Welcome to the Q4 Rodeo

By Peggy Tierney Galvin, Chief Strategy Officer

Executive takeaway: In a crowded market with a lot of noise and growing ambiguity around the availability of capital in coming quarters, the best way to set yourself apart is to focus on how your solution solves your customers’ business pains.

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As we head into Q4, our clients are making the final push to finish the year strong and achieve the goals they set at the beginning of the year. With the trade war and increasing warnings about the economy from industry observers, it’ll be more important than ever to move deliberately and strategically with every prospect in the pipeline.

A sustained bull market and aggressive investment from VCs has resulted in an explosion of tech startups, some offering solutions that are little more than feature sets rather than fully baked platforms. Uncertainty about the continued bull market in 2020 means that customers will be more hesitant to invest in new technologies—especially those that fail to demonstrate how they address critical business pain points.

This can be a challenge. If you’re a technical founder, it feels logical to focus on how your product wins in speeds and feeds over the competition. Yet tech vendors need to be able to anticipate their customers’ “so what?” response to any feature-based marketing as budget dollars become more competitive.

Here are some questions to ask yourself to evaluate whether you’re addressing your customers’ business pains in your marketing comms:

• Who are my target organizations?
• What are the purchase influencer job roles within those organizations?
• What are their priorities/what are they being measured on?
• How does investment in our solution help them achieve their goals internally?

When you make the connection between your solution’s ability to reduce latency, cut chatter or reduce duplication, and how it saves money, boosts performance or opens up new revenue streams, you’re anticipating and answering the customer’s “so what?”

This will keep you on a solid footing so that you can finish the year strong and prepare for the year ahead with a clarified strategy and message.