At every opportunity, and there seems to be one everywhere you look, I criticize high-technology marketing types for their ham-handedness, tone-deafness and generally inside-out view of the world. Seeing through the lens of the product, rather than through the eyes of their customers. So, it's only fair to give credit where credit's due. Meet my old bud, Junaid Islam, marketing veep at Caspian Networks in San Jose. He's turned things around pretty quickly at this once-moribund, would-be competitor of Cisco (CSCO) and Juniper (JNPR), the big dawgs in the network biz. Caspian's customer list now totals about 25 and counting, up thousands of percentage points in very short order. Korea is major market, along with China, where "new" technology equates to "superior", as he puts it. But this is beside the point. His secret? He positioned Caspian technology as way to make smoother the choppy flow of voice, video and email that comes pouring into corporate servers and routers. What this means is that where your company's email flow used to interfere with video images on your screen, Caspian routers now separate each stream and make sure the email bits don't collide with the video images. Which results in clearer video beamed, or streamed, more quickly and naturally. Caspian's new marketing language and selling proposition describes all of this in customer terms that resonate with -- imagine -- real customers. Prior to Junaid's arrival, and his victory in the positioning debate, the gang at Caspian was so enamored with what their gear could do featurewise that actual benefits were pretty much an afterthought. They saw the world through the lens of their products, as so many technology vendors do. If this sounds familiar to your own situation, better bone-up on the "language" your customers' speak. Then start using it at every opportunity. The goal: to think in this language, as if it was your native tongue.
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