Seth Godin’s bestselling book Purple Cow describes how companies can be “remarkable”.

We’re currently spending a lot of time discussing purple cows.   We’re not getting 100% of small businesses that come to our site signing up with their email address to get access to our new services – and its killing me.

Here’s what we’re thinking of implementing:

• Get our messaging on target to share our passion for what our software can do to improve the way they interact with their customers – to transform their business by automating a lot of manual processes, involve the customer in developing customer knowledge, and creating a dedicated customer space that will blow their minds.

• Deep discount for early adopters.  Signup now to get access to our first release – warts and all – give us feedback and grow with us.  If you invest your time with us, we’ll invest in your business by providing free upgrades, support, and amazing service… for life.  We’ll provide a limited number of free or highly discounted lifetime licenses.

I’m nervous about using price as the draw – I think price is always an important factor for small businesses, but our service is a premium offering, not a web2.0 knock-off, and I worry that focusing on the price may be putting the emphasis in the wrong place.  We may want to focus instead on something unique and remarkable around our service instead of focusing on the software…

But I want 100% of the small businesses who come to see us to jump on board.

I’m going to reach out to some marketing professionals who have experience with “remarkability” for some more ideas.

photo courtesy of Linda Cronin.

So this is almost unheard of but the images attached to this posts are our task lists, including delivery dates for this project. We wanted to share these right from the beginning so people could see what we’re doing and when we think we will be “getting stuff done”.

It takes a lot of guts for a company to be this transparent. MG has already committed to developing four applications in four months, and now we’re making public the most secret list that any software company has.

Personally, I think its about time. Lots of software companies exist under this veil of secrecy that doesn’t really benefit anyone but themselves. When you ask simple questions like “How long will that take?” – You get a response that equates the development process for the creation of heaven and earth. As far as Im concerned that is BS. We’re professionals and we make commitments. We should have no problem saying what we are going to do, then doing it.

Communications strategies always have key messages – the five to ten salient points that should be communicated over and over again. Key messages provide an organization with the foundation to speak with clients, media and each other. They’re the glue.

In this naked marketing arena, much of who we are is being defined as we go. We don’t want to sound canned, but we also can’t sound scattered and inconsistent. Everyone’s speaking at once and we’re not managing the message with the same rigour that you’d often see.

So here’s the challenge: suggest messaging that can keep people on point without stifling the flood of ideas that stem from having to stop, reflect and share every step of the process.

I’m going to step back and create “a key concept checklist”. Staying away from actual messages will prevent us from looking like we’re plagiarizing off of each other. Hopefully, we can all measure our messages against this checklist, not lose our unique voices, and convey the same high-level messages.

I think we’ll be a stronger, more articulate organization for the exercise.

Nearly ten years ago a small team in a small San Francisco apartment launched “The End of Software” revolution.  The fundamental concept was that companies didn’t need to “own” software code and host it within their network.  Instead people could access the software remotely via a web browser at the office, at home, or anywhere there was an internet connection.  The type of software was a logical starting point – customer management software that the salesforce could access while on the road.  And Salesforce.com was born.

Over the last 10 years Salesforce.com has led the transformation for how people use software at work.  Today most corporate applications are accessed through a web browser and many of these are hosted outside the network by external companies.  Over time, the “End of Software” revolution evolved into a new trend of ”Software on Demand” or “Software as a Service” which allows companies to rent software rather than having to purchase it.

But to the users of the software, it is not a service.  It’s software.

The future of software needs to be more than just forms and databases, it should actively and purposely help educate people who use the software on best practices, industry standards, and success stories on how to achieve a task or manage a process more effectively.

As we develop our software we are looking at how we can further empower the people that use our software to improve their customer relationships by providing success stories, feedback on industry ratios and norms, inspirational stories, tips from experts, quality content from the web…

I think that is the kind of service that software companies should be providing, and I hope that people will begin to expect it from their software partners.

Surely we are past the “utility age” of computing.

The one frustrating thing about working with social media companies that is that alot of them are not very social when it comes to customer service. Setting up a simple Linkedin group for Mercury Grove is a great example of this. It begins with filling in a short form that describes the group you are setting up. Ok simple enough. I fill it in and am told that my group will be reviewed shortly and to stay tuned. I thought that was interesting at the time since it introduced a social component to the sign up. That means a "real person" was going to review what I submitted and make a decision about it.

I was really surprised when a day later I got an email saying that the group was rejected. The email was from a "real person"and said that the group was rejected because…

LinkedIn reserves the right not to accept applications from groups that do not have an existing member base or affinity or that do not serve a business or professional purpose.

Come on, I’m creating a group based around a company that wants to connect with current and potential new clients – how does this not serve a business or professional purpose. So I thought ok, at least I have someone that I can write back to and plead my case with. So I put together a nicely worded email explaining again what we are doing and that it serves both a business and professional purpose. The response was automated saying that a service professional will be in touch sometime and that my Question Reference number is 080739-001073. So much for social.

Some of the apps (or their features) developed by Mercury Grove, have arisen from the consulting side of Mercury Grove – either to satisfy a direct request of a Client, or in response to a need to help support a client engagement.

This puts is in the unique position of having our own “feature farm”, and our symbiotic relationship with our clientèle is what allows it to exist. Sometimes we don’t just develop applications and their features…we pick them (assuming they’re ripe).

As long as we continue to provide consulting services for our customers and continue to effectively harvest their needs and requests (more on Mercury Grove’s “Evolutionary Prototyping” approach to come later), we’ll be able to keep pace with market changes without having to spend a lot of money on market research (or just guess).

Today marks the end of the first month.  We’re now one quarter of the way into our “project” to launch four apps in four months.  We’ve spent weeks preparing strategy, building wireframes, discussing tactics, and creating code (lots of code).  Specifically we have:

• Defined the team and roles and responsibilities
• Defined 80% of product specs through our software design methodology
• Defined a launch strategy
• Developed 80% of the code for one application
• Refined our existing Collaboration software (to launch next week)

It’s a great start, but we’re still short on some core areas:

• Finalized Project Plan 
• Brand platform definition
• Marketing copy

Our new site will launch before the end of the week and we’ll start our communication blitz next week – which will add a lot more pressure to the team.  Already everyone is running at 100% on various projects – the next three months will require clearly defined deliverables and first-class prioritization from everyone for us to achieve our goal of “Outrageous Success”.

The other ingredient we’ll need is a lot more positive momentum.  A groundswell.  I believe that success – in business and in life – is based on momentum.  It’s hard to stop something that is accelerating quickly, or on a steep decline.

One month into this project I am optimistic, but we really need to accelerate.  Now it’s time to regroup, go public, and continue moving – faster.

I’m working on capturing messaging and tone for Mercury Grove.

I’ve recently developed an approach that makes writing for other people much easier. I record conversations and then I build my first draft from the transcript.

That way, I can record ideas, concepts and language immediately, when they are there for the taking. It makes getting things started and finished much easier.

I turned the mic on myself to write this blog. For years, I’ve had brainstorming sessions with colleagues and friends only to spend the next hours trying to recall the fluid and articulate brilliance that was shared during moments of valid and impassioned inspiration.

There’s a point to all of this. I’m starting to take this approach because we have become so jaded by marketing that we don’t respond to the contrived. We seek out the genuine. The authentic. The live concert over the studio album.

Traditional communications approaches cannot respond to this change. The days of telling companies how to sound are numbered. The model needs to be reversed. Communicators need to harness the ideas, language and passion of the people that make up an organization and use their words to tell the story.

I’m going speak to the other project members and I’ll capture their exact phrasing and their exact terms so that there is no change in tone from the web site you visit, the apps you use or the people you speak with.

Regardless of the medium, it’s us. Word for word.

First draft – recorded May 8, 2008
The sound quality is poor. I didn’t have my voice recorder and had to pull the ideas off of my answering machine.

I’m currently reviewing frameworks for the new apps we are developing.

My friends in the enterprise tell me I should use Struts or .Net, but that is just a long way to go for a drink of water. From what I’ve seen, Struts and .Net projects tend to develop the marketing skills of IT project managers, who need to sell why its taking so long and why it costs so much money.

But the simple fact is that Struts and .Net have the framework market share in the enterprise. But why?

If you go to India, you will find a strong belief among developers that those two frameworks are the only things worth knowing. But we are to blame. They just listen and respond to what the “customer asks for”.

When you go into a conference room in India you will have the choice of exotic tea, coffee or Diet Coke. Why Diet Coke? Because that is what they hear we want.

I can see it going down something like this … “Would you like something to drink?”. “Sure, do you have Diet Coke?”. Because really, what else are we going to ask for in a country like India? We are going to ask for what we know, what we feel safe with. Even when something more interesting and compelling is on the table.

Not for me.

The new apps will not be on Struts or .Net.

Having just wrapped up my involvement in a Fortune 500 CMS project, I’m convinced that big apps are on their way out.

If you work in IT for a Fortune 500 company and work on a big app, ask yourself these questions:

1. Have you meet with the big app pre-sales, regional sales and professional services teams, and did they recommended you upgrade, purchase additional software and buy more consulting hours?
2. Did the big app sales team keep telling you about their other applications and recent acquisitions?
3. Did you use an excel spreadsheet or calculator to work out how many processor licenses you needed and how much it would cost?
4. Did you find yourself asking the vendor what they considered a processor? Was a dual processor the same as 2 processors? What about a quad processor? At $20-35k per processor, semantics matter.
5. Did you find yourself asking the vendor if you needed to purchase licenses for development and staging?
6. Were you inundated with questions from your hosting and support providers? Questions like…What hardware should they buy? Do they already support all the components? Do they need training? When do they need to buy the boxes? Who needs access? What type of architecture is it? What should they do with the existing architecture? Does it cost more to support? Does it scale?
7. Did you either a) negotiate vendor training for the development team and business areas OR b) build a powerpoint presentation explaining why you didn’t
8. Did you gather global requirements for the app? If so, did you hear – “We already have a system in country xzy that does this and works.”
9. Did you migrate country xyz’s app into the “global solution”, and catch hell from them because the “global solution” does less and costs more?
10. Have you become one with Powerpoint

If you answered yes to most of them (and you probably did), its important to realize how we got here.

The big app model persists today because it looks good on paper. In this IT model, you only need a few apps to run the business. You can standardize the technology and move support to low cost countries. Business areas are on board because they hear it will cost them less and they will get better support.

But the big app model is not working. It is taking too long, costing too much, and big app vendors are not innovating. Have you seen a big app that doesn’t look old?

Its time for a change.

So what can you do as an IT manager?

1. Stop feeding the big app. Move to a “just keep the lights on” support model. Stop paying the big app vendor a percentage of the overall sales price for support per year. Stop enhancements. Stop all non-critical bug fixes. Stop 24-7 support. If you are concerned about your customers being upset, chances are they are already upset. So start rolling out better solutions in less time (next step)
2. Invest the money instead in hosted solutions that can be rolled out in under 30 days. Hosted solutions don’t require you to expand your internal infrastructure, they typically offer APIs so you can move data around internally when needed, and they are innovating.
3. Build a small internal team to support these “new” apps. Make sure they are on the business side of IT, and have them gather enhancement requests from your customers. Forward enhancement requests to the hosted solution provider and share any roadmaps with your customers.

It is time to get stuff done.

Leave big apps behind.