This article originally appeared in the September 2002 issue of KMWorld
Improving effectiveness is the next frontier for the CM industry
By Bob Schmonsees
The Vision
This is the first in a two part series that paints a more expansive vision for the Content Management (CM) market. It’s based on the premise that as business content becomes an increasingly valuable corporate asset, improving the quality and effectiveness of that content will become a mission critical activity. It’s a vision where improving the value and impact of the enterprise content asset is as important to the CIO as the efficient administration and control of that asset.
In this broader market vision, content management vendors and their implementation partners will have to elevate the market discussion from technology issues to business issues, and go beyond the content administration and technology infrastructure they provide today. They will need to augment their traditional offerings with new functionality and services that improve the value of the enterprise content asset, turn it into a strategic competitive advantage, and increase its contribution to the customer’s operational results.
This vision for “Total Quality Content” (TQC) will require CM industry executives to step outside their IT centric comfort zone, adopt a broader more strategic mindset, and embrace the challenge of increasing content quality and effectiveness as a fundamental industry objective. If, however, they can elevate their sights, embrace this vision, and start delivering on the TQC value proposition, CM has the potential to become a mission critical application like CRM.
While a TQC approach can improve any business content, this article primarily focuses on marketing and sales content. Improving the quality and effectiveness of marketing and sales content can create sustainable competitive advantage, increase revenues, shorten sales cycles, and reduce marketing and sales costs.
This first part reviews the current state of the CM market and how the adoption of a TQC vision could revitalize the industry. It summarizes the major business and environmental factors that are driving the need for more effective business content, and the market forces that will make higher quality marketing and sales content a business necessity in the coming decade. It proposes a practical definition for effective content and outlines a set of six strategic principles for a new business practice called Message Management that enables marketing and sales organizations to begin implementing a TQC program.
The second part, which will appear in our next issue, describes the practice of Message Management in more detail, provides an operational roadmap for implementation, and suggests some new technologies, functionality, and best practices will make the TQC vision a reality.
The demand for more effective content is inevitable and a systematic quality management approach is the only answer. Today, there is no content quality cookbook, and this article is not intended to provide all the answers. It is just the first step in what will be a long and constantly evolving journey for marketing and sales organizations, CM vendors, and their partners. Hopefully it will ignite more formal industry discussions on quality and effectiveness and accelerate a TQC movement.
An Industry At A Crossroads
CM is at a crossroads. Over the past decade, it has matured as the technology and software functionality for managing unstructured information has become more useable, scalable, and robust. The early adopters have long since embraced CM and now mainstream and mid-market customers have begun to implement CM technology.
The market place is growing, however, the recent financial results for most of the industry have been lackluster, and valuations have come back in line with those you would expect in a commodity market. There are other signs that CM software is becoming a commodity, including significant price pressure, market consolidation, and the entry of Microsoft as a viable low cost competitor.
There is little question that CM will become ubiquitous, the real question is whether or not it will become more strategic, accelerate its growth curve, and preserve premium prices. To address this challenge, and hopefully raise the strategic importance of CM, the leading vendors have adopted a tried and true technology marketing technique: Broaden the vision, redefine the space, modify the message, and add “enterprise” to the name to make it sound more strategic. The result is “Enterprise Content Management” or ECM. The ECM positioning is based upon viewing all business content as a strategic corporate asset and implementing a comprehensive technology strategy to enable tighter control and more efficient administration of that asset.
ECM is certainly a step in the right direction, and looking at content as a strategic asset makes a lot of sense. But, I believe this new vision does not go far enough to excite CEOs and get them and their CIOs to embrace ECM as a strategic imperative.
Today’s CEO is interested in more than cost cutting and control. They are looking at their technology investments to create sustainable strategic advantage and grow their business, and those messages are missing from the current ECM positioning. Traditionally, the marketing of enterprise software goes through three distinct positioning phases. In the first two phases the message evolves from “increased management control” to include “reduced costs and better efficiency. In the third phase, which sometimes results in what Geoff Moore calls a “Tornado Market”, the message expands further to include increased effectiveness and providing strategic advantage.
There are five realities of business content and four major market forces that make the time right for the ECM industry to push the effectiveness message and embrace concept of TQC.
Five Realities Of Business Content
- Content Isn’t Documents. For generations paper was the primary, if not the only, content delivery vehicle. As a result, the document became the fundamental unit of business content, and it drove the way we thought about, wrote, and read things.
Today companies need to embrace electronic communication and information delivery as the foundation of their business content.
We all know that screens are harder to read than paper. Humans, however are developing new reading patterns, are getting comfortable with all kinds of interactive media, and are more adept at absorbing small chunks and sound bites of information that are delivered in rapid-fire fashion.- The “one time event” mentality of documents has given way to a continuous improvement model that supports rapid change.
- The fundamental unit of managed content is becoming more granular. With today’s object based technologies and XML, business content can now be easily reconfigured, reused and repurposed. Companies have to get used to thinking about their content in smaller re-usable “thought level” chunks that consist of individual facts, ideas, and opinions.
- Finally we must embrace the concept of dynamically generated, personalized, and user customizable content.
- Content is not created equal. Some content, like e-learning and instructional content, customer service content, and marketing and sales content, is critical to an enterprise’s success. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, ECM has traditionally been marketed as content type neutral. Instead of being solution focused, it has been marketed primarily as an enterprise wide technology to manage and administer all kinds of content. This is starting to change with initiatives like Documentum’s alliance with Adobe to produce a marketing content solution, however the promotional material on this offering focuses mostly on reducing the cost of content administration.
- Content assets have a cost and value dimension. To date the ECM vendors have focused on the cost side of content management. The reality of today’s competitive markets demands that businesses leverage both dimensions of every asset, even content. As the concept of TQC evolves and takes hold, the ECM vendors need to be asking “What are the most important content assets and how can we improve their value and make them perform better?”
- Content is not data. IT professionals are used to managing historical data which doesn’t change and were quality is a binary issue. Content is continually evolving, and the quality of unstructured information is far more subjective and qualitative.
- There is always pressure to increase quality. There is always pressure to increase the quality of the things we produce and consume, and content is no exception. Spell Checkers, Thesaurus, and Formatting Wizards have significantly increased the quality of business letters and presentations and there is a growing body of knowledge on more effective writing and web site design that is beginning to be codified. There are also best practices in personalization, collaboration, automatic categorization and man machine interaction that can have a significant on content effectiveness. These best practices and technologies, however, have not yet been consolidated under a common TQC umbrella and they are probably just the tip of the iceberg. The adoption of an industry commitment to quality will exploit these existing capabilities and create a framework that will spawn new technologies and best practices just like it has in the manufacturing sector.
Four Market Forces
In addition to these five realities, there are four major market forces driving the need for more effective marketing and sales content. These forces impact all companies, especially those that sell complex products and services where the marketing and sales content is broad in scope and includes a wide array of prospect content as well as internal sales and competitive intelligence. The four market forces are:
- Increased Product Complexity and Velocity of Change. Products and services of all types are undergoing rapid change, becoming more complex, and, at the same time, becoming harder to differentiate. Accordingly, real differentiation is often fleeting and provides a short window of market opportunity. This triple whammy puts a premium on more accurate, current, and effective marketing and sales content, and the rapid assimilation of that content by prospects and sales channels.
- A Changing Buyer / Seller Relationship: The selling process for complex products has become more fragmented, with more people, each with different agendas and perspectives, involved at various stages of the sales cycle. Buyers, at all levels, are more informed and demanding, and sales people no longer have a significant “information advantage”.
Self-service technology has absorbed many sales functions, and there is new genre of communications and presentation capabilities that have reduced face-to-face contact through out the selling cycle. We have replaced some of the most important sales activities with content, and the resulting loss of substantive personal contact has diminished the value of the sales channel in many industries.
With all this complexity and loss of control on the selling side, it is more important than ever to improve the quality and effectiveness of marketing and sales content. It is also critical to create content that helps the sales channels provide additional value and increases their ability to influence the decision process. - The Explosion in Marketing and Sales Content: More is not always better, and in today’s business environment there are more people creating more marketing and sales content than ever before. Technology has made professional looking marketing and sales content easy to create and publish, and many times people end up writing a whole new document, web page, or presentation from scratch, just to put a slightly different spin on the message.
The result is a compounding effect on both the absolute amount of content, and the number of occurrences and variations of the message. This reduces quality, causes considerable duplication, and in many cases creates inconsistencies and conflicting information that can prolong sales cycles or even kill a sale. - A Shrinking Message Shelf Life: As David Weinberger says in The Cluetrain Manifesto, "for every product, there are dozens or hundreds of facts...useful facts”. When linked together, these facts along with other ideas, opinions, and chunks of information create a complete product message.
Many of these chunks of information are changing rapidly in today’s competitive environment, and as a result, a product’s positioning and value propositions have become highly perishable. This has significantly reduced the shelf life of a product’s message and requires that the positioning and value propositions be constantly reviewed, refreshed, and refined.
We are all familiar with the typical product life cycle, (see Figure 1) in which revenues follow a bell curve from product inception through market acceptance, product growth, and finally to product maturity and its corresponding phase of declining revenue.
Today, however, most product life cycles include multiple "message life cycles", and the velocity of message change is sometimes overwhelming. As soon as a message begins to work, something in the market place changes, or the competition adds a new feature, and marketing and sales organizations have to adjust. This adjustment has become increasingly cumbersome with the explosion in marketing and sales content.
Increased product complexity, the changing buyer / seller relationship, the explosion in content, and the shrinking message shelf life all have a significant impact on marketing and sales productivity. When taken together, these forces put a premium on producing higher quality and more effective marketing and sales content.
The Opportunity FOR ECM Vendors
These five realities and four market forces create a unique opportunity for the ECM vendors to expand their value proposition and capture more executive mind share with a broader more strategic message.
The situation is similar to what happened in the late 1990’s when Tom Siebel lead the charge to reposition Sales Force Automation and Contact Management to the more strategic value proposition of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). This was more than just a name change, and CRM became a revolution in business process because it put a strategic perspective on what was previously an inwardly focused IT and sales administration function.
It is interesting to note that a key part of Siebel’s message focused on improving sales effectiveness through higher quality content with some unique sales coaching functionality they provided called “Decision Issues”. This sales effectiveness message helped Siebel’s sales force change the game, call higher in an organization, and differentiate themselves in the eyes of “C” level executives.
The rest is history, CRM became “mission critical” because it was tightly aligned with the objectives and interests of the CEO, and was framed in ideas and concepts that they could easily understand and embrace. This repositioning elevated the discussion, changed the way the industry sold, significantly increased adoption rates, and gave us new technologies, processes, and best practices. It created a market tornado and established a model that ECM vendors, and their implementation partners would do well to emulate.
The Road To Total Quality Content
So, how can ECM vendors begin to work with marketing and sales organizations to improve content quality and effectiveness and increase its impact on the sales process?
To begin with, they need a more systematic way to define and measure quality and effectiveness. A good way to do this is to focus on how well the content influences the opinion and behavior of the reader through:
The value of the message: How unique are the thoughts and ideas that make up the subject matter? How relevant is that information to the reader?
The quality of the writing: Is it clear and concise? Does it simplify things for the reader and promote comprehension and retention? Does it have a structure that simplifies updating and continuous improvement?
The impact of the delivery experience: Is the information easy to find? Does the interaction engage the reader? Do they feel like they are being dealt with in a more personalized and human like fashion? Can the content be easily customized and repurposed by the user?
Secondly, they need a well thought out planning, process, and technology strategy that helps their customers maximize quality and effectiveness. This is what a new business practice called Message Management accomplishes. Message Management’s premise is that marketing and sales content is too important to be managed in a haphazard manner. It is similar to CRM in that is a proactive business strategy supported by more rigorous planning, process, and technology.
Message Management is based upon six strategic principles:
- Embrace customer centric messaging
- Adopt a 360-degree view
- Less is more
- Transfer knowledge… don’t just disseminate information.
- Increase channel value
- Continuously improve the content
In the next installment we will explore these strategic principles of Message Management in more detail and review some new business processes that improve content quality and effectiveness. We will also discuss some new functionality that the ECM industry needs to embrace in the coming years to make the vision of Total Quality Content a reality and turn Message Management into their “Killer App”.
Bob Schmonsees (bobs@web2one.com) is the CEO of Web2one, Inc. Web2one helps B2B companies accomplish more of the selling process on the Web. Its patented Interactive Product Page software replaces static product descriptions with highly conversational and personalized prospect education and self-qualification sessions that clearly differentiate a company’s products and services, generate higher quality leads, and shorten the sales cycles. He has managed high tech marketing and sales organizations of all sizes for more than 27 years.
The Quest For Content Quality: Part Two
Managing the Message From A Total Quality Perspective