How to nail product positioning when your company needs a refresh

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How to nail product positioning when your company needs a refresh Matt Allen VP, Corporate and Product Marketing, MarkLogic

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Great technology Great investors Great customers But… A turnaround story that began five years ago...

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Challenges § Engineering-driven – Technical, complex product § Brownfield market – Competing against Oracle § Adoption – No open source distribution channel § Getting heard – Crowded marketplace § Hyperscale dominance – David vs Goliath (AWS) § Gaining buy-in – Disagreements among stakeholders MarkLogic-specific Challenges everyone faces MarkLogic didn’t have a story people could believe in

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MarkLogic pitch circa 2014

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If there was one piece of advice I wish I could phone back and give to myself, was just concentrate on that storytelling part, on the convincing people. “ Stewart Butterfield CEO & Cofounder, Slack Because if you can't do that, it doesn't matter how good the product is, it doesn't matter how good the idea was for the market, or what happens with the external factors, if you don't have the people believing.”

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You cannot win without a great story

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Evolution of MarkLogic XML Content Server Enterprise NoSQL Database World’s Best Database for Integrating Data from Silos Data integration simplified What it is Why you should use it 2001 – 2013 2014 - 2015 2016 - 2017 2018 - present

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Our story today FUTURE VISION THE PAIN / REFRAME RATIONAL DROWNING A BETTER WORLD VALIDATION BUSINESS RESULTS

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Focus on Business Results SOURCE: GARTNER 2019

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§ Big vision for PR and AR § Clarity for customers § We sell product… - Faster demand gen and deal cycle - Largest deals of any modern database company - Unicorn status MarkLogic results

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How we changed our story

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Start by developing your framework CEB/Gartner – Duarte – StoryBrand – SiriusDecisions

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CEB (now Gartner) Business Problem and What the Customer Is Currently Doing New Customer Approach (Leading to Your Solution) Highlight What Customer Is Missing A B SOURCE: CORPORATE EXECUTIVE BOARD

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Duarte SOURCE: DUARTE

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Duarte resources Emotions Repeatable Sound Bites Choosing Your Delivery Style Transformational Words

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Storybrand (SB7) SOURCE: STORYBRAND

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SiriusDecisions SOURCE: SIRIUS DECISIONS

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Formula for writing your value prop AUDIENCE = Business Leaders NEED Need a unified, actionable 360º view + ASSERTION (WHY?) Simplified data integration makes it faster and easier to achieve a 360º view so that IT can keep up with the speed of business. + OUTCOME Achieve a 360º view 4-12x faster in order to better serve customers, improve operations, and answer regulators. + DISTINCTION Simplest platform to integrate data = VALUE PROP The MarkLogic Data Hub Platform simplifies data integration, enabling organizations to achieve a 360º view faster than ever so that IT can keep up with the speed of business. The MarkLogic Data Hub Platform removes¬ friction from every step of the data integration process, allowing IT to keep pace with the speed of business.

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Our approach… keep is simple

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Deliverables and process Company Core Product Product/Campaign Launches 1. Mission 2. Vision 3. Market 4. Value prop 1. Future vision 2. Challenges (A state) 3. Insight 4. Solution (B state) 5. Differentiators 6. Results 7. Validation 1. Future vision 2. Challenges (A state) 3. Insight 4. Solution (B state) 5. Differentiators 6. Results 7. Validation 8. User stories RESEARCH WRITING BUY-IN TESTING LAUNCH ITERATION

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Avoiding feature paralysis

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“ Reid Hoffman Co-founder of LinkedIn, Partner at Greylock Rather than sell the whole Swiss Army knife, VMWare focused on the most pressing use case. It was as if they said: ‘Forget the blade, the scissors and the screw—let’s just sell the tweezers.’”

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Kano model NEED NOT MET NEED FULLY MET USER DISSATISFACTION USER SATISFACTION Performance (more is better) Delighter (wow!) Must-have

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Winning requires more than great features and a great story

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PCs running Microsoft 90+% market share Apple computers 7% market share Apple iOS and Android 98% market share Nokia and Blackberry 2% market share Strong connections Weak connections

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Position for growth by telling a great story and building connections

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Thank you matt.allen@marklogic.com