I’ve been waiting for notification and searching on toolbox.com’s site itself. Silly me, thinking their search would work. Now that I’ve moved across the country and am getting settled in, after a few weeks of “fun,” I did a yahoo search. Found it!

Before Ziff-Davis decided they didn’t want more IT Management track articles from a writing house I worked with, they bought two of my articles. The first is The Myth of the Data Scientist. I’ve muttered about it before and will again, but that’s a longer article. Enjoy.

I’m reading an AMA periodical and an article on Chipotle has a brilliant bit about co-opetition. In case you haven’t heard the term, it was popularized by the 1997 book of the same name. The concept is that complex markets see companies act as both competitors and partners depending on what’s happening.

The relevant section is when the author is describing that Chipotle wanted to only buy thigh meat from a vendor but that wasn’t economical for either company. “But it just so happened that Panera Bread used only chicken breast meat in its recipes, so Chipotle approached its competitor with the idea of working together to more economically source all-natural chicken meat for both restaurant chains. Previously, Bell & Evans mostly supplied high-end restaurants willing to pay a significant price premium. With the Chipotle/Panera cooperation, new economies emerged that didn’t exist before, allowing fast-casual chains to afford to purchase the naturally raised meat and still be profitable.

Chipotle’s management wasn’t scared about contacting a competitor with a suggestion that would help both companies. That’s good management.

One thing everyone is discussing is the changing nature of the IT/Business manager relationship with modern BI solutions. Many folks have talked about “enabling” the end users or used other similar terms.

Late last year, QlikTech and Informatica presented a three part webinar on the state of BI. I don’t remember if it was Donald Farmer of QlikView or David Lyle of Informatica who said the phrase that stuck with me, but it was evocative: IT is changing from gate keeper to shop keeper.

The goal of IT in today’s BI world is to stop being perceived as a barrier to business information and turn to being someone who quickly provides what the customer needs. I’d even suggest the shop is a grocery store. The business user will check the tools IT provides, applets, reports, basic dashboards and similar components, then have the ability to combine them, tweaking as necessary, to create a meal appropriate enough for the specific appetite.

What I like about the analogy is that it doesn’t denigrate the importance of IT. Business users aren’t doing a run around, they’re being provided core tools by an IT organization that’s doing a lot behind the scenes, just as the grocer is very busy to ensure the products are on the shelf and the store functions properly. It’s only that it’s a time sink for both IT and the user if the wrong is preparing the meal, the user knows better what she wants so why spend so much time trying to translate for IT. Both sides have a lot of work that needs their skills, finding the right level of interaction is a boon to both.

Today, Accenture held a presentation for alumni (I worked for Andersen Consulting in the late 1990s) to present its Tech Vision 2014. The subtitle for their report is “Every Business is a Digital Business.” That mean the focus should be on what business wants from technology, the business drivers pushing technology forward. As with most, very smart technologists, the Accenture team’s focus was a key shift and was what technology can do for business. It was focused on technology, backed up by a few business examples.

So how does Business Intelligence stack up in Accenture’s eyes? The answer was simple: It was hidden and scattered across the trends. It’s clear that the categories were created by some very smart technology people and that business took second place.

Of the six trends, the obvious place to discuss BI was in the third, “Data Supply Chain.” Yet the presenter focused that segment on grabbing data and API management, the technical portions, and mentioned analytics in a few seconds towards the end.

On their mini-site (link above), there was an additional presentation by CTO Paul Dougherty. One key phrase caught my ears: “Enterprise and unstructured data.” That’s a technologist’s view of enterprise, not a business manager’s view. He views “enterprise data” as only that data which comes from “enterprise software” such as ERP, CRM and SFA. That’s not a distinction business management makes and not one that should be spoken to the business audience.

BI was also briefly mentioned in the Business of Applications trend, in the mobile section but, again, only briefly. The final trend, Architecting for Resilience also mentioned key items critical to business intelligence, those of performance and cyber security. Sadly, no mention of how important those were for reactiveness to the business environment and protection of intellectual property and business critical information.

It was a very good presentation from the technical side, if they consider their audience to be only IT people and ISV’s working on point solutions. However, if they expect to interest business decision makers they have to focus less on how cool technology might help some parts of business and more on what are the business needs driving technological decisions.

Analysts understanding trends in large data volumes is important to business. I contend that how management views those trends, makes decisions and evaluates changes is even more important. A key trend for any company should be how business management better understands the challenges facing business and whether or not they’re addressing those challenges. That’s the heart of BI.

The refrain I constantly hear from both corporate marketing and sales is “more leads!” They seem to think that lead generation should be a KPI for marketing success. I beg to differ.

As someone who has spent years in product marketing, my view is that lead tracking is only the beginning of the job. People talk about “lead quality.” When they define the term, they typically talk about the number of leads needed to close X dollars of sales. However, that’s discussing two end points without discussing the journey. There is basic benefit to that, such as understanding you have enough leads to close quote for one product so you can shift lead generation spending to another product line (or to other marketing tasks when the leads meet near term for all sales), it’s not sufficient for increasing pipeline effectiveness.

B2B sales are complex. They aren’t instant and they involve many stakeholders in multiple organizations within a prospect’s firm. To hand over leads and then discuss close rates is akin to the classic Sidney Harris cartoon with the magical formula on the blackboard.

Sales force automation (SFA) systems typical track sales through a pipeline with something such as a percentage estimate of close. Customer resource management (CRM) systems track individual contacts at companies. However, I’ve never seen the systems linked in such a way to track what contacts happen where in the pipeline and link collateral and messaging used in each step.

That information would help fine tune how well sales and marketing work to close a prospect. If you’re losing 40% of your prospects at a specific point in the sales cycle and feedback shows there’s information missing or some other issue, marketing and sales can focus messaging for that step in the process.

I’ve yet to see SFA and CRM systems work in concert to clearly provide such information, so an opportunity exists for business intelligence (BI). Both ISV’s and SI’s have the ability to work with those systems and provide dashboards to help collect information from both organizations and present in a clearer format, linking pipeline and contact information to build a clearer picture of messaging and tools used throughout the sales cycle.

Eventually, SFA and CRM systems will provide their own links as they move back to the original concept of single systems from the early days and companies such as I worked with in the 1990s, but if BI companies get a jump, their solutions can be incorporated in an OEM fashion and can be extended. There’s a window of opportunity for BI vendors to help improve a critical aspect of the sales/marketing relationship.

Sales and marketing often have a very complex relationship. Too often, companies take one of the two extremist positions in relating the two organizations: Either marketing is just an adjunct of sales or it is somehow almost completely distinct and involved in the “bigger issues” of branding and other longer term goals. As someone who has a broad background working in different departments within business, I have a more holistic approach.

Marketing and sales must work together, they are closely tied but still separate entities. On one side, it’s critical to ensure the tools exist to close sales. The sales force is right to demand messaging and material and it’s critical for all of marketing, not just product and events marketing, to understand the pressures upon a sales force.

At the same time, marketing must be positioning the company past the individual sale, for mid- and longer term imaging of the company. Those messages must be clear. The first issue on that side is that means getting the executives to agree upon a vision for the firm. There must be CxO buy-in as to messaging and positioning. This especially matters in the SMB software company, since the founders are usually very active in sales, discussions with analysts (both market an financial) and other external groups. If they’re saying different things, the market gets confused. The key challenge for marketing on that front is convincing the founders that a new message may be needed and to stick to it. I’ll focus a bit more on that challenge in later blogs.

Those are high level concepts that many have seen, but how does the rubber hit the road? The product marketing manager, or the “marketing person” in a small company, must be able to help sales understand the balance between individual sales and corporate goals. In an early stage company, there’s not really a difference. Each sale is critical to survival and the product can change drastically to help close. However, at some point the company has to address the larger market, then things change.

I have an example from one company that was in the transition. The previous year it earned around $15 million in revenue. Analysts were expecting a hockey stick revenue gain for $100 million in the current year. I had one sales person come to me in a rush, saying “I need feature X added into the product and I can close a $1 million dollar sale!” They’d closed their first one million deal the previous year and it meant a lot to the sales force. Telling him a simple no and pointing out that we have a market to address isn’t enough. Neither is acting as if the company is smaller and rushing to change product.

I responded, asking him how much analysts expected us to make this year (and sales always knows). I then pointed out that the deal was only 1% of expectations. I asked him to see how many other prospects wanted the same feature and sent out an email to the sales force to see if it was popping up elsewhere. I explained that if we could, again, get to a pipeline of 5% I could check with development about tradeoffs with other features the market wanted. At the same time, I worked to give him information to provide the prospect with a workaround and words to help him communicate where we were going with products.

It ends up there weren’t other people who “required” it and that the workarounds were good enough to close the deal with the prospect. I was able to address both the short term sales needs and the corporate goal of addressing a wider market. Neither one exists on its own, there’s a sliding scale.

Marketing is about communications, all types. Sales is a critical channel of communications and it’s what pays the bills. The wars between the two groups do a disservice to both. It’s a symbiotic relationship.

One of the books I’m reading is “The Age of Edison” by Ernest Freeberg. It describes the great technology transition of the late 1800s and early 1900s. I’m only to chapter three but on pages 60-61 there’s something that drives this blog post. The author quotes someone in Electric World (March 31, 1888) humorously describing the typical electric company sales pitch: “There are two kinds of electric lights, namely, our kind and the other fellow’s kind. Our light is much better than the other fellow’s light. The other fellow’s light is surrounded by a cloud of non-luminous verbosity.”

George Santayana said that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” I’ll modify that. It’s necessary to remember, but not sufficient. You also need to learn from it. It’s one thing to note other people’s mistakes but another to have the self-reflection to notice you making those same mistakes.

The software industry is replete with those who think their new product is completely different than all others. How many times have you asked a founder or early sales person about their firm’s competition and received the answer “we have no competition!” Right…

Firms always have advantages, but every product has disadvantages too. It’s knowing the two and dealing with them appropriately that makes your messages stronger. The task is to minimize your non-luminous verbosity and help your market clearly understand the value you provide to them.

Remember history, minimize the marketspeil.