After we finished our last version a few months ago, we finally realized what kind of tool we wanted to build. The problems was that the UX decisions to pull of this kind of experience is very uncharted territory. Uncharted in terms of all disciplines of product development. It was a very painful process but we’re coming out the other side… I’ll be posting more on that soon. The release is happening in February to a close beta list of a few thousand people. If you haven’t signed up yet, you should go and do that to get on the beta list.

When you’re building a new product with a long development cycle (assuming that you had no other option), you must accept that you’re going to be making a lot of stupid decisions that have no basis. Your job is to reduce that as much as possible by being aware when you’re working on something just because you find it interesting.

You have to get visibility into the impact value somehow.

Many designers that I’ve worked with have no concept of the relative impact value of their decisions. They basically don’t know what they should focus on first. Sometimes that’s good but most of the time, you’re diving into a horrible black hole (because you find it interesting) and if you’re in the design / management function of product development, you’re going to drag the rest of the team with you. That’s selfish and really unproductive.

So my advice is to understand where you have the most visibility / impact value and focus on that first.

If you have to solve issues that you don’t have visibility into -> prototype. Keep prototyping until you understand what’s going on. If you can, don’t tax your main product team with this. Use someone else to prototype. Use another firm. Another dev… anyone else really. Lack of visibility is your problem, not theirs. Solve it before you confuse them too.

A naive / overly ambitious designer or product manager can destroy products. I’ve done it myself plenty of times. The results are horrid. People usually write it off as the expense of doing experimental things. I say it’s a really dumb way of managing resources.

By definition, a good UX happens when a user can figure out the critical action items without having to struggle.

We have to remember that all UX is learned. There is nothing natural about it. A drop-down, double click, shift + click, drag and drop… you learned all that. So the only intuitive things that exists for users are design patterns and conventions that have been used over and over again.

When we design, we really have to ask our selves if this new convention that we’re about to establish in our app is worth the learning curve. More importantly, you have to realize when you are effectively pushing a new convention. Or that there is a convention already established for something like this.

A new convention should never be pushed into an app unless the currently massive library of conventions forced into a user’s workflow by millions of applications everyday cannot support the actions that we want to make available to a user. If you are still going to push the new convention, make sure it’s really worth it for them. Don’t tax them because of your laziness.

It would be cool to do an article on the different levels of conventions. From ones that have been grandfathered in and the new ones that starting to become natural.

It’s tough because you’re putting your entire company at stake when you choose a partner to build your product. Natrually, you feel like you have to protect yourself. So you start making yourself feel like you know what you’re doing. You prepare “wireframes” in powerpoint (or something equally horrible), writing long word docs and getting your logo made on 99designs. This makes our job a lot harder since we have to spend the 1st week to just convince you that you need to re-do all this.

Product development is also expensive. You don’t want to confuse product development and web development. Web development happens when you know what you want to build. Product development encompasses the whole process from the start to the end. From product planning all the way to deployment, qa and launch.

So now you start getting some prices and get scared. Instead of understanding why, you immediately look around to find a cheaper way of doing things. The internet never fails that test! It’s a sure way of making yourself feel good in the short-term. With all the lean methodology out there, clients really feel like somehow pasting together a designer and developer = a product team. This clearly produces really low quality products. You get to mix poor tech decisions with poor UX decisions. It turns out wonderful!

Product development firms are very deeply involved in your product planning process. Most of the time, we change our client’s ideas completely during the 1st phase of the project. You want to work with people that are honest and will help teach you how to organize yourself so you can effectively bring your ideas to life. Sending them the powerpoint you made is not going to help much. Learn from them. Put your guards down.

The key thing here is that you’re BUILDING a PRODUCT. Except that you’re not doing that. Someone else is doing for you. Yes… it’s your idea but your company will be defined mostly by what we end up building and not what’s on the napkin.

Building a cohesive, solid, polished product takes a lot of work and attention. It doesn’t matter where it’s produced or how much experience the person has. It’s a really difficult thing to pull off. It takes an extremely dedicated / multidisciplinary group of people to produce such a thing.

The core issue of engaging with a product development agency is that you expect a really loyal and dedicated service from them. One that can’t really be measured in hours. But many still conveniently think of it as a traditional service provider… I’m paying you x, you are performing a service for me and I want to get a good deal so… I’ll try to get MORE. Most people won’t admit to this but it’s true. You try your best to get more.

In this particular transaction, it’s the absolute opposite.

What you want to do is focus on getting less stuff (features, pages, modules, widgets, etc). Give the firm more time to polish. More time to perfect the same items. The more stuff you get, the lower quality each part will be.

More of a lot of crap is really useless for your users. Less of an awesome thing is pretty useful. I know it’s tough, it takes a ton of trust and a solid partnership but ultimately, it’s what I’ve seen produce great results for both agencies and our clients.

Yes. They do. They just don’t know it’s ok to act like that. We have lots of bad IBM-like examples of conducting business. Most people will make the case for enterprise caring for a trusted partner much more than a better product. That’s bull. The process can definitely be optimized.

It’s about knowing more information. It’s about understanding what you are purchasing. Most importantly, it’s about not wasting time. Enterprise or not, you don’t want to be responsible for purchasing a poor product.

Buyers are getting smarter and demand more. We all know that. So why aren’t enterprise clients changing the way they demand information? It’s simple.

They usually aren’t the end users are the product that they purchase. That’s a serious issue. It’s massive.

Most of us in the web world are use to completely different purchasing dynamics. We are use to a predictable experience. It’s the idea of trying before buying. It makes complete sense and we are demanding it now more than ever.

Going back to enterprise… The issue is the role of sales. They are confused about where their client interaction begins. You can create a more scalable sales organization by creating a better “try” funnel and still inserting sales but only when it makes sense.

It will always make much more sense to scale advertising, getting customers informed / interested, and then involving sales.

The key thing to figure out is what is informed and interested? How do you do that effectively? It is different for every product but I believe in recreating the sales experience online. That requires lots of work upfront. That means understanding who is visiting your site. Knowing what they are looking for. Anticipating the questions that they are going to have. And more importantly, knowing when to involve sales in this flow.

There is something very powerful about predictable experiences which plays into many aspects of marketing and scale in branding… especially when you involve technology. If you know how to give a guided tour or trial without being present, you can scale advertising rather than sales.

The goal is to decease your customer acquisition costs by figuring out which parts of the sales process are fairly repetitive and which require human interaction (sales).

The other issue besides being disconnected from the end-user benefits is the lack price transparency. It’s the lack of creativity in the space to understand how to present some level of pricing informational to make the potential customer feel as though they are not going to get ripped off the second they start speaking with a sales rep.

Vendors need to follow some sort of transactional pricing model in order to be competitive. At least that is what has worked for most of them.

Why? Well, that’s how those organization stay profitable. Their customer acquision costs are very high because they are chasing individual deals. They have to chase them because the pool is not that large.

In order to make up for the differences in sales cycles and difficulty to close a harder account, they need to make up the difference by charging a different price. You can’t do that when your pricing is transparent. That is a problem!

The way this old model works is by squeezing the most revenue from the bigger clients (with the bigger/longer chase) but also grabbing middle of their respective curve as well. Those accounts are not as profitable but they are enough to have value for the company.

The goal here needs to be how to present a semi-transparent pricing model. You need to communicate some basics. Like how do you charge? Per site? per user? per user/month? You give discounts to volume clients? Obviously? Ok.. then say that.

Most of these organizations are built with a large sales force. The way they can justify such high salaries is by having them optimize revenue per transaction.

So what happens if you bring in a fully transparent pricing model but still keep the sales force? You get a horrible customer acquisition model. A very expensive one. Even if you optimize the salary of sales and the price of the product and production to create some sort of margin, the model won’t scale because you’ll get stuck in client retention.

Sales people have to sell. With that comes promises attached to a person which requires proper account management to have a respectable client retention rate.

When you isolate the promise pre-sale and account manager which handles the account post-sale, you get horrendous retention rates. You’ll make money if the market is massive and you can churn through it but I personally wouldn’t ever want to be involved in that type of business.

That’s called theft.

You are robbing a market based on their lack of understanding on your offering. We are seeing this in the local advertising / promo space right now.

You don’t see much of this in the enterprise space because they don’t switch much. Even if they do make a horrible choice, they stick with it for at least a year.

So what is a b2b tech company suppose to do?

Let’s make a big assumption first… that enterprise clients start to slowly act like consumers in some respects and request the same type of practices that seem familiar to consumers

In that scenario, what will be a good model for a b2b tech company to adopt?

It’s obviously different for everyone but I think that the bulk of predictable experiences that we’ll start to see in entp products on the web is the try now (in some form) and then let the sales person in to optimize revenue type of relationships.

It’s leveraging technology the right way (show it to me). It is respectful to the consumer and it’s a model that could be optimized to return a healthy profit given all the other parameters are correct. The only thing is if you have a crappy product and really good sales people, you are not going to do too well either.

It takes a long time to get a consumer’s trust. On the web, we get it by mainly letting the products shine.

Web people haven’t been that great at marketing their products. They build utilities and let the use cases market themselves. They wrap the product features in the idea. It’s a different dynamic. It’s much more real.

We build a product and then let them give it a try. It’s because trying is effortless. Why not? It is the engineer’s way of marketing.

We have to remember that when more effort exists to try, the more we require trust from the customer in the sales process. The more we require trust, the better job the marketing and sales department has to do in selling. Most b2b products on the web still work like this.

In many of today’s b2b markets, you see a horrible trend of the most horrendous companies investing very little product and a ton on sales. The saddest part is that they will outperform the company with a better product and weaker sales. It’s true… It will be a short term play and you’ll still lose to the guys with a better product and better sales but at least you’ll win against the ones who spend most of their resources on product. It’s a horrible thing. The end users end up losing with this dynamic. I hope this changes soon.

The one trend that we’ve seen over and over again is tech companies that have enabled a bottom-up approach to their target markets. Those companies tend to have great products with a super frictionless way of using their product. Think Salesforce… Yammer.

The goal of marketing and sales in a b2b (not including small business) tech company should be to work with the product team to get to a sustainable product cost model that can allow them to get the product in the hands of the consumer without the need for them to ask for it.

Most of what sales should do is just optimize the revenue once the relationship (could be very loose) has been created and for marketing to focus on tracking and communicating results.

The critical part bout picking a good market isn’t size. It’s finding a market that is a good fit for you YOU.

You defined as you + the product that you can be passionate about. This is critical to understand. It doesn’t matter how massive a market might be. If you can’t stand to be competitive in that market, you shouldn’t be thinking about how huge it is.

So the way I like going about this exercise is to start asking questions about ourselves.

I run through these questions and start writing down the answers. Through this process, you’ll end up answering a lot of gaps in your own thinking. Just take the time to answer them thoroughly.

If you have answers to all these questions, you will be somewhere near having “market certainty” which I think is the most important milestone before starting to build a product.

• Can you design the ability to pivot efficiently (sales/product)
  • How easy is it to pivot on the market?
  • How easy is to pivot on the demographic?
  • How big is the potential adopting market?
  • How big is the acting market?
  • How easy is it to cross market the product to other markets without a shift in the core product strategies?
  • How long does it take to reasonably test the market assumptions?

• Market peer dynamic / adoption Influence points (when u don’t get the value prop for something but you still buy it because you trust)
  • How will the peer effect the adoption of other segments within the market adoption range?

• Dirty marketing sizing – real dirty
  • note: you should do proper market sizing as well. this is a dirty way of doing market sizing. i think it is more honest and less bull shit. you need more clarity in the short term. this is for yourself.
  • Most important: Define your Market Size as the ones who don’t need value props for you get through. The ones that will compare your product, understand their need and are pulling for your solution
  • Less important: The tech savvy % of your total market size
  • Ability to scale comfortably assuming infinite demand: Once you have the two above, look at the fastest you could scale your organization within the first year if the market demand was infinite
  • So what’s your market size? use the smallest number between the ability to scale and total tech savvy portion of your market size.
  • Now split this market into into Will Give it a Shot, Probably Not Gonna Buy It Within the Next Year (or 6 months?) and Would Buy it if Other People Would and you had to split the market into those 3 areas, how would split it?
  • Now remove the the ones that probably not gonna buy it within the next year… now you have a somewhat realistic market size.
  • To get an actual dollar value, take the pessimistic average dollar amount they would spend on your service * the market size that you defined in the previous step

• Market’s ingrained perception on services like yours and how that effects your profitability
  • Will they pay me me high rate compared to other market choice given the amount of product investment?
  • What does the average sale look like? When someone asks them why did you buy this product… what would they say?
  • What would they mention about the price that they paid for the product if they mentioned it to a colleague
  • What are the price points of 3 of our compared solutions?
  • How much time will it take me to get the client up and running?
  • How much time will it take me to service a client?

• Sales dynamics
  • List 3 value props that have worked in this market and their relative CAC ratios
  • Can you get the contacts of at least 2 – 3 decision makers within your network?
  • Are there distribution partners that we can work with?
  • How long will the sales cycle take for similar products? list 3
  • How clearly fragmented is the market? does that translate into nice bucket for value props?
  • How does your CA costs compare to a length of time for giving your product away
  • Describe 3 different perfect reference clients? How can you get them as soon as possible

• Market insight ability, accessibility and sales learning curve
  • Do you and the market use the same language when describing the solution?
  • Do you know roughly the size of the budgets that this market spends on solutions like this?
  • When you told them how much you were planning to charge for it, what was their reaction?
  • Have you ever worked with one? Is one of your family members in this profession or positions?

• Perceived value of ANY (not yours.. let’s say the best) solution for the pain
  • Do they current enjoy the task?
  • What does the full process look like the user’s mind?
  • If they could avoid this task, would they do it?
  • How terrified are they of the task that you revolve the product around?
  • Is it a common (how common?) problem in the market that you are looking at?

• Market perception of your service – degree of commodities to high service
  • Do they see your product as a high service or a product that is basically a commodity?
  • If you had to define the mix between service and product, what % value would you give to each?

• Market behavior transparency
  • What pricing structures are they currently accustomed to?
  • What types of offers are they most receptive to? What have worked?
  • How do they hear, learn, and evaluate their decisions?

• Market perception of your service on technology
  • When you explained the concept to the potential demographic, how long did it take them to get what you were talking about?
  • Will they pay a premium price for this?
  • How cynical are your users and purchasers about technology? look at the tyes of technologies they use for their own personal use

• Your organization’s potential in this market
  • Who are these people?
  • Do you care about them?
  • Would you be ok with spending an entire day with one of them?
  • Have you worked in one before?
  • Can I create a must have for them that is better than the competition? If marketing didn’t exist and it was just the task and you guys went head to head… who would win
  • How accessible are the decision makers to YOU?

• Marketing / wave riding / making a splash
  • Is the entire industry talking about solving this problem?
  • Could you get easy coverage?
  • What market entry strategies would work best in this market? which ones would have the most lasting effects?
  • Are there clear areas where you can directly target the highest likely adopters?
  • Would you be able to be a topic in the industry forums and conferences?

• What your customer do now and what you want them to do
  • What does it cost them to do the task?
  • What are they switching from?
  • How difficult is it to make them switch?
  • How high are the switching costs for the customer?
  • What concerns do they have about switching?

• Product use dynamic – purchaser vs user (b2b sales dynamic – doesn’t really apply to smb or consumer)
  • Am I selling to a person that is different than is different than the one making the purchasing decision?
  • Is there any price point where the person that uses the product can purchase my product?
  • What is purchaser worried about when he makes a decision?
  • If the user likes the product, what things would he say yes to that are closest to purchasing the product? be creative

• Ability to create compelling value proposition given YOUR product vision (assumed that you have one)
  • If you can’t convince them on the first value prop, what’s the second one
  • If the product was free, who would you would talk to and how long would it take to be adopted?
  • What others items that are close to your product does your product user use?
  • Have they heard my value props before? if so, what are the words that they keep repeating?
  • If you posted the message on a Linked In discussion, would people think you are spamming?
  • What are the other services that the customer compares our solution to?
  • Do they see the medium or base tool of your product in the way that you intend it to? example: Empowerkit is the product. Client is Lawyers. The value prop is using personalized lawyer sites as a lead generation tool. problem: lawyers don’t think the web can generate leads

• Degree of demand creation ( you want this to be as low as possible )
  • Are they understanding what I will put in my tag line?
  • How difficult will it be to form a good value proposition for them?
  • How confused are the users about what solution to use?
  • How many other services need to be created in the market in order for my service to deliver the intended value?

• Reaching “market certainty” and aligning it with your “perceived whole product”
  • Your goal should be to align your feature set with key milestones that allow you to pivot your feature set and build your architecture in a way that you’re not building feature-set for a market that you are not sure about. I think a good metric to use here is market certainty. It’s a point at which you have clarity on all the items outlined in this document + you understand the Perceived Whole Product by your client. You should design your market and product development stages around your market certainty date.

• Few ways of getting these answers
  • Talking to potential customers without their guards up
  • Giving them the product for free – helpful in understand the perceived whole product
  • Market research reports to get a high level view – I think this is one of the first steps to figure out what things not to focus on or to kill a few of your assumptions
  • Put together good questions. There is nothing worst than talking to people ad asking dumb questions that don’t help you figure anything out

• If you are done with all of above. Here are some additional ones:
• Are you OK with staying in this market for 3x the length that you had planned? and more importantly do you have the financial ability to withstand that?
• Are you honest with your team’s capabilities relative to the market? and if not, what do you have to add to your HR mix in order to be able to aggressively compete
• Will you be fighting with a massive player at any point in the first year? Think about how that will change your product strategy / value props. Bigger companies can out market you. You need to leverage your base feature-set and pivot on key area that allows you to focus on needy slice of the market that you were targeting
• Lots of smaller competitors are good if they are spending marketing dollars. They are bad for you if they are doing direct sales on the lowest hanging fruit in even in a low switch cost product

Online publishers need to understand the difference between their readers reading (or hearing) and taking action when it comes to ads.

The point of any publisher is to publish quality (relative to the audience’s judgement) stories and content. The way it sells advertising that gets clicked on is by having relative and targeted advertising to the topic and the audience reading that story.

Ye. So you knew that. Now an online publisher places ads all over their site. The bottom toolbar, inline within the content, huge block to the right, animations going on and add some popups on top of all that. So what are you saying to me when you do that?

I came to your site to read an article that your journalist took the time to write. I clicked on the article because it interested me. You spend most of your resources as a company making sure this experience is good for me but yet, you have another department of your company (or completely outsourced one) trying to kill the experience. Keep in mind that you also told me that I should read this ad when you put it on this story. I trust you.

You’re trying to kill my experience. How? Well, not just because the ads are flying all over the place but because you want me to click on it. I don’t think anyone comes back to the article after clicking on it. Yes, the click. You can’t click a newspaper ad. You’re going to keep moving to the next story. You can’t click an ad on the radio. You’re going to keep listening to the next piece of content.

The best way to think about this is to see how much content is viewed after you serve a super relevant ad to an online reader. Probably very very very very little.

When you compare that to TV, radio, or newspaper, that is a fundamental difference. Yes, it is better for the advertiser but if the publisher doesn’t do it right, it goes against everything they setup their organization to do.

So how do you fix it? You have to understand sequence and flow. When do I want to ask this person to check out this advertisement and how? and the hint is that it is definitely not how you’re doing it now. It’s a hard problem to solve and only some companies have figured how to actually fit advertising into the customer flow. Mint.com would be an excellent example although they are not an online publisher.

Whatever the solution is, the metric to use will be in increasing your reader’s post-ad experience content served.

Mideastyouth, the organization behind this great idea was very forward thinking in allowing us to open source this project so you should thank them first and foremost.

The platform is built on Ruby on Rails (3).

Giving users an easy option to have a relavant experience will always be a good idea.

The user interface is simple, applies across different mediums/devices and allows the user to finally get a personalized version of the site without having to put any effort in.

There has been a lot of empty promises in this area with the popularity of start pages but the key here is to listen, guess and then make it as simple as possible to edit. That sequence is very important.

If you like this idea and want to implement it, drop us a line… we’d love to work with you.

The screencast will do the talking.