me hundreds of new business applications that have emerged in auto, consumer industries financial services, healthcare and many other sectors. 2023 is still early but the month I have spent in India has exposed me a group of humans who are hustling like crazy to make up for 3 lost years.
And yet, I see too many technology vendors who are not evolving quick enough. The last couple of decades have been generous to most of us. So we hope the current slowdown is a temporary recession. We try to keep selling what we have in the bag. We hire for the same roles which brought us here.
It’s time to reinvent technology vendors. Obviously there are plenty of new addressable markets - but they call for new products, not spray painting old products or hyping up ChatGPT. There are many new networks to explore as we think of ecosystems. Economics to revisit as mature markets are getting commoditized. Analyst relations to be re-examined and organizationally re-positioned.
Let me just spend a minute on the last point. Some of you have heard me talk about using analysts for intelligence v influence. With most AR groups being organizationally part of marketing they mostly want praise from analysts. They spend way too much time striving for the top right in the Magic quadrant of a mature product. They would add much more value if they would help their company explore new markets and help with competitive analysis for that unfamiliar turf.
Cannot say I blame them. Many of them report to execs who clearly love the adulation. You can see the narcissism in these exec's social media postings. It’s delusion - if they looked at their own win-loss analysis they would see they are far from perfect. Very far.
Personally I would love to see AR groups with a dotted line to marketing and also report to R&D and to corporate strategy.
That’s just one thought around reinventing technology vendors. In the next few months you will hear more from me about other recommendations. Technology is a very wide industry so I will nuance my thoughts for software vendors v outsourcers v hyperscalers.
Let me repeat what I have said a few times recently. Business as usual - circa 2019 - is a recipe for mediocrity. The tech sector is especially vulnerable. Time to shake up every aspect of the business.
Burning Platform: Raising the Bar for Analyst Summits with Truly Zoho
In the 83nd episode of Burning Platform, we host Sandy Lo and Pooja Mittal in the marketing team of Zoho and they talk about the elaborate planning and logistics it took to host the Truly Zoho analyst event in Chennai and Tenkasi in India.
You have likely read perspectives from several analysts including Brian Sommer, Jeremy Cox, Ankita Singh, Thomas Wieberneit and seen videos from Paul Greenberg and Brent Leary and others. It is not an overstatement to say it was one of the most talked about events in the industry, especially considering only 15 analysts participated.
However, the positive outcomes and experiences took months of planning, which as they say had backups to backup plans and extremely complicated logistics many of which changed on an hourly basis
Here they are summarizing many of the gory details in about half and hour and sharing some of the photos and social media from the event.
Raising the bar for analyst summits does not give it enough credit – they blew the roof off!!
March 27, 2023 in Burning Questions, Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0)