Meanwhile, in marketing school, there's a teacher writing on a whiteboard: "Never ever tell anyone what your company does."
So say you're making software for car washes. Don't lead with the fact that you make software. Instead, show the benefit by saying something like "Book 73% more car washes" and then say "Car wash booking software to increase revenue."
Marketers are often consumed by showing the company's "Why" - but the challenge in that is it often gets too abstract and generalized and may make you sound like everyone else. A great example of this is that many companies make software that, in the end, is designed to improve end-user experience. You might be, say, a testing company. The end goal is definitely improving end-user experience, but if that is all you say, then it won't be clear how you do that, or how you're different from, say, a UI optimization tool which also improves end-user experience.
In this example, what if the company isn't any different? The marketer has to find a way to hide the fact that the company they've been hired to promote is not actually that innovative. An inferior product can still be a success if the right combination of hype, timing and smart promotion is combined.
What you're describing is fast becoming a reality for most software businesses imho - the days of feature differentiation are rapidly declining.
I don't care that your product is going to make me the reborn Buddha, because if you lead with that there's an overwhelming likelihood that your product doesn't stand on its merits and there is no underlying value. Blame the other marketers for spoiling the game if you want, but I think marketing is fundamentally a business mistake in that it makes you an adversary of your customers, not a partner. It's based on attacking customers with weaponized psychology. That's the premise of the modern field, and there's no escaping that.
If you had a product that I actually needed and provided value, you could just tell me what it was. It should be straightforward how that addresses my needs -- or it likely doesn't.
That still actually tells me what the product is, which is way more than we keep seeing for all these start-ups, open source software etc, which seem to revolve around hippie meaningless B.S. that doesn't provide any value proposition up front.
Any decent marketer, imho, would argue against not telling people what your company does (it's usually the CEO making that case) - the good marketer just moves the "what you do" to behind a value/benefit.
Unfortunately this never turns out well. Even if the marketer uses the prescribed wording, it'll look like marketing BS to any engineer ("web scale," anyone?). If the marketer steers clear of any specifics, then... well, we get posts like this.
The solution is to push your marketing team to understand your product well enough that they can talk about it with accurate specifics, at least to some extent. Or hire marketers who have some basic understanding of software (cough cough).
Finally, a big issue I see is that companies use internal language to describe their software, rather than using the language of their prospect. They do this to "raise up" their messaging, but the result is often a word blob mashup of internal language and industry buzzwords which don't connect to the problem the prospect is trying to solve.
Perhaps it represents a bias towards investors rather than customers?
Knowing your audience seems really important to this discussion. Those of us with technical knowledge immediately want to know "what does it actually do?"
But there are a lot of decision-makers without technical knowledge who might be swayed by their "general impression of the people they meet." This group doesn't necessarily care if they're in need of what you're selling.
There's a spectrum between these two extremes and how you approach marketing is going to depend on your opinion of how the audience is distributed in this spectrum. If you believe there are more people toward the latter end of the spectrum then a more general, details-free approach may make sense.
I think it's a joke, but there is actually real advice along the same lines. When cold emailing someone with the goal of getting a phone call, you want to avoid giving the person enough information to say no.
Why? What's the point in wasting time having a call with somebody when the answer is going to be "no" either way? Better to get to "no" as fast as you can, so you can move on to a better prospect.
No one is ever going to say 'yes' to a $10M sale from a cold email. They'll only say yes after they've met you in person, but they're not going to agree to meet you in person until you've done a phone call.
The problem is that everyone will say they don't need what you're selling, even if they do. You want to disqualify folks as fast as possible, but email doesn't work for that because even if you're selling the cure to cancer to someone with cancer, you're still going to have basically a 100% false negative rate.
I won't pretend I'm great at sales, but this is directly contrary to the advice I get, which is you want to filter out people who are a sure "no" or not a match (eg, on budget) as fast as possible so you don't waste sales resources on them while minimizing the chance of leaving a bad impression from trying pressure tactics on someone who wont buy.
What am I missing? (I guess it could be intending to be unethical, but I prefer to assume I don't understand.)
This, so very much this. I love what Jeff Thull says about this... "always be leaving" (as opposed to "always be closing"). Make it clear to the prospect that you are not going to be the stereotypical sales-person who grabs onto them like a little pit-bull grabbing onto your leg, and who won't let go until they've been beaten over the head with a stick. Show them that you respect them, and leave as soon as it's clear that there isn't a good fit. Leave a good impression and later, when they do need your "thing" they're more likely to call you up (or take your call when you call again in a year).
If you leave a good impression, there's every chance they'll recommend you to someone who does need $thing, doing much of your selling for you -- you just have to leave them thinking "well, $thing wasn't right for me, but I'd do business with $person and $company".