We're going to be a little bit interactive to start off. And I'm going to invite Sarah from 23 to come up and film something. So we are going to, because it's like lunch, some people are still eating, we're going to have the caloric, the sort of like the carb dive. So we're going to move a little bit. So I want you guys to do the wave. OK? I'm not a sports fan, but I know that you have to bring the wave to places that I actually do go. So I think we're going to start over here, and we're just going to do the wave. We're just going to see how long it goes. OK? So go ahead. Do the wave. Go ahead. All right. OK, OK. It's coming back. Now it's like, oh! Excellent. You guys can keep doing that during my presentation if you want to. OK, thank you, Sarah. OK, so that'll be like, I don't know, it's live streamed, it's now in space. It's available everywhere. Yeah. Awesome. I'm not forwarding yet. Try again. There we go. OK. You're going to think by the end of my presentation that I'm here to sell you software called Poll Everywhere. Because we're using this Poll Everywhere software. We hope it works. Yeah, here it goes. Look. And I just want you to go on your mobile devices. I know everybody's sitting there wanting to check it anyway. Go to your mobile device and go to PollEV.com. PollEV.com. You can actually just go to that URL, and then you can type in the actual path there. Eigenwerks, spell it right. And then you're going to receive a poll. Now, how many of you guys present at least once a month, let's say? A lot of you, right? Everybody gets up. You want this software. You totally want this software. So once you go there, is it working? It's coming up on your devices? PollEV.com. And then you have to type in Eigenwerks. Because I was told. OK. So now you see we're going to build a word cloud as we go. The question, why did you come here today? And you can type in your responses. And I just love. I founded a research company, because I love to listen to people and hear what's going on in your mind. And so here we go. These are the reasons you came here today. A lot of learning. Networking. Cocktails. So far, no cocktails, as far as I know. That's coming later. Yeah. To meditate? OK. All right, food. I was told to come. OK. All right. Good stuff. OK, so there's a little word cloud. We'll publish these later. So that's fun. So now, if you'll notice, now that I just clicked that little button now on your devices, the question will change. Why did you stay after lunch? And actually, I didn't realize you'd be eating while I put this up. So you haven't actually proven that you stayed after lunch. So the question, I mean, you guys all could have left as well, but you're sticking around for the afternoon. So I'm curious. Cocktails. OK, yeah. That's all part of it. OK, yeah, cocktails. I think I might be influencing the poll as I read these things out, too. That's not good research. But anyway, drinks. Yeah, OK. All right. OK, so I know what I need to do is move my talk along quickly, because the cocktail's not going to happen until after my talk. OK. OK, so now I'm actually going to do a little bit of research, and I'd like you all to, in one word, describe your competitive intelligence efforts or approach. Now, go ahead and type stuff. If you decide to sign in in this software that you're seeing there, you just type in your email and your password. We will be able to, based on your responses, actually give you, we're going to give a prize out after the end of the day today. So feel free, as the talk is progressing, to create an account. And then I'm going to ask one question at the end, based on what I've talked about. It's not an intelligence test, but it's just a kind of, I want to hear from you folks. So if you would be willing to sign in or sign up to poll everywhere, then we'll be able to give you a prize if you are the winner of the prize at the end. All right. So I love that while I talk, research is being done. So in a word, we're hearing the competitive intelligence is scattered, limited, ad hoc, lackluster, Google. Google. My one word for describing my competitive intelligence is Google. Awesome. Awesome, because I probably Google, what is competitive intelligence? OK. Non-existent, unstructured. OK. So like a lot of you, I've been doing competitive intelligence for a long time. Probably about 20 years. And I've been through a lot of different versions of it, both in startup companies, three startups, as well as one large public company called Sybase. I don't know if you remember that. Yeah, OK. There's a few people. We're like, yeah, we're old. Yeah. That's where I started out. And most competitive intelligence is a very reactive process. And so it typically starts out with sales panicking. We lost the latest deal because we don't have this feature, or because they said these bad things about us. And they're so influential. Their salespeople's negative words are way more influential than our use of the company-defined messaging that they want to deal about us. So then it starts out with specific competitors. We investigate a specific competitor. We're looking at it on a project basis. And worst of all, it's all feature-centric. So I've been around long enough that my first competitive intelligence was like, we're going to score a copy of their software somehow. And then somebody's going to decompile it because you could do that. And we would read their documentation. The point is that we were staring not only at their product, but really at the insides of their product, how it was actually working. And feature-centric or product-centric competitive intelligence, while the product is, of course, important, and it's an important part of the whole picture, starting there leads us to chasing competitors. And this leads to a competitive situation. How many of you folks have heard of Michael Porter? Yeah, lots, right? Sort of the lead thinker in competitive strategy from Harvard. Leads to a highly undifferentiated field of products, companies, services, situations, so that we have to actually compete on other things, like price. So that's what happens with feature-centric, product-centric competitive intelligence. Because we start with researching our competitor on Google, probably. That's what we saw earlier. And then we're looking at sales, marketing, and product. And what I'm suggesting is that we ought to turn this around. And that's where I developed the phrase that most competitive intelligence is ass-backwards. Someone pointed out to me that most asses actually point backwards, which made me question the title of my talk. But apparently, it's got something to do with babies being born, not the direction of asses. But anyway, I wondered whether I would mention that, but I did. So I want you to turn this around. I want you to turn it around and take it from we're looking at the product first and the features and everything. And we want to, with apologies to Simon Sinek, start with buy. Because really, what I want you to look at is buyer decisions. Buyer decisions. And you can think of that as the initial product purchase, or as one of the speakers said this morning, which I thought was probably one of the best insights I heard this morning, that you start with success, actually, and revenue comes later. But it's at every point, at every decision, every conversion from less commitment to more commitment, we're studying those decisions and what's happening there. Not just with our product, but with the whole experience that our customer is going through. So I want you to think about starting with buy. And so then we just reversed a couple of boxes on our flow chart. And so rather than starting with competitor research, we're going to start with buyer research. And sadly, you can't actually Google that. So you're going to go back to your offices and you're going to start with buy. You're going to start looking at buyer decisions. I want to give you a tool that we use a lot to think about the kinds of feedback that you get. And this is called the Johari window. How many people have heard of the Johari window? OK, fair number. So this is a tool that was developed by these two gentlemen who are attributed here for feedback given in a work context. So when you give feedback to people, it helps them develop self-understanding. We're using the same tool, but then applying it to corporate self-understanding, product self-understanding. And that's really the fundamental job of you is to understand your buyers and your products. And you're starting with an understanding, a mental model. And it's your job to expand that mental model to become more authentic. So let's start by looking at the Johari window as it's normally used. So on the left side of the window, so this is a four quadrant grid, are things that are known by you about yourself. Things that are unknown by you are on the right. Things that are known by others are on the top of the grid, and things that are unknown by others are at the bottom of the grid. So the things in the top right are shared pieces of information. So I'll use myself. You know that I'm a speaker today at product marketing community. That's an obvious but also shared piece of understanding. The second type of understanding are blind spots. So there may be things that you know about me that I don't know about myself, which would be amazing, given I've only been up here for eight minutes. But nonetheless, all of us have blind spots. The third kind are hidden things. So these would be things that I know about myself that you don't know about me. And so I'll tell you something. I'm a saxophone player. I play jazz saxophone. That just changed from being a hidden thing to being a shared thing. So that piece of information moved from the bottom quadrant to the top. And then there are things that are unknown unknowns. These are the deep dark things. And we generally just say leave those things to your therapist. Forget the fourth quadrant completely. So let's apply that now to product understanding. So in our companies, we all have an internal story. And then we have the truths that are denied. And I can't tell you how many times I've worked now with clients, but also all parts of my life. I talk to people and they go, the thing that's really going on here, but we can't say that internally. Well, I can't say this when we get to the meeting, but what's really going on is this. And there's always that sort of knowledge of that, but it's sort of the denied truth. The company won't let itself think that. I'm going to give you an example of how this applies to competitive intelligence in a bit. And then we're going to switch axes. In the top, we have valid market perceptions. And then we have invalid market perceptions. And so those quadrants still translate. Now, this is our stock slide. We shouldn't have Eigenworks up there. We should have competitive intelligence helps you uncover the truth. So just forget that I put my company name up there, please. So the role of buyer and competitive intelligence is to expand shared understanding and compress blind spots. So you go out there and you compress that stuff. And you can say to people, I think this is a blind spot we have, right? Because then it becomes an objective discussion about that point. And then once you understand what are the invalid market perceptions, you can use marketing communications to communicate those things. Now, to the point, the first session that product marketing is not about MarCom, that's true. But mapping the difference between shared understanding or valid market perceptions and invalid market perceptions is very clearly in the domain of product marketing. And then you can tell MarCom what to do. OK. So that's a quick tutorial on how to turn your competitive intelligence efforts around and to start to communicate what you find within your company. Because you will find that as you start to communicate buyer decisions, first of all, it's very powerful for you as a product marketer to bring market data back. But it can also cause the sort of situation where you're confronting your own company with a truth that they would rather deny. And that's where they will say, well, that's just an anecdote. So you have to have enough data, enough stories to be able to do that. So let me tell you about a case where we worked with a customer to help them transform. So this is with Oracle. Connect to your customer. Yeah. This is with Oracle. It was the Eloqua product. Everybody know about Eloqua? Marketing automation. Probably one of the first marketing automation tools developed out of Toronto. Acquired by Oracle in 2012. And this information was publicly described by Oracle. So I'm not disclosing anything that was confidential. They were losing to Marketo. They were losing to Marketo in the mid-market segment. They were having win rates of about 42%. And they wanted to change that. And so let's talk about what they believed internally about themselves. Eloqua grew up as a product-proud company. They had been marketing and selling their product as the best, most configurable, most powerful, most scalable, most deliverable, lots of a-bulls and illities at the end of the words they used in their marketing. Or in their sales pitches. And so demos would be like, the customer would be like, OK, I get it. I know what you're talking about. And they would say, but I haven't shown you this check box. That's a little bit of an exaggeration, but not too much. And we've all seen demos like that. Well, I haven't shown you this window yet. And that worked for them for a long time. The company grew massively. I think when they went public, they were valued at $800 million. I think they were bought by Oracle for about $1 or $1.1 billion. Those numbers are rough, but they're definitely in the ballpark. So lots of success there. But they had entered a phase of the market where what they believed at the beginning of their life was no longer true. And so they had their own story that they told themselves that just wasn't true in the market anymore. And so we had done a body of research for them for a number of years, and we started to look back at what we were learning and some of the trends. And our person there was a director of competitive intelligence, and he came to us and he said, we really need to move the needle on win rates against Marketo. So we said, OK, let's look at it. What we found is that zero, and I think actually that's two out of 100 buying decisions, wins and losses were being made on the basis of product superiority. Two out of 100. That's an extraordinarily small number, banishingly small. And those particular clients, they were very sophisticated buyers, and they were going to go for that anyway. So we tried to communicate this to them, and they were able to hear it because the data was so strong and so powerful. And what we actually found was that a lot of their market was, in particular in the mid-market segment, was coming from less mature marketers or people who were starting from maturity model zero or one. And we're just needing to get the basics of marketing automation in place. And you can imagine if you're just trying to get the basics in place, that showing you every dial or every configurable option is not necessarily going to work. And so they changed their playbook. To their credit, they were able to hear the story and accept the truth that they were being told. They changed their whole demo strategy from that to, let me just show you the first three things you're going to need to do. Let me show you you being successful with this product. And they moved the win rate, 64%, within six months, and director of competitive intelligence became a hero, capturing, he claimed, $15 million in revenue in that time. And of course, setting them up to be more competitive in the future. So that's the power of starting with buy. That never would have worked had we been looking at Marketo's product, getting secret copies, watching their demos, reading their documentation, watching their press releases, and following them. We would have ended up being a very undifferentiated offering. And instead, by studying the buyer, they were able to really change that game. I put some details on the story in the slides so that when you see the slides later on, you can see some of those details. That's the story. That's my story. That's my story about moving from a product marketer into a company where we study buyer decisions all day, every day. One of the most funnest things that I get to do is to see those kinds of insights and help people turn things around. But I would like to hear your story. And this is where you don't have to register for this. But if you do register and you tell your story about competitive intelligence and what you are trying to do in your role as a competitive intelligence leader or a product marketing leader, we're going to be giving away a couple of prizes at the end of the day. We'll be contacting people separately. So I'll leave the slide up for a little while. It looks like no responses are received yet. You can go back to the same slide, and you can start typing in your stories. Thank you very much. I'd be happy to answer any questions if we have a few minutes left. Yeah. No, it's not a word cloud story, actually. This is a little bit, you should type something in. Can you type something in? It got censored. OK. Tell me your story, not that story. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So how do we capture those people with whom we haven't spoken, so they're not even in our CRM or they haven't even. Yeah. That's a very difficult one, right? It's sort of like the unknown, unknown. It's like, it's too quiet in here. We're not losing enough deals. Very difficult, right? It becomes a little bit like a business development problem where you need to actually identify who those people are and find them. Scanning social media is a great way to do that. So if you have any social media listing tools or ways of even scraping off of Twitter of who's evaluating what, and you can correlate what you hear on social media with what's in your CRM, that's a way to identify those people. But not easy. Another way is you can go and hang out where they hang out. If there's a place on the internet that they hang out and discuss things, or if there are actual conferences, of course, that's obviously more time intensive and costly. But it can be a good way to start making those connections. Any others? Wayne, one more question? Yeah. So how do you actually get a lost account to speak to you? And why would they want to do that? I sometimes talk about losses. It's like a relationship break up, particularly in direct sales, because there was an actual relationship. Salesperson worked really hard, and they just would rather ghost and just go away. And so if the salesperson does ask for that feedback, it's not you, it's me. The answer is that those people actually do want to give feedback. They really do, because they carry a little bit of a psychic burden for having used up your time and your resources and not bought your product. And it's also not often a super clear decision. It's a bit of a weighing. So they might have bought you. So they're actually willing to speak so long as they have no fear of reproach. Your question was like, well, they didn't buy from you. The you in that sentence is the salesperson. So they will speak to the company if they think that they won't be resold to. And we are able to speak to about between 2 thirds and 3 quarters of losses. So it's pretty good. And actually, they feel better afterwards. They can unload. They give something back. There's some venting that goes on. But there's also giving something back, because often there's some hardworking salesperson who did a fine job, it just didn't work, and here's why. They would like to help the market grow. There's also just in a capitalist society, there's a belief that if you help all the competitors, that in a sense as a customer, you will benefit as well. We're at zero, exactly zero. So thank you all. Good to be with you today.