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Tony Byrne

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How much should vendor sales and marketing skill really matter for customers?

17-Aug-2009

Tags: Web Content Management

A few weeks back I suggested that a vendor's sales and marketing acumen shouldn't really matter to prospective customers. In a nice comment, Bex Huff argued that, "measuring market effectiveness and sales is important for making a long-term decision on a technology partner." My friend (and ex-Gartner analyst) Priscilla Emery made a similar comment in a Facebook discussion. And I hear tech leaders frequently echo that they want to buy software from market winners. Who wouldn't?

Yet, when I parse the comments of technology customers in the midst of long-term vendor relationships, what I hear them asking for is predictability, rather than commercial zest. Sure, they want their suppliers to innovate, but since when is innovation a function of sales and marketing skill?

More pointedly, the "I want my vendor to still be around in three years" justification is usually a red herring. Of course this will vary circumstantially, but I think buyers tend to over-weight vendor financial success and underweight vendor (and product) stability.

Consider this poll of recent webinar attendees. I was presenting about the surprising placidity of the Social Software marketplace, and asked attendees about their own experiences with enterprise software. Here's the question and results:

"In the last three years, my enterprise has experienced the following with a software tool we licensed:"

Now, with less than a hundred respondents, I won't call these results scientific, but you get the idea. Vendors and products go away, but once they get enough traction such that analysts like us cover them, demise happens less often than most people believe. The biggest risk to predictability is M&A activity, and that tends to be more prevalent among large, well-established vendors buying each other.

Let's look at the Web CMS marketplace, forever slated for "consolidation." Quick: how many WCM products have gone away due to lack of sales and marketing success? I don't mean acquired by another firm and still living, but outright disappeared. INSO/eBT's Dynabase evaporated when the founders took their money and went home. Serena Collage looks like it will die a slow death (albeit self-imposed). That leaves another 40+ WCM vendors chugging along happily for the past decade or more.

The really big implosion -- the one that's causing pain from Auckland to Geneva -- is the demise of Microsoft CMS, replaced in 2006 by SharePoint. Microsoft is not a company known for poor sales and marketing abilities. Mega-rollup firm Open Text has also euthanized (no, "merged") a couple of WCM products it acquired some years ago. FileNet bought small WCM vendor eGrail in 2002, then ignored it for several years before IBM delivered the coup de grace. That's right folks, you have a greater chance of getting screwed by a large, financially successful vendor than a small, struggling one.

Open source platforms offer no guaranteed panacea here. The key indicator of long-term viability lies not in the slick marketing of commercial open source vendors, but rather, the maturity of project governance (for which there are many different models).

Bex Huff is right that a vendor's business skills and model do matter. In our evaluations we ding some vendors as "quirky," or "inconsistent," or "QA-averse." This is less because we fear them driving the company into the ground, and more because running a solid business contributes to the kind of operational predictability that customers crave.

People who highlight a vendors' sales and marketing prowess are fundamentally cheerleading. You see this primarily among investors and equity analysts, but also major technology analyst firms. You know their traditional complaint: Vendor X has great engineering, but poor marketing savvy."Gearheads!" Interestingly, when we run into seriously disappointed technology customers, that's almost never their complaint. More typically they complain of poor engineering masked by savvy marketing and fawning commentators.

What do you think?