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Thursday, November 14, 2002

By Steven N. Czetli

Marketing advice for companies at each of three stages of growth was the theme of the second annual Pittsburgh Marketing Summit. Three sequenced presentations last week offered tips and tools for companies from seed stage to pre-revenue and finally to cash-positive.

Aceda Chief Executive Officer Suzy Teele urged seed stage companies to first make sure that sufficient market opportunity existed to sustain their new venture. Subsequent tasks were to accurately define the "perfect" customer, find such customers and then motivate them to buy your solution. Those goals require a variety of strategies including market research, target marketing and a mix of marketing methods.

Market research involves telephone and personal interviews, surveys, focus groups and Internet research to learn about customer characteristics, attitudes and behavior.

Target marketing techniques include using public relations and direct mail to raise awareness, and conducting customer seminars.

Marketing mix includes the use of multiple tools to promote your product or service such as a Web site, demos, testimonials, competitive positioning and sales offers.

Focusing on the adequacy of the product or service itself is critical for seed companies to make it to the start-up phase, said Teele. Ask yourself whether it meets the customers' needs, if it does so better than competitors and if it is linked to a compelling vision.

Beechwood Consulting President John Zappa urged so-called pre-revenue companies, those readying a product or service for sale, to focus their marketing message on a compelling value proposition. Align marketing with sales and make sure you are reaching your target audience, he advised. It also is important to understand the length of the sales cycle. Knowing yourself and your customers' market are fundamental to positioning any start-up company for eventual market leadership.

Zappa offered these additional tips:

Know where your product is in the adoption cycle -- and beware of the "chasm," the slow interval between the early adopters and early mainstream buyers.

Avoid the "customization trap." Draw a clear line between base product and customized elements. Many business customers will insist on custom adaptations of a standard product, which will raise the cost prohibitively.

When they become available, use past successes to help articulate your message through case studies, references, referrals and speaking opportunities.

Make your solution easy to sell with flexible demonstrations, clear pricing policies, supportive graphics and collateral.

Taking a revenue-generating company to the next level of growth -- that is, making it cash positive -- requires strategic marketing that will differentiate your products from your competition's, connect effectively with key customer segments and understand the customer pain you are relieving, according to CommuniTech President Pam Selker Rak.

Capture everything you've learned about your customers in a database; take what you've learned about their pain and build strategies that better meet customer requirements. Stick with it. Brand-building takes time, requires consistency and benefits from reinforcement through multiple channels.

In his keynote address to the Marketing Summit, author, executive and corporate trainer Richard Gallagher described his research at more than 100 companies in search of what he called their "corporate soul." What he found was that companies whose cultures have been shaped by the passionately held values of their founders do better in the marketplace and in measures of employee satisfaction than companies driven by such traditional management tools as policy books, committees, time studies and organizational charts.

Bill Flanagan, another keynote speaker at the workshop, described efforts under way to develop a stronger, clearer message that describes Pittsburgh consistently and positively rather than as a community in decline. That Regional Branding Initiative is a part of the collaborative Image Gap Project. Flanagan, who is communications director for four economic development agencies, said that by February the initial phase of the project would be complete. "We'll have a research report that will be a public document, open to anyone who's designing marketing efforts for any organization," he said.

Confluence of biotech, IT creates opportunity

The convergence of medical information and information technology during the past three years has yielded a flood of clinical and research data that has the potential to facilitate drug discovery, improved treatment methods and better patient outcomes. But the fulfillment of that promise requires overcoming formidable technical and social barriers, several of which were discussed during a joint meeting last week of the Pittsburgh Technology Council's BioMedical and Information Technology networks.

Among technical barriers are information storage and management. Traditional methods have been taxed by the abrupt surge in data coming not only from research but also from the improved resolution now possible for medical imaging. And even that flood may be just the tip of the data iceberg since digital imaging technology is still at a comparatively early point in its evolution and so much of a hospital's work remains paper and film based. In fact, according to IBM Life Sciences sales executive Kip Peterson, the typical life sciences company will soon need to access and analyze "petabytes" (1,015 bytes) of data to further their research efforts.

Compounding this challenge is the proliferation of different, and potentially conflicting, electronic platforms: hand-held computers, high resolution displays, wireless technologies and ASP hosting services in addition to conventional PC networks and mainframes -- many with proprietary operating systems. People who have the skills to pull all these together are in very short supply. In fact, according to Peterson, IBM has concluded that no single entity -- even one as big as itself -- will be able to deliver the whole answer. So it is looking for collaborators.

Former Pittsburgh Press business editor Steven N. Czetli edits and publishes TechyVent/Pittsburgh, a free, regional e-mail newsletter that recommends and provides detailed information on the region's most useful business events. For more information on these and other events go to newsletter.techyvent.com.