In the last year I have had a chance to see things from the other side of the coin. Instead of a vendor centric world I have seen a bunch of things from the reseller and customer perspective. I have seen two sins, of which I was guilty of myself in a big way, that vendors commit s regular as clockwork.
1) Renaming everything... again. Or brand management gone mad
Stop renaming everything! And then re-renaming it. Customers are not fooled when you rename a piece or crap, nor is a loyalty cemented after an acquisition (like say Big Red or Big Yellow swallowing up a smaller security company) by removing the traditional names. We as the audience are just aggravated that we need to research what the hell it is that you have just made harder for us to figure out. Not just the big security iconic companies are guilty of this, it is everywhere.
2) We have heard this before. Here is a sin I have been guilty of myself (in spades). Every vendor likes to tell the story that they are the industry thought-leader with a feature that no one else has. In the reseller and buyer community we hear everybody’s version of the pitch. Not only are the vendors not differentiating their product offering they are doing damage to their credibility by telling the same lies everybody else is. Here are some recent examples:
a. Blue Coat, Web Sense, McAfee, and Symantec all have huge splash pages on how they have the biggest sensor network in the world and can protect you best from zero day threats because they are so HUGE
b. Mobile Iron, Symantec, McAfee and Good are all at the limits of the mobile device operating systems (Apple IOS and Android mostly) and can only do the same limited things in mobile device security. All have the same limits and the same roadmaps. No amount of motion-graphics on a power point changes this.
c. I won’t name names on this one because there is some insider knowledge to it. Vendors move a product forward to versions like 9 or 10. They put a pretty new logo and marketing campaign around it. This does not fix antiquated Databases, nightmarish installers or shortcomings in performance. Only fixing the product does that.
Now I won’t say that this is all bad. Marketing pushes the boundaries of truth by its very nature. But when the most likely circumstance is the audience KNOWS the degree to which you are pushing the truth boundaries, this is failed marketing.
What we did back when I was in vendor-land was a formula like:
A. Cost or repackaging and remarketing.
B. Cost of actually bringing a product to the features it claims to do
C. Revenue gained from sales
A is always cheaper and Quicker than B. If C is higher than A then continue with A and never go to B. The answer is never actually fix the issues.
What about factor D?
D. Company’s reputation and customer satisfaction.
What if we looked at the post sales satisfaction of customers? What if we factor in which resellers will never sell the product again or will do business with another vendor because of the pig-in-lipstick they bought?
Here is a novel approach brothers and sisters! Our customers and partners are intelligent mature human beings and are just looking to know what is being sold to them. They will remember who lied last time and will tell their friends. Sales by actually selling what you have to sell!
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