Slow Cooked Bacon

Despite the fact that the sales numbers are impressive, Android should really be doing much better than it is.  A single device (the iPhone) is still its largest competitor.  Shouldn't the scales have tipped by now, the way they did in the early 80s in the Apple versus PC war?  The iPhone, with proprietary, closed technology scuttling by with 10% market share while Android eats the other 90%?  Why is the iPhone still even a factor?

Look no further than the most recent high-profile Android release (the Droid Bionic) and the advertising for it:

This kind of stuff scares the crap out of everybody who doesn't love computers.  It's not focused on what those features let you do (easily hook up your phone to show pictures and movies on your TV, stream high-quality video without long buffering times, switch between games and apps quickly without lag...)  It's focused on silicon, metal, and glass.  People aren't buying phones for that.  They are buying them for what they can do.

Nearly every ad campaign I've seen for Android devices either goes for the "crazy awesome feature list" approach or the "we're just like an iPhone" approach.  Those two approaches are going to keep Android neck-in-neck with the iPhone, rather than dominating it like Wintel dominated Apple in the 80s and 90s.

Why are we all so stuck on feature lists and technology needs and not focused on what we are trying to achieve?  Would anybody in their right mind spend a bunch of money on "phone tracking"?  No.  They will spend a bunch of money to save a bunch more money by optimizing their advertising. You're calling me...you're calling my company...because you believe that my expertise will help you solve your problems better than my competitors.

We do this now more than ever because we're so often expected to be an expert when we go to purchase something.  Nobody helps you in the grocery store buy the best tomato.  When you go into Walmart, nobody is going to help you pick out a computer that best fits your needs.  We go to Amazon.com and are expected to do the research ourselves to figure out exactly what product is going to fit our needs.

Instead of going to experts, we're going to warehouses.  This is great if you know what you're looking for (I can pick out the best tomato in a bin), but not so much as you dig into complex technology.  You might think you need call tracking and a bid management system, but what you really need is expertise in online marketing.

When you're looking to buy something large and complex (whether that's a service or even "buying" a consultant's time), ask yourself:  are you buying solutions and expertise, or are you just buying a feature list you're guessing you need?

Because if you are cooking bacon in less than 30 minutes, you're doing it wrong.

After starting my career solidly in the online community space, I've now spent some time in mobile application development and now in marketing optimization.

What I've learned is that each business really has the same value proposition:  develop a better understanding of your customer by building a better relationship with them.  This was brutally obvious in the online community space--those companies knew that creating a nest for their customer communities to foster conversation and transparency resulted in mutual understanding between customer and business.  Our early goals when I was working on the Microsoft Forums for .NET and Visual Studio were that clear:  we want to make a happier customer that sees us as human beings rather a faceless organization.  You build relationships, you build trust, and you build loyalty.

In mobile application development, a huge number of app proposals weren't about building the next blockbuster like Angry Birds, but rather to create an application that used the power and magic of devices like the iPad to delight customers and make them feel closer to your brand and company.  The recent Cleveland Clinic Heritage app was Sideways final foray into app development, but it's an excellent example of an effort primarily to build a connection with customers.

Now at Mongoose Metrics, the deep goal--the mission of the company--isn't in "call tracking analytics", but rather focusing on helping other organizations better understand who their customers are.  How are people finding your company?  What are they looking for if they decide to pick up the phone and call you?  How can you optimize so you're connecting with even more customers?

So why did I go into sales?

In title at least, I've been on the engineering side of the business since I got out of school.  I was a Program/Project Manager at both Microsoft and Telligent, and most recently, a Development Manager at Sideways.  I dealt in the word of user stories, schedules, scrums, bug bashes, and managing expectations.  And every once in a while, actual engineering.

During that time, I developed a healthy dose of skepticism for the "other side" of the business.  Sales and Marketing were the nicely dressed people downstairs, shaking hands with the client, going to expensive dinners, playing at conferences.  When they interacted with engineering, it was usually to point out something they required of us.  I heard lots of "We need" and "The customer wants" and "How long will it take" questions.  I was often forced into playing "defense", using phrases like "That's not practical given the time" and "Estimates aren't promises" and "Please don't promise things to the customer without talking to me."

Of course, there were good reasons why these questions were being asked--the salespeople and marketing people aren't blind, dumb, or stupid.  Many were generally unaware of how the technical side of the business thought and operated though, and that caused a ton of the friction--both between sales and development and between our company and our customers.

I like talking to customers.  I like talking to developers.  I'm an engineer at heart--I can speak "tech".  I eventually want to own my own business.  Why not give the "dark side" a shot and see if I can make a difference in that interface between sales and development?

And, okay, maybe Sideways went out of business and Mongoose was looking for a highly-technical sales person as well.  That did have something to do with it.

So I'm hoping to be able to share some learnings as I learn the sales side of the business.  And hell, I've already made a sale.

Several years ago, Chris Anderson wrote a well-received article in Wired called The Long Tail.  The general premise was that the internet was allowing companies such as Amazon and Netflix to cater better to customers whose interests and passions were often poorly served by the brick-and-mortar mainstream.  If you were into 1950s-era Westerns, Netflix could serve you up an endless stream of DVDs.  If you can't get enough about the art of the Byzantine Empire, Amazon was there to sell you book after book on the subject.

Fast-forward to 2011:  Goods are being sold and delivered more and more in a purely digital medium, unencumbered by the constraints of out-of-print edition books and a limited pool of DVDs.  The Kindle, nook, and iBook stores all deliver books in seconds to your eReader--without needing to have a physical copy of the book anywhere in their inventories.  The result is an expansion of the long tail, into an even longer one.

To get some interesting numbers on this, I wrote a simple program that scanned Twitter for a week for the special tweets that users can push to the web when they are done reading a Kindle book.  The tweets have a very common format, usually looking like this:

I looked for the top titles and top authors that people had read over the weekend, and found that typical "Long Tail" curve--there were groups of people reading the same books, but the vast majority of books that were mentioned were only mentioned once.  These books weren't popular, but they were the majority of the books being read.

In fact, a shocking 65.3%, or nearly two-thirds of total "reads" that were tweeted about last weekend were people reading unique books--books that nobody else tweeted about.

Why does this matter?  It's more proof that traditional marketing continues to lose influence in an economy and market that allows a greater and greater diversity of goods that are infinitely accessible to their customer base.  Yes, there are still literary "hits" (the Hunger Games trilogy had over 100 tweets), but those hits tend to be generated by word-of-mouth, from person to person, rather than from traditional advertising.  In fact, the best marketing of all, especially for the more obscure "long-tail" books, are the tweets themselves.

Welcome to the eReader-enabled Longer Tail.