Infographic by Dennis Michael Dimos

A value roadmap can provide a number of sustainable benefits inside the company that invests in the effort.

1. The capabilities section of the value roadmap showcases the gaps between what the roadmap says is needed and what the company can actually provide. The gap analysis showcases exactly where the company needs to improve its own capabilities in terms of people, process, solutions, and services.
2. The gap analysis becomes a decision tree for what, when and how a company needs to fill the gaps. It sets up decisions that need to be made regarding
   1. Priorities
   2. Timing
   3. Investments
   4. Methodology – build, buy or partner
3. The effort to develop the value roadmap can motivate a company. Let’s face it. The work is highly strategic. It’s about creating an innovative yet functional form of intellectual property that can help catapult the company to category leadership. It represents a significant value opportunity, and everyone involved knows it.
4. The roadmap team is a reflection of how powerful a company can be when it aligns its critical assets. The construction of a value roadmap requires the active participation of a cross-functional team from Product Management, Sales, Services, and Marketing. Input in = input out. Smart, committed people supported by executive sponsors will produce a really good result.
5. The roadmap identifies what each department needs to do
   1. Product Management needs to fill gaps in the product portfolio while continually improving existing products that are core to what’s needed
   2. Services can elevate its game from simply supporting customers to strategically guiding customers through a new consulting practice
   3. Marketing must leverage the thought leadership value of the roadmap, first with influencers like analysts and the media, then as a vehicle to drive higher value engagements with customers and prospects
   4. Sales needs to be trained on how to leverage the roadmap content in two ways: to create a new narrative with current customers; and to be able to have a credible conversation with senior executives who heretofore have eluded the company’s reach
6. The content of the roadmap can be repurposed into other thought leadership forms, such as keynote addresses, Point-of-View booklets, executive seminars, workshops, articles, and the like. For one company, we even formed a partnership with a top business school to create an executive education series off of the content of the roadmap. We received money (nice), valuable input (good), access to executives (really good), and the pedigree of partnering with a leading institution (invaluable).

As you have seen in these posts, a value roadmap is a highly worthy endeavor for those companies looking to lead a changing or emerging category. It has clear and sustainable benefits within the marketplace and within the company doing it.

But, it’s not easy. Not in the least. To be successful you have to be willing to commit to the hard work of doing it properly. Here are some tips.

– You have to stay firm with a skeptical sales force used to selling from demos

– You have to test the content of the roadmap as it’s forming with real customers in real sales situations as often as you can

– And, you have to be willing to take to heart what one of my executive partners in one of these efforts said when he admonished a Services team for not fully committing to the roadmap as it was forming. He said, “Get with the (expletive) program! If you’re not on the roadmap you’re off strategy!!!”

That was … and very much is … the point. A value roadmap is the strategy that can make all the difference. It has for the many companies with whom I’ve done this. It certainly did for the company and executive in the above story. Now, 10 years later, the company is leveraging version 6 of their roadmap as the clear leader of their market space. And that passionate executive is the CEO/President of the company!

Thomas Butta

Writers Note: This post is about what’s possible for those of you facing an opportunity to accelerate your organization to a higher level of value. It showcases a company that had the courage to challenge the status quo and heavy-duty competition. The story is longer than normal, but it’s a compelling case study that needs room to unfold.

Did you catch the news of IBM’s latest software acquisition a few weeks ago? Business as usual for Big Blue? Certainly. But, who and what is Platform Computing? Click here to find out.

We had the same questions in late 2009 when 21 Weeks was retained by Platform Computing, Inc. to help position and package Platform as a credible enterprise software player in cloud and big data against behemoths like IBM, HP, EMC and VMware.

For 17 years, Platform Computing was a well-respected leader in the niche field of high-performance computing (also known as technical computing). Its clients were companies who relied on large, mission-critical applications, like models used in financial services, discrete manufacturing, and oil & gas. Platform not only helped such companies maximize application run time, but Platform helped them optimize infrastructure costs as well. Before cloud, such infrastructure configurations were known as clusters or grids.

Platform was successful because its software had at its core a highly intelligent algorithm that optimized the balance between effectiveness and efficiency, run-time and cost, performance and capacity. The smart algorithm enabled Platform to achieve levels of optimization that far exceed other software companies. And because Platform’s open architecture worked equally well on any operating system or infrastructure configuration,  it helped its clients avoid vendor lock-in, the unspoken cost of doing business with the dominant players.

That was all well and good, but Platform’s year-over-year growth slowed considerably by 2009 as its niche market of high performance computing matured. So, Platform plotted its  move to the much larger and faster-growing enterprise software markets for cloud and big data. Platform’s expertise and experience were a good fit, and the markets provided the opportunity for geometric growth.

That was the plan, but the move came with significant risk. Platform would be expanding outside its big fish/small pond comfort zone to arguably the hottest segments of enterprise computing — markets dominated by iconic brands and enormous companies with marketing departments larger than the whole of Platform.

How did Platform transform from a relatively unknown company to become a credible player in the enterprise software markets for cloud and big data?

How did Platform achieve year-over-year double-digit growth?

How did this niche company from Toronto become important enough to be acquired by IBM, one of the most powerful companies in the world?

It did so in two ways:

1. Platform made the smart decision not to focus on the broad-based cloud market, but rather on the emerging space of private cloud favored by enterprises running large, mission-critical applications. Not only did this space closely resemble Platform’s roots in high-performance computing, but it was an area that was still forming. The same held true for big data. Focus gave Platform the the chance to compete.
2. Platform embraced a classic challenger brand stance. It established a compelling positioning platform around a provocative point of view. To Platform cloud — and whatever they call that which inevitably comes after cloud (like big data) — is simply an iteration of what came before cloud, like clusters and grids. To Platform the fundamentals of managing applications in cloud and big data computing environments are the same as running applications in clusters or grids environments. It all comes down to optimizing an application’s run time and minimizing infrastructure costs. Nowhere was this more true than in the emerging areas of private cloud and big data where critical applications and big enterprises played.

A simple, but bold refrain became Platform’s provocative point of view, positioning platform, and rallying cry: Clusters, Grids, Clouds, Whatever.

Everything flowed from that compelling, challenger positioning platform:

• The opportunity for growth

— The move beyond technical IT to corporate IT brought with it the chance for double-digit growth versus single-digit growth in the maturing technical IT market

• The acquisition of talent with enterprise computing and market formation experience

— New talent was enticed and secured for  product management and marketing, sales, business development, and corporate marketing

• Clarity of market sector

— Cloud had correlation to Platform’s roots, but private cloud had highly credible      relevance and no clear market leader. The same was true with big data. Focus increased Platform’s odds of success.

• Internal alignment

— The positioning platform provided a clear framework for internal decisions and    actions: Product development (best performing software for clusters, grids, cloud and whatever came next like big data); sales (cross-sell existing relationships with technical IT to get to corporate IT; attract new, enterprise customers); marketing (win over analyst and media influencers; drive awareness, interest & adoption)

• Brand Identity

— A change in identity is an effective way to get people to look at you in a fresh, new way. Platform’s new identity not only demonstrated exactly what it did, but it did so in a memorable way thereby achieving two strategic goals with one effort

• Messaging

— Platform lived the role of the challenger brand by being provocative and embracing bold in speeches, booth displays, advertising, webinars, its website, etc.

• Analyst  Relations

— Industry analysts are critical influencers to buyers, which is why Platform set out to become the advocate for private cloud, for example

• Recognition

— Leaders need to be recognized as leaders so Platform worked important industry and trade media to win and promote Platform’s technical credibility and prowess

• Thought Leadership

— Emerging markets are often led by the company that owns the customer problem so a series of Point-of-View booklets were created and marketed

• Sales Training

— Selling into the enterprise is where the best software selling machines operate. Platform needed a new kind of sales executive and a different mode of selling — from  feature/function focused to one that was value-oriented

• Partnerships

— Rarely does a company achieve rapid growth in a new market sector on its own. Hand to hand combat (i.e., selling to one prospect at a time) doesn’t scale. Finding one-to-many distribution opportunities is an effective match to direct sales

In two years, Platform achieved what it set out to do. It grew at double digit rates. It attracted new talent. It won over new important enterprise relationships. It generated credibility with customers, analysts and the media for its newest products.  It got noticed.

Could Platform have made it big if it continued on an independent path? It’s hard to say. But, Platform certainly transformed itself from a niche market, technical computing expert into a credible player in the hottest categories in enterprise computing today — important enough that IBM wanted to buy the company.

Platform’s Founder and CEO, Songnian Zou, summed it up this way in his post-acquisition blog. “Platform Computing as a standalone company may come to an end, but the journey continues to clusters, grids, clouds or whatever comes next.”

Will you be ready when you have that rare opportunity to transform your organization into a more valuable entity?  Will you be ready? Or will your attitude be one of … “whatever”?

Activation and action are key.

By Roger Ehrenberg
Roger Ehrenberg is the founder and Managing Partner of IA Ventures.

Throughout my business career, I’ve observed that people love to label current fashions. “Web 2.0,” “Cloud” and “Social” are three which are currently in vogue. In my lifetime likely none was bigger than “.com,” describing a business and its recognition of the importance of the Internet. Remember when long-established businesses would change their names by adding a .com extension, only to receive a salutary stock market reaction? This was an equity market story that was destined to have an unhappy ending, from which the public markets still have yet to fully recover. Needless to say, the Internet has changed billions of lives in positive ways too numerous to mention, but those benefits didn’t come from labels, stickers or launch parties. They emerged from businesses new and old building and re-positioning their strategies to harness the Web’s true power, and to engage with customers in more and better ways than was previously possible. Nobody gratuitously adds .com to their names any more, and as far as I know I haven’t heard anyone refer to an Internet-based business as a .com for at least five years. That said, I’m beginning to detect a similar phenomenon in companies touting a characteristic particularly close to my heart: the use of “data” to describe a value inherent in the business. And in many if not most cases, it’s not true and I’m not buying.

It doesn’t take a genius to know that data is everywhere, and that it is growing exponentially across virtually every dimension: bigger, faster, deeper – and perhaps even more messy. Every business uses and generates data, but this doesn’t begin to capture what it means to be a data-driven enterprise or where data is viewed as a discrete asset and treated as such. It is a fundamental issue of strategy and culture, and the mere presence of data is not itself an indicator of having deep and relevant data DNA. “Hey, our business generates a lot of data, BIG DATA” is a phrase I hear frequently which I assume is supposed to get me excited. It doesn’t. “Hey, we’ve got this thesis that as our business scales we’re going to build a monster data asset that can better help us attract, retain and monetize happy customers. It will help us create competitive barriers and we’re planning for this from Day 1. We’ve shared some early data with a data-hacker buddy and feel this is a promising avenue for building company value.” Hey now, NOW you’ve got my attention.

There is a world of difference between the mere presence of data (say, an inert corpus of data accumulated from customer transactions) and its activation (putting that same data in a form that can be analyzed in real-time to provide intelligence about trends, pricing, feature attributes, etc. and classified and stored in a way that subjects itself well for future analysis). The data-driven enterprise will embody the notion of creating and leveraging its data asset in everything it does, and will use it to drive current and future decision-making, not merely retrospective analysis. There isn’t some checklist to determine if a business has a deep data culture or not; believe me, if you are one you know it. And if you toss around labels that sound good but ring hollow as there isn’t a bridge between headline and application, then, well, you probably lack the culture I’m describing.

There isn’t anything wrong with not being a data-driven enterprise. I mean, we all can’t be data-driven, can we? Well… I take that back. There is something wrong if a business isn’t data-driven in some way. Online or offline, it doesn’t matter. Commerce generates data. Businesses need to learn from and leverage data to remain competitive and grow. Whether you operate a barber shop, an enterprise software business or sell virtual goods online you have the potential for creating a valuable data asset. But I’m here to ask you a simple question: “Where’s the beef?” Because without it don’t talk about it: just get it. It’s never too late to adapt but it requires core cultural change, and half-hearted efforts simply won’t work. Just as building an online culture has been critical for all businesses to compete in the 2000s, building a data culture has become an essential element for success in the 2010s and beyond.

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Never put off until tomorrow what you can do today.

How many times have we heard that refrain? How many times have we ignored it? How many times have we believed that nothing will change because of another day?

If you want (or need) to do something then why not get on with it?  Whether it’s energizing your company, reshaping how you do things, or simply making contact with someone you’ve been thinking about, why is it so hard to act with urgency?

Certainly inertia has something to do with it. Inertia, after all, is a force more powerful than momentum. Inertia is the weight that keeps us rooted in the status quo. Weighty things typically don’t inspire action.

Could it also be laziness? I suppose not doing what we want (or need) can be construed as being lazy no matter what excuses we might have.

But at the end of the day, I believe the failure to act in the here and now comes down to commitment. Acting with urgency requires a commitment to velocity that’s based on the belief that there are no guarantees about what tomorrow may bring. Anything can and very often does happen. The earth might quake. Your competition announces what you’ve been thinking of doing. Someone else writes the piece you’ve been noodling with. Etc.

Tomorrow has yet to emerge. Yesterday is gone. They are far, far away from what exists today. Today is in your control. What you do today is in your control. The sooner you internalize the notion that speed actually matters, the sooner you’ll take the steps toward becoming the person, company, parent, athlete, writer, friend, spouse, partner, mentor, and leader you want/need/can be.

Be in the moment. Focus on what’s in front of you. Then do it again and again and again. Be impatient with yourself. Just do it. Because you can.

Third, given the importance of transformation should organizations consider making transformation a business function? I would argue, yes. Organizing for success is key. Where can we find the best candidate to lead the transformation effort?

The Office of the CEO would seem to be a natural candidate, but it’s not my choice. While the Office of the CEO sets company vision and strategy it does not have the time or operational bandwidth to physically drive the transformation agenda day in and day out.

Who then? Who is best equipped to lead the cross-functional, enterprise-wide effort of making transformation happen?

I believe someone from Marketing should lead the transformation function. Why?

1. Marketing sees the whole. To do marketing well, it must understand customer needs and integrate the core of every organization – sales & service/product/marketing.
2. Marketing drives positioning. It brings vision to life. And it activates strategy.
3. Marketing is the point of the corporate spear. Everything lines up behind it as proof.

The original business can’t get to next level by working off of the old framework. Transformation to a new, higher-value business requires hammering out new boundaries and values that the sales & service/product/marketing functions can use.  Unlike the original business where boundaries and values were established under different conditions, there are three problems facing any new business that’s built on top of an old one.

1. Holistic understanding. The business is too big for any one person to fully grasp.
2. Alignment. Different camps derived from different functions, origins and cultures have built-in biases and agendas.
3. Accountability. The lack of common language and detailed cross-functional commitments and dependencies doom the group to under-achievement.

A cross-functional group does not have the time nor the expertise to solve these problems through the many execution iterations required. Nor will CEO-led management off-sites. The only way to give sustainable transformation a chance of sticking is to organize for success and select the right leader. For my money, that’s establishing transformation as a business function and selecting someone from marketing to lead the effort.

The Future of the Enterprise is at Stake

The job of driving transformation is critical. The future of your entire enterprise is at stake. The decisions on how to organize for success and who to select to lead the effort are politically loaded, that’s for sure. But, they are probably the most important decisions a CEO and board can make. They are decisions that will make the difference between success and failure – between remaining an organization stuck in its past or one whose value is vital to the interests of its customers.

This is the second part of a 2 part post. Read part 1 here.

Certainty is a lofty goal. We all strive to be certain about our choices and recommendations, but the reality is certainty is a continuous work in process.  People don’t expect you to be absolutely certain, but they expect you to be transparent in your efforts to be certain. That’s how I read this study. If you think about it, honesty, clarity, and transparency make for the most effective communication in all areas of our lives. The power of trying to be certain in the right ways will speed progress.

BY ANDREW HANELLY

Nobody can possibly know everything.

And we tend to look through a thick lens of skepticism to anyone who claims they do (here’s looking at you, gurus, ninjas, and self-proclaimed experts).

It may be that we’re cynical toward braggarts and wary of for-profit prophets with an agenda hidden behind their proclamation of knowledge, but it could be something more.

According to new research from Zakary Tormala, “[people] don’t necessarily mistrust confident experts, but we’re more persuaded by experts who are not confident,” he said in an interview with Harvard Business Review.

A description of the research:

“Subjects read a review that gave a new eatery four out of five stars. Half the subjects read a write-up by a professional food critic, and the other half, one by an amateur. Half of each group saw a review that was highly certain; the rest, a review that was tentative. The subjects were then asked how good they thought the restaurant would be … People who read the tentative professional review were willing to pay 56% more than people who’d read the highly certain professional review.”

It seems counterintuitive but there may be value in showing not playing your hand close to the vest and showing your audience what you’re holding – even if some of your cards are wild cards.

Admitting that you don’t know, but that you are committed to continually learning can be the most powerful promise you can make.

People can accept that experts don’t know everything. They are turned off when they claim they do. And they are most confident in an expert who is committed to improving, acquiring new knowledge, and staying as informed as possible.

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Phil Fernandez and Marketo have a really good thing going on. They’re trying to create a new category — revenue performance management — and throwing everything they can at it. I believe they’ll be successful for one overarching reason: They understand the value of time. Time is in their control. Most everything else isn’t.

BY FC EXPERT BLOGGER KAIHAN KRIPPENDORFF

Perhaps AT&T’s recent announcement that it would buy T-Mobile for $39 billion got you thinking: how much is my business worth and what would it take to double its value this year?

That is the kind of question we have been helping our clients answer for years. And we have found the best way to learn is to ask. When you are learning to cook a new dish, you consult a recipe. When you assemble IKEA furniture, you follow the directions (at least most of us do). So why not also consult someone about how to build huge value in your business?

Over the years, my colleagues and I have interviewed many CEOs and entrepreneurs to understand how they do it. But last week, we think we hit the gold mine.

Phil Fernandez is an entrepreneur who has already taken two companies public. Now he is applying his process again, as the CEO of Marketo–a Revenue Performance Management company, which over just a few years grew to 1,000 customers in 30 countries with a 315% year-over-year revenue growth rate. My colleague Nadia Laurinci and I got a chance to learn first-hand how Phil does it, and you can view my blogcast on building company value here.

Here is Phil’s recipe:

1) Set out to change the world: identify a business opportunity where you can make a dramatic impact. Tesla Motors (the first U.S. automobile company to establish IPO since Ford) is pursuing a grand mission: “to increase the number and variety of electric cars available to mainstream consumers.”

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I think your point about time is understated.  The point that you are making is that no clothes = no party. Waiting for the perfect outfit is the wrong focus.

Your point about time is THE point. That’s what 21 Weeks is all about. Speed Matters! I would keep hammering that.  The conflict isn’t between companies and people or CMOs and Boards of Directors. It’s between winners and losers. Winners understand the enemy is time, not their competition.  Whenever you make this point to me verbally (including today), I nod vigorously because the only thing worse than the whole ‘fit’ routine is the whole ‘is cloud or PLM or open source or any space for that matter…real?’ skepticism and indecision that piss away value.

The market has left the station. It’s not up to you, Board Of Directors, to decide fit.  The market will.