Yes, but what does it do?

I was in a briefing call today by a large software vendor, it wasn’t a one to one briefing there were a few of us on the call – I am not going to say who they were and if you know I’d rather you didn’t either.
I am sure the point I am going to make can be applied to lots of briefings and is no way a reflection of quality of their product, services or makes them evil people. I just saw a slide, that for the good of product marketing, analysts relations and mankind – must be shared and well, I guess shamed.
Here are the bullet points, in verbatim:

• Moving ECM from “Point” to “Platform”
• Low Cost of Ownership
• Unified ECM
• High Return on Investment
• Leveraging Fastest Growing Middleware Stack
• Effective Standardization
• Content Platform for the Enterprise
• Improved Business Responsiveness
• Content Management for Enterprise Applications and Portal
• Risk Mitigation

I don’t think I am breaking any NDA by sharing that, as this says absolutely nothing.

Also, you may say – “but Truscott, you hilarious young man, you’ve taken it out of context” – but trust me. I didn’t.

The rest of the slides said it was big, enterprise, billions, DOD compliant and leading – with lots of architectures and TLA’s….

I can see the value in big, but being big doesn’t absolve your responsibility to be valuable and being able to put that in a form I understand – or more importantly in a form a business user, the guy that writes the cheques, a visitor to your website or shareholder understands.

I spent 30 minutes thinking – Yes, but what is it for? What does it do? How does it help?

What do you think?

Image of robot by KB35 reproduced under creative commons license.

Ian Truscott

Founder of the B2B marketing agency appropingo and editor of Rockstar CMO.

I’m a former CMO, a marketing strategist, content marketer, columnist, speaker, industry watcher, but most of all; creator of ART (Awareness, Revenue, and Trust) for the companies I work with.

If the topic of this article is interesting, if I can help your business, or you just want to say hello please get in touch.