Summertime
And the living is easy
Fish are jumpin'
And the cotton is high
Oh, your daddy's rich
And your mama's good lookin'
So hush little baby now
don't you cry
One of these mornin's
You're gonna rise up singin'
Then you'll spread your wings
And take to the sky
From “Summertime”
George Gershwin and Dubose Heyward
Dear Colleague,
It is summertime, but the living is not that easy... (unless
your daddy
is indeed rich). The
enterprise software market is still reeling.
Hot and hazy summer days are not the best time to turn things
around. Customers are on vacation,
salespeople are at the golf course, and the product is practically
melting. Marketing?! They never do any good anyway...
So what
can you do to get things going this summer?
Whenever things don’t work out, we try to look at root
cause, which usually leads to some sort of strategic discussion about
positioning. This doesn’t go very far
either: the only meaningful conversation you can have these days about
positioning is how to place your easy chair to catch the best breeze. Or how to secure the most strategic position
for people watching on the beach.
What about promotion? After all, summer promotion is a great tradition. So we sweat it and came up with some grand ideas that are guaranteed to get your customers all excited:
- Offer a trip to the North Pole.
- Use the 80/20 rule: offer 80% discount to 20% of your
customers.
- Treat your prospects to a beach party. Most would rather buy your software suite than show up in a bathing suite.
- Burn your software on frozen CD’s (sells especially well
in Arizona).
- Go global. It’s time to open that office in Australia (it’s winter there).
- Go fishing. Forget about selling software. Only fish are dumb enough to bite the bait after all these years.
As usual, we are looking for your feedback – did our ideas
work for you? Do you have any other
ideas you’d like to share with our readers?
Write to
SummerIdeas@MarketCaputre.Beach.
To really ease things up these days, we’re offering a
shortened summer issue of our newsletter.
Last month, we wrote about
opportunities
for renewed growth in the enterprise software market. Two great articles published since then add relevance and substance to the topic. The first article shares our enthusiasm for the “Software as Service” business model; the second echoes the
sentiment we voiced for lower expectations, concluding with the words “small is beautiful.”
We end this issue back on a less serious note; keeping with
our summer tradition, we turn to Dave Barry for some funny reflections.
We’ll be back with our standard newsletter format in
September.
For now, enjoy the rest of the summer,
Eran.
