Decoding the True Value of Platforms and Winning Customers with Paul Wiefels, Chasm Group

Discover the ripple effects of interest rates on the tech industry as we sit down with Paul Wiefels from the Chasm Group. Our enlightening conversation traverses the current challenges faced by tech firms, especially in the bustling hub of the San Francisco Bay Area. From the precarious dance of hiring to the tough decisions on layoffs, Paul unpacks the ways companies are striving to adapt to a "normal economy." His insights on the criticality of speed of execution provide valuable lessons for maintaining momentum in the industry, even as headcounts shrink and efficiency becomes the watchword.

Platforms are the buzzword of the day, but what truly makes a platform successful? We crack open the evolving definition, distinguishing between transaction platforms like Airbnb and innovation powerhouses such as AWS. Through candid anecdotes—including one from Splunk's former CEO—we underscore the importance of a customer-centric approach in tech leadership. It's not about the label 'platform' but the utility and customer adoption that truly cements a platform's place in the tech pantheon.

Wrapping up this deep-dive, the discussion shifts to the nuanced dance between vendors and customers. Paul emphasizes the need for tech companies to hone in on the outcomes and benefits that customers genuinely seek, rather than merely pushing the platform label. We dissect how Splunk's journey from a single-application offering to a comprehensive platform exemplifies the organic growth and alignment with customer aspirations that's crucial for success.

So tune in for a fresh angle on platforms and the critical importance of having a customer centric approach in the tech world.

You can view the Business Value Stairway framework that Paul shared with us here:
Business Value Stairway Extract 2023 (amplifiedgroup.co.uk)

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Transcript

Sam: 0:10

Welcome to Get Amplified the podcast about the people who power the tech industry. Well, I'm at home in Bucks. As usual, it is a rare afternoon podcast it's quarter past four or so and it's still light outside, which is blooming fantastic. You still got light up in deepest, darkest Oxfordshire Vicky?

Vic: 0:28

I have, and I'm watching the sun go down. Actually I've got a lovely red sky, Thank you.

Sam: 0:33

Amazing, beautiful. So I mean, I'm a bit miffed about this being an afternoon podcast because it's cutting into my nap time, if I'm entirely honest, but there must be a really blooming good reason for it. Vicki, who have we got on today?

Vic: 0:44

There is a really good reason. So thank you for taking time out of your nap time. The reason we're recording later on in the afternoon is because we have Paul Wiefels with us from the Chasm Group. And Paul, last time you were on, I learned so much from you and I always learn so much from you every time we have a conversation, so I'm really really grateful that you are joining us, and when we were prepping for this and I was trying to figure out what was the best use of your time, one of the challenges that we came up against was everybody that we speak to, all the clients that we observe. They all want to be selling a platform, and I just said that to you and that was it. There was a wealth of knowledge and experience that you started to share, and instead of sharing that just with me, I think it's really critical that we can share it for our audience. So I'm really grateful that you're taking the time with us again today.

Paul: 1:52

Well, thank you, Vicki. Sam, it's good to be with you. Thanks for inviting me. Always a pleasure for me to speak with you.

Sam: 1:59

You're very, very welcome indeed back on the podcast. We really appreciate it, so maybe you could start us off by telling us what you've been up to in the last couple of years, since you last graced us with your celestial presence.

Paul: 2:13

Well, first of all, I can't believe that it's been a couple of years. They have gone rather fast, as they seem to do. That's life. I think that from a technology industry perspective it's been a last couple of years have been, frankly, very bumpy for a lot of companies. Certainly in my neck of the woods in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live and where our office is, we have witnessed kind of a yet again another transformative in quotation marks moment for tech companies as they now purge the amount of staff that they hired on during and post pandemic and decided that when business slowed down, as it inevitably does, due to interest rate hikes, which this industry is extraordinarily sensitive to, and due to really just kind of coming back into what we might consider to be a normal economy with, in my view, normal interest rates, all of a sudden companies find themselves to be 10%, 15%, 20%, even over man, so to speak, too many people.

Paul: 3:32

I've always described this industry as one of the smartest, if not the smartest industries in the entire world and yet one of the slowest learners in the entire world. We go through these cycles on a very predictable, regular basis. I was going to say this this does seem to be a repeat. It does. It does. We have all seen this movie before.

Paul: 3:58

Sadly, for many of the people who find themselves on the other end of RIF a reduction in force, somebody who's made redundant by this many of those people have not seen this before. They've come out of university or they've been on the job for maybe three, four years or so. They've really enjoyed this industry and now suddenly find themselves now looking for something else to do, which I just reassure people who are on that slide, they will. We will go through another one of these cycles. That is what's really been going on over the past couple of years, at least in our experience. These are coming to grips with the new realities which, to quote a song of long ago, meet the new boss same as the old boss, same as the old boss.

Sam: 4:52

Yeah, yeah, I remember that one.

Vic: 4:55

It's funny because we've been growing in that time Paul since those last two years. So much of that is down to the guidance that you gave us and how much we've learned and actually taking our work and defining it as speed of execution, which is what we learned with you on the previous podcast. The tech is very similar but they're in a time-based competition that plays very well with us, actually, now, with that headcount reduction that you're talking about, if you're looking at efficiency, and with us people power, the tech industry how can you get that efficiency? How can you do more with less? That plays beautifully into our value proposition. So actually it's a great market for us currently.

Sam: 5:43

Vicky, I thought all this stuff was your idea. I didn't realise you ripped it off of Paul. Oh no, it's all. Paul, Paul, Paul.

Vic: 5:50

He gets all the credit for it, and my great team as well, that have helped pull it all together.

Sam: 5:55

But yeah, definitely not down to me. Would you mind just, probably for the benefit of, if nothing else, of our UK listeners, just explain your comments regarding the interest rates driving the industry so much?

Paul: 6:09

We have been worldwide, really. But let's just take the US and the UK economy, and I'm very, very familiar with both. Interest rate sensitivity has always been part and parcel, notably of the software industry, but across the board in technology. And why is that? We've been living with artificially low interest rates for almost 10 years or so maybe a little bit more than that, coming out of the 2012-2011-2012 recession, which was a mini recession. Then, previous to that, the 2008 or the 2008-09 recession, which was rather significant, and at least in this country, in the Bank of England did it too. But the Federal Reserve decided that, well, the economy was really in precarious shape. So we really need to stimulate the economy, and we do that.

Paul: 7:06

The Fed and to the same extent that the Bank of England, really have one instrument and that is the manipulation of interest rates. So when they lower those interest rates, what can you do? You can go out and borrow money very, very cheaply, and that literally borrowing it, or issuing bonds. What have you? Issuing debt instruments, and doing that at a very, very low rate. We saw banks doing this. You could get mortgages. We all have mortgages. We all got very, very low rates for our mortgages.

Paul: 7:44

So companies go out and borrow lots and lots of money, and they do so for all kinds of different reasons, as do their customers. So people go out and buy all kinds of new kit when you can get low interest rates. When those interest rates begin to creep up, that borrowing obviously stops or slows down rather than dramatically. Interest rates go way up as the economies heat up as they did. Inflation goes up and all of a sudden it becomes very, very expensive to both borrow and very, very expensive for companies to spend. So when we're in these kinds of situations, the tech industry in particular and I'll just confine my comments to that is really sensitive to these sorts of things, because their customers are sensitive to it, and so you get this slowdown. That happens when we have this, in a sense, free money. Other industries, obviously, are subjected to the same thing, but, as I said, the tech industry, in my opinion, has always been very very sensitive to this.

Sam: 8:54

That makes sense. That makes sense. It's a vicious cycle one way or another, isn't it?

Paul: 9:01

Back to Vicky's point and you've heard me say this before competitive advantage is not built and sustained by technology. It's built and sustained by people, and so those low interest rates allow us to go out and hire lots more people, and we get the advantage by doing so. When those interest rates go up, all of a sudden we've got a balance sheet, we've got a P&L that looks far less attractive, notably to public investors, but it also looks unattractive to private investors as well. And so now what is the major, single major cost, notably for software companies? It's people.

Paul: 9:39

And so we get back, as you were saying, Sam, back into this vicious cycle again, and what that means is that, for a company like Amplified, you're in particularly high demand because you've got to help teams do more with less. From a strategy perspective, as strategy consultants as we are, we have to look at our clients, or we're asked to look by our clients at their particular strategy. Is it really battle-hardened for the market realities of the day, or are they playing to a strategy that was appropriate even a year ago, even a shorter period of time as that? Now they have competitive headwinds from any number of factors. Oftentimes, the most prevalent factor is people just buy less.

Vic: 10:36

So certainly the sales cycle slows down, decisions take longer.

Sam: 10:41

Yeah, most money is more expensive. It makes sense yeah.

Paul: 10:45

And the last point that I'll make on that is the other thing that we see over and over again, particularly the low interest rates. It's very inexpensive to start a company. There are categories out there right now that are must-have categories for customers. Cyber is one of them. They've got to have AI. They may not know what it means, but they've got to have AI and so lots of companies flood into the marketplace and, all of a sudden, interest rates go back up, market headwinds happen and now a customer is asking who do I really need in my stable of supplier? I certainly need these guys over here, but I need those guys over there. Thank you so much顶 call.

Sam: 11:38

Do you think, as the peak of interest rates feels like it's unwinding now, are we at the beginning of a boom cycle? Do you think again? Fingers crossed, hell yeah.

Paul: 11:54

I know, for our business, for our clients, for our personal investing. So fingers crossed, yeah, I mean, I think so. I am not as rosy cheeked as I think some of the pundits are out in the marketplace right now, notably on the financial press, about oh, we've hit this Goldilocks moment, we've hit this. Any time I start hearing a prevalence of opinion that this is all going to turn out beautifully, we'll all be home and dry with presents and sugar plums and everything else, I get nervous. Yeah, yeah.

Paul: 12:40

I think what it is that never seems to be actually the case, yeah. Yeah. So, as I say, fingers crossed, I think it looks good. I'm not going to Las Vegas, where I was last week, put money on it.

Sam: 12:55

Yeah, fair enough. Sentiment is somehow important here, though. Yeah.

Paul: 13:02

There's a certain set of cognitive biases which we like to self reinforce ourselves.

Sam: 13:09

So it would appear Brilliant. Thank you for that. Aside, so that wasn't what we dragged you onto the podcast to talk about today, but I just thought it would be interesting, as most of our listeners are sort of tech industry centric, to get the view from across the pond, as they say, is really helpful. So thank you for that. So we wanted to talk today about platforms, didn't we, Vicky? We did the P word Everyone's got a platform.

Vic: 13:35

Everybody, everyone's got a platform. We've got a platform. We haven't, we haven't.

Sam: 13:40

I don't think I've got a platform anymore, Maybe a burning one. So can we define platform pool? You know every IT vendor's got one. It must mean something, surely?

Paul: 13:52

Well, I think it's in the eyes of the holders now, it's a word that has been bandied about for the last 15, 20 years or so, and I think that it was something that was quite exalted in years past, and I think the terminology itself has been somewhat, co-opted. Shall we say, co-opted. Diluted, yeah, diluted, yes, you know, you can write people who kind of throw it about as they would. You know water coming out of your faucet. Look, the classic definition of platforms really are and this is not our definition or my definition. This is people who write books. Michael Cusamano, the business of platforms and his co-authors, Cusamano defines platform typically as either a transaction platform, you know, one that you can do things against, so an Airbnb, a Sales force, an Apple App Store? I was going to say one of the apps.

Paul: 15:00

So apps yeah things like that, things that you trade on. That is a platform. He also describes what he calls innovation platforms, where other people can play off of a base platform of infrastructure AWS, Azure, Google, et cetera and build things on top of those infrastructure platforms. That might be an operating system, as an example, so Apple, ios, people build apps on the Apple, ios or Android platform. So a transaction platform, an innovation platform. And then there is the. What I think is the more commonly used or kind of internalized definition of platform is well, we have a single pane of glass, so all of our applications kind of look and work the same, and a related variant to that is well, we have a singular code base or we have a common set of APIs, and so all of those get used as platforms. Our platform can talk to their platform, and so on and so forth.

Sam: 16:17

APIs.

Paul: 16:19

Yeah.

Sam: 16:21

The pane of glass thing. I once heard a customer of ours describe a particularly poor vendor portal as a single glass of pain. Nice one Indeed.

Paul: 16:36

And that's all fine. And again, I think this is migrated over time. The way that we have always thought about platforms becoming or coming of age as a practical matter is that technologies harden into the kind of next evolutionary step, which are tools, and tools are used to build the next evolution evolutionary step, which are applications, and then applications kind of solidify to become platforms. And that was kind of the way that we always thought about how this stuff works. I don't think anybody gets up in the morning and says I need to buy a platform.

Vic: 17:22

Well, customer says that. Absolutely.

Paul: 17:24

Pretty sure that they don't. Yeah, they may wake up in the morning and say I think I could really benefit from that particular application, or our company or my department could really benefit from that set of applications. So I think in practice, platforms come of age or come into being because people want to buy a set of applications that they will later build life processes, work processes, whatever. They'll build some set of processes around this particular platform and again you kind of bring it back to that Pusamano's definition. They may be a set of transactions, they may be a set of innovations that I can build on it, but I can do something with this. But I'm not buying the platform. I'm not waking up in the morning and saying I need a platform.

Vic: 18:25

Can I?

Paul: 18:25

have the set of utility.

Vic: 18:27

Sorry, say that again.

Paul: 18:29

I said, I don't wake up in the morning and saying I need a platform. What I need is a specific set of utilities or I need to get a specific set of jobs done and therefore I need an application. If I'm in the digital world, I need an application to do that.

Vic: 18:51

So, as you know, I've been out of the true tech product marketing role for quite a while now. But my very simplistic view of what you just talked about there I see as an organization we want to sell a product, and then that would move into solution selling, and it feels like now the new word for solution is platform, from the way you've just described it there as a set of jobs to be done, and it feels like it's the new word for bundle.

Sam: 19:28

Yeah, it's a new word for vendor locking.

Paul: 19:31

Yeah, I think it goes back to the earlier point, Vic, that people toss this term around kind of willy nilly a bit and I don't really think that anybody has done a lot of service by that. I don't know that you get to declare platform status and I've always kind of gone under the rules. Of engagement is that you don't, you're not a platform until somebody declares you a platform.

Vic: 20:00

But don't vendors do that though?

Paul: 20:03

Oh, they do it all the time.

Paul: 20:04

They do it all the time and again. This is an industry that talks to itself. So we, particularly here in the San Francisco Bay area, we have a tremendous and it's not confined to here, by the way, but this might be the epicenter of it Silicon Valley. We have what I call a window and mirror problem. We confuse a window with a mirror. We confuse a mirror actually with a window. So what we tell ourselves is what we think is going to be interesting to our customers, and it turns out that oftentimes that's not indeed the case.

Paul: 20:45

My friend, Godfrey Sullivan went way back to Apple together. Godfrey, as you know, was the CEO of Splunk and brought Splunk public, a very, very successful company, a very, very successful IPO. Godfrey, one of the best CEOs that I have ever known and just a good guy. And Godfrey, when he took the job, he called me one day and he said hey, let's get dinner. I want to understand.

Paul: 21:17

You know, the guys at work are saying that we have a platform and I don't think we do. And he said I remember what you said to me when you know, I was doing some work in his prior company with him and I said you're not a platform until somebody thinks you are and until people can literally stand on you and you know, if they can't, then you're not. And my advice at this early stage of Splunk was don't declare yourself that they don't even know what you are anyway. So you're going to have to figure out what the killer applications are and kind of go through that. And he said yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, I've been through this before.

Vic: 22:01

So what you've just said there is. As a vendor, it's not up to you to declare you have a platform. It's for the outside.

Paul: 22:08

That's not going to stop anybody from doing it. No, no, no.

Paul: 22:12

To be fair. I mean, I do want a platform for certain things. I don't want to have to rethink them. So once these things become hardened and real Sam raised the point earlier they become very, very sticky. But I think that how they emerge is always through the adoption of a set of applications. These things morph out into however they're going to morph out into however they're going to evolve. Don't get me wrong. It is a good place to be one of those sticky platforms. But I always smile a bit when a $10 million company it's got a couple of rounds of investment comes out and says we're a platform to do A, b and C. Yeah.

Sam: 23:13

Well, it's a bit different if you're absolutely.

Paul: 23:17

Okay, but let's unpack what that actually needs.

Sam: 23:20

Yeah, interesting. I think that makes sense. I like the idea of by and large vendors not being able to self-declare as a platform. Yeah, platform status is earned, is conferred, rather than grabbed.

Paul: 23:37

I believe so. I may be a bit old school that way, Sam, but I still think that that is the case. No, I'm with you. I'm with you. That's it Again. People declare it all the time, and that's okay. But the more important question is to raise is is that really what my customer is looking for Exactly? Are they looking for the thing that conveys a benefit, or are they looking for the benefit?

Sam: 24:05

There's a parallel with Cloud there. When vendors started selling everything or we've got a Cloud, we've got a Cloud, or this is a Cloud thing I used to say customers couldn't give to you-know-what about the way in which it's delivered. It's the outcome that they aspire to. If they consume it as software, as a service, great. If they install it and run it on a physical server under someone's desk somewhere, great, it doesn't really matter. It's what that software does for them that they want. I guess it's the same with platform. They want or they should want an outcome, not a platform. If the platform delivers the outcome, all well and good. It doesn't make any sense.

Vic: 24:47

It's a practical tool to really what your key thing is that you work on, which is getting vendors to understand what their customers are looking for.

Paul: 24:57

Yeah, yeah, that's right, and we always are bringing an outside in perspective. Yes, we talked to clients. We talked to lots and lots and lots of customers over the course of the year in our client engagements, because we're really interested in finding out is the customer actually saying the same things that the vendor is saying? And what is actually landing with the customer? Why did the customer decide in favor of vendor A versus vendor B? And, contrasting that, why, in some cases, did vendor A not get the business? It did not land. And that's what we try to help our customers understand and try to help their organizations understand those things so that, frankly, you can spend less time trying to worry about getting it 100% right and actually spend more time on trying to turn the conversation around less about what we have to show you and more about what you're trying to do. And again, this is still an industry that is enormously proud of itself, as it should be, and is enormously fascinated by its own stuff.

Vic: 26:19

Do you know what the analogy of the mirror versus the window just fits for all of this, doesn't it?

Sam: 26:25

Yes, yeah, it's lovely it really does.

Vic: 26:27

It's a very easy way to think about it, but whilst you were talking and I was so this week we've been incredibly fortunate and sorry we're just going to go off topic just for a second, but just to share with you. I'm so proud of this. One of our longest standing clients has written an essay on what he believes good leadership and teamwork looks like, and he's published it on our website and it could be from us, because it's like one and the same. It's an absolutely wonderful validation of the four and a half year partnership that we've had.

Paul: 27:00

Brilliant. Yeah, that's great. That's great. I mean, there's nothing better than a customer story, is there?

Sam: 27:06

Hey, no, no, no. So does all this platform shenanigans impact the buying cycle? If you've got a vendor that's trying to persuade a customer that they're buying into something strategic, does that mean it takes longer rather than just buying a product or a technology that does a particular job?

Paul: 27:23

Well, I think, if you start off trying to say bad analogy, but I'll make it anyway the customer is interested in a lunch and you want to feed them a nine-course banquet. Actually, I just was interested in a sandwich for right now. Thank you, nice to know that you can cook all of this, but it's not what I'm going to eat right now and I'll leave it at there. Again, what is the customer looking to do? What is the outcome that that customer wants? Yeah, is the outcome that that customer wants a platform? No, right, it's a. Again, that might be something that is attractive to a customer who's saying what we might call an expansion opportunity.

Paul: 28:17

We've landed with this particular application and this particular application by the way, we have three more that we can build onto that and then you start to build out oh, there's more applications actually standing. You know able to be stood up on this particular tech base. Okay, great. But again, if you come in and you say we have this entire platform, right, well, that's very interesting, but I don't have budget nor authority to buy an entire platform. And, by the way, I don't, you know, I'm in charge of running, you know, a customer facing a transaction set of applications and I don't really care with the guys back in the warehouse are doing. I mean, I understand that you make stuff for them as well, but I don't really. That's not my job. My job is to make this happen over here. So why don't you sell me one of those?

Vic: 29:21

Yeah.

Sam: 29:22

Yeah, I think that makes sense. Yeah, so by puffing up their offering as a platform, it's possible vendors are potentially slowing the sales cycle down.

Paul: 29:35

You talk platform, it sounds big ticket to me. You know, again, that's interesting, but that sounds big ticket. Last time I checked only the C staff could buy platforms. And again, the guy, who's the guy that the CMO is, you know buying with the CMO wants and you know the CHRO is buying with the CHRO wants, and yeah, those two things may be, you might be able to serve both of them. I mean, I have, we have a client right now that does serve both of those groups, but they're very clear that those groups are different.

Sam: 30:13

Yes, very different, different budget holders, different buying cycles.

Paul: 30:18

I mean it turns out that our clients code base runs across all of that.

Sam: 30:25

You know that's insight, knowledge, I know that the customer doesn't care about the color.

Paul: 30:31

The customer doesn't know that and probably doesn't really care about it at this stage. Right, and so you know they're very good about. You know, not kind of, you know selling something before it's time, so to speak.

Sam: 30:45

Yeah, yeah, they've done well there. So what implications do you think this has on go-to-market activity, what the sellers have to do out there in the field? You know, if the powers that be dictate that you're now selling a platform, what changes do have to take place in the sales activity?

Paul: 31:07

Well, again, the way that we follow this, or the way that we advocate that it's going to be, it should be done, is something that we call a business value stairway, and a business value stairway really is designed to do a couple of different things. First of all, it's designed to, or the methodology is designed to, say let's, or to posit, rather, that, instead of us turning up on your doorstep with all of this stuff that we can show you and that we can demo for you and that we're very proud of, etc. Let's start the conversation by asking what is your current level of aspiration, customer? Where would you want to start? Do you want to start very modestly, or do you have much bigger aspirations now, such that, well, let's put modesty aside, let's start higher on that stairway of value? But the customer decides, obviously with a vendor's help, with a vendor's guidance, rather than saying we've got this and then we've got this, and of course we've got this, and of course we've got this, and then there's this, this, this and this, and did I mention this?

Paul: 32:26

Business value start-aways says what is your level of aspiration? What are you trying to attempt to do? What is the budget levels that you want to invest in this? Are you new to this? Are you new to us? Or do you want to expand? You're not new to this, but you may be new to us. So where do we want to start that conversation If you can facilitate that from not only a one-on-one perspective, a sales perspective, but facilitate that on a one-to-many or a market development effort? Now you've made the conversation about the customer. About that instead of about you.

Sam: 33:12

What a revolutionary idea.

Paul: 33:14

Yeah, you get past this, this thing that we have witnessed almost since we began in the business a long time ago. You get past this 30 pages of PowerPoint slides, the first five of which are what I call news, weather and sports. I already knew that you haven't told me anything new that I didn't already know. Yes, I know that business today is changing. Yes, I know that digital transformation is this and this is that you were started in 2004, and, by the way, I don't care about that.

Sam: 34:04

That's a lovely picture of your chief exact, but I could not give too monkey.

Paul: 34:08

I really don't care about that. It's news, weather and sports. Reddit in the paper, reddit online Already know a bunch of stuff about you that you don't think I even know. Research bears that out. Research bears that out is that when a customer is in an investigatory cycle, they already know a lot about what they're talking to you about.

Paul: 34:38

Yeah, I'm glad they've only got it made up in their heads who's going to be their shortlist. To bring it all back organizations spend a lot of wasted time, a lot of wasted cycles, on the front end of that, trying to weave their way into relevance as opposed to trying to weave their way into. How could we help you solve the?

Vic: 35:05

problem, of course, the problems that you're trying to solve. Yeah, so good. How? Just use the chains of that.

Paul: 35:11

Maybe we could, but maybe we couldn't. But let's have a discussion about how you might want to continue this investigatory process, In other words, how you might want to buy something. That's where people don't know.

Speaker 1: 35:30

It's like I know about the category I know about you.

Paul: 35:33

I don't know how to buy this. How should I go about buying this? What is the business value first of all that I can justify to management to start this investigation? Then, what is it that I need to do in order to get this up and running so that I get value quickly for it and can demonstrate the value that is still open, fertile ground for both sales organizations as well as more organizations?

Sam: 36:07

I used to use an analogy for the type of selling that you were describing earlier We've got this, we've got this, we've got this, we've got this, this is our security product, this is our storage product, and so on. I'd say it's like you don't ever see them anymore. I don't even know if they existed in the States, but, vic, you'll remember you used to pull up at a motorway services and some bloke in a long coat would walk up to you. He'd open the coat and he'd have all these watches. They were all counterfeit, they were all fake or if they weren't fake, they were stolen. And he's look at all my watches, which ones you want to buy? That was often the sales technique. This is blooming dreadful. What does the customer want? What does the customer need? Start from that point.

Paul: 36:53

That still exists, Sam. Just walk down. Walk on any street in midtown Manhattan. You'll see that.

Vic: 37:03

I'm selfishly. I did a podcast last week at Meta and it was with four millennials. I felt like the oldest person on earth in comparison. But we used it as a coaching session and I feel like I'm going to manipulate your time if you don't mind now and ask. So we are now starting to engage with our clients by building a mutual success plan with them. I say what is it that you're trying to achieve? How do we help you do that, or not, as the case may be? So does that make sense with? What you're talking about.

Paul: 37:46

Yeah, yeah, you're like us a service firm.

Vic: 37:52

Yeah.

Paul: 37:54

And so we have, because a service is based on relationships and expertise and specific knowledge base and a specific set of experiences. Will be to us to go too far outside of that, and so when I am talking to prospects, I really want to know much as a physician might want to know. Tell me where it hurts. Yes, yeah.

Paul: 38:28

Well, my foot hurts, oh, OK. Well, tell me a bit more about that. I don't really do feet. Potiatrist and orthopedist do feet, I do internal medicine, and so again, enough with my bad analogies. But I really want to qualify a prospect such that that qualification accomplishes two things. Number one it really gives a good working or it starts to build the interlock between. This is really a good fit between a client or a potential client that has got challenges with the things that we do, the partnership. That's right. And the reason why it's a good fit is because we've done this lots and lots and lots of times before. Chances are we've seen this problem before. Yeah, so if I've got again, a general surgeon doesn't do neurosurgery right, and neurosurgeons don't do general surgery. There's reasons for that.

Vic: 39:50

Yeah Well, absolutely so. Just coming back to the platform, what advice have you got for vendors out there?

Paul: 40:01

Well, again, my advice is, Vicky, what I've always said previously I think people buy platforms. Platform, first of all, is in the eye of the field. So you say you are one. Ok, that's great. Noted, I'm still going to buy an application. I'm still, if I go out into my tool shed and I need to pound a nail, I'm going to get a hammer, my complete toolbox that is on wheels and everything else I can wheel that out. That's my platform for tools, but what I'm really looking for is a hammer.

Paul: 40:37

So again, start with the application, start with the job to be done. If you have a platform to do that, then fine, I'm willing to listen to that, but don't obfuscate my job to be done with your platform. I'm less interested in your platform and more interested in solving my problem far more interested. And when you're talking to me about that application or when you're talking to me about your platform, should that come up, I'd like first to be able to understand what it is, what it does, what it means and why I should care. And that is one of the first things that we always ask our clients when we're engaged with them is tell me what it is that you do on one page of paper at a minimum of 12 point type what it is, what it does, what it means and why anybody would care about that.

Vic: 41:46

I'm smiling so widely because I love the fact that you're so specific about saying what font size you're looking at. It's wonderful, but it's so true so often. No, I just want it on one page.

Paul: 42:01

And I don't need 30 PowerPoint slides to understand what it is that you do, and I don't need 30 PowerPoint slides to understand the news, weather and sports.

Vic: 42:13

I remember such a while ago, when I first started at VMware, I went into Maurizio Carli's office with a stack of it was supposed to be an elevator pitch and I printed it off and it was 30 pages and he went to put his glasses on and I went Maurizio, you don't need to put your glasses on. Just tell me, do you know a salesperson who will take this into a customer? And he just shook his head. I'm like no, we need this to be one page. Are you OK with me going, taking this back to the States and telling them this?

Speaker 1: 42:50

Yeah, not even the tallest building in the world will get through a 30-page deck in an elevator.

Vic: 42:58

VMware in a tall building. That's going to be one tall building.

Sam: 43:01

If so, yeah, or a stack elevator. Yeah, or a stack elevator. I would say yeah.

Vic: 43:07

So bring it back to being customer-led versus look at this shiny new thing I bought. Who's gonna come buy it?

Paul: 43:15

Yeah, well, there will always be that. There will always be many new things. I mean, when the iPhone was launched, steve Jobs, as you know, I worked at Apple. Steve Jobs was great at marketing shiny new things and he held them out as shiny new things because, guess what? They were shiny new things and we'd never seen them before, and that was the whole reason for being for Apple. Today is January 24th, vicki and Sam, do you know what happened on January 24th 40 years ago? The Macintosh was launched. Oh, wow.

Paul: 44:01

Yeah, macintosh was launched today, january 24th 1984.

Vic: 44:09

Wow, are you sure you'll reach that?

Paul: 44:11

I am showing my age because, if you'll remember, on January 24th Apple will introduce Macintosh and you'll see why 1984 won't be like 1984. That's the voiceover to the best commercial of all time, 1984. Wow, I didn't do that voiceover and I can't even get close to that, but that's the script. Yeah, wow, that's so cool. So that's a shiny new thing. There's a time and a place for that. Yeah yeah, there are far fewer shiny new things in the marketplace nowadays.

Paul: 44:55

And by the way, that's how long technology has been in the marketplace, and in fact way before that. So this is not misdefying stuff to us anymore, is it? Well, we've got AI, we've got AI, we've got AI, we've got AI for our AI. And I mean, if you were a proctor in Gamble or Uniblever and now in lemon fresh scent. Yeah.

Paul: 45:28

OK, great. So what? What does it do? Yeah, right, yeah, I mean, that's what's so fun about this business is taking things that are particularly in software. You can't touch them, you can't feel them, you can't see them, you can't smell them, you can't taste them, but they're there. So how do you work at that stuff and how do you do it in a way that's understandable and sensible and not wasting a lot of time doing it?

Sam: 45:55

Yes, so is there a best practice for platform selling?

Paul: 46:01

Oh gosh, I don't think there is Sam. I really don't think there is. I think that the companies that have been the most successful at doing this have been companies. Again, I'll give you Splunk as an example. They have been companies that have come out with a singular application. Who knew that so much information was in log data files? Yeah.

Paul: 46:27

Well, the co-founders of Splunk knew and they also had a customer who was way down into, as I call it, way down in the engine room of a company pulling levers and keeping the ship moving forward and there was gold in that log data file, and Splunk figured out a way to get that out, make sense of it all, and, lo and behold, that came to be known as big data, and I'm expanding a little bit here just to make the point Over time. What else could you do with this technology? Oh, well, it turns out that you can understand incoming telemetry. Oh, you mean, as in cyber security protection? Yes, oh, it can also do this. It can also do this. Now I've got a platform because it's doing a series of things that are important and it's doing them in a very unified way and it's doing them in a way that I can consume and that makes sense to me. In other words, something is standing on the platform that I want to get. The platform is the stage.

Sam: 47:52

Interesting Almost into philosophy here, aren't? We, maybe we better stop there, maybe we should.

Vic: 48:03

Just before we wrap up, you were talking about the business value staircase. Stairway, stairway, staircase. Yeah, staircase, we have staircases, you have stairways. Yes, I know we have bigger houses than we do generally. Is that something that we can share with our listeners? Paul?

Paul: 48:21

Yes indeed.

Vic: 48:22

Great. Ok, so we can include that in the show notes, then Super.

Sam: 48:28

Yeah, brilliant. The business value is stairway to heaven.

Paul: 48:32

Yes. Well, that's what we called it internally when we were building it out. Yeah, oh, brilliant, brilliant.

Sam: 48:40

Better than the business value.

Paul: 48:41

Highway to hell yeah, so we figured that, well, somebody already owns that, really, so let's. Yeah, no stairway. Let's call it business value stairway or, if we angle the size, of the business value staircase. Thank you.

Vic: 49:00

Yeah, ok, and we do have a global listeners though, so we're OK, we can go with that, that's fine, yeah, ok, that's cool.

Sam: 49:08

Yeah, I think most of our listeners have been in the IT industry long enough to be bilingual between English and American. Anyway, yeah, brilliant. So as we bring this to a close, would you be so kind as to give us three takeaways for our listeners? Thanks, paul.

Paul: 49:24

Three takeaways for your listeners. Number one a platform is something that is earned, that's earned status. Number two if you can't fit what you are marketing on one page of paper, at least internally, before you start the marketing embellishment process what it is, what it does, what it means and why someone should care then I would urge you to go back and start there. Number three if you're not aligned across your organization because of people having different views of what either the platform is, or the application, or the benefit or what have you, you're going to waste an awful lot of time getting into what we call alignment and there's lots of alignment conversations, as there must be in big organizations and even small ones. But alignment starts with having common understanding, common purpose and oftentimes a common vocabulary.

Paul: 50:28

And that's where we often get involved with companies too. After we work with them to incorporate some of these principles, really start to inculcate or want the management, wants leadership teams, want to get that vocabulary. Can we stop talking across each other and just get a common lingo going?

Vic: 50:51

So that comes out? I know you've just hit the three key takeaways, but that thing around alignment is the number one thing that we have addressed. And actually the platform thing came up gosh quite a while ago with a client who they couldn't even define what the platform meant, and with that that really was what kicked off this idea of let's talk about the platform in the first place, because if you can't get alignment on what it means, let alone the alignment that we work on, which is looking like one team in front of the customer, because that's the alignment we see a real challenge with, so your alignment is getting everyone aligned in the go-to-market from a corporate perspective. We almost catch that ideally and go right now, how do we align as one field team?

Paul: 51:40

What are the actual elements of that alignment that a firm such as yours would foster within a client? What is the conversation that needs to happen? We're trying to get people aligned on a common set of what is the strategy that we're going to pursue. Very, very simply, oftentimes there's three fundamental questions when do we compete? How do we compete? And then the third one is far less addressed how do we win? And so oftentimes, each of those questions requires yes, they require alignment, but they require commonality and purpose, and they require commonality of is the strategy that we're pursuing and the tactics that are going to be executional elements of that strategy. Are they fit for purpose today, going forward, or do they represent still vestiges of what we did two years ago? And I will submit that nobody, no company in this industry, is like they were two years ago.

Vic: 52:53

Yeah, and there's the challenge because they're just not moving and getting that alignment from corporate on what that common purpose is that brings everyone together, and then how that lands in the field to really get in front of customers. Yeah, yeah, there's work to be done. But what is interesting and I remember the very first podcast we recorded with you you said something around when Kazim first started. It got to the point where people were coming to you going, oh yeah, we've got that problem. Yes, we see that problem.

Vic: 53:25

Yeah, and so every organization we work with, they've all got the same challenges. They're not on their own and it is a repeatable thing, but it comes down to. So we're on our general newsletters just about to go out. The number one reason we get asked to cut into customers is because of accountability. We need to hold our sales teams accountable, but actually you go and talk to them and they want to hold customer success accountable. They want to hold renewals accountable and all of these different teams that support them, but they're not part of the team in the first place.

Vic: 54:01

So that's why we're talking about alignment, but that's very different.

Paul: 54:05

It's a different place to you. Yeah, they're in different roles. They're for Q alignment.

Vic: 54:12

No, exactly Exactly, but it has to come from the top. So I think, if you don't mind, you've got some work to do with quite a few organizations.

Paul: 54:20

Okay, we're willing to serve Vicki. There you go.

Sam: 54:24

Thank you very much All right, very good. No platform without alignment.

Vic: 54:30

There we go.

Sam: 54:31

Brilliant. Thanks, paul, always a pleasure, fantastic, really interesting stuff and, I think, something a lot of organizations can learn from and take into heart. A lot of that stuff can make them more effective.

Paul: 54:46

Again, thanks for the invitation. I look forward to seeing you both next time I'm over. Yeah, fantastic, I'm looking forward to it.

Sam: 54:54

It remains for me to say thanks for listening to Get Amplified from the Amplified Group. Your comments and subscriptions are always gratefully received.