Given May 19, 2024 by Yonatan Stern

This is our third lecture, and we’re going to continue with what I think is the most critical and important element in the smart -up methodology, which is to start building a brand before you do anything else. And we’ll talk about that, but before that I want to do a little bit of a preview or a post -view of what we did last week, so that will be a continuation here. Introducing the team again. What is the smart -up academy? That’s a program to teach the profession of building a successful company. So I believe that building a company is a profession. Very much like you learn how to be an engineer or how to be a doctor or how to be a lawyer, except that there are no schools that teach, really teach, how you build a company. 

And the foundations of the course, this is the foundation course, so I’m working really hard to build the curriculum for this profession and explain all the elements that a founder who wants to build a company should think about, should be aware about, and should operate upon. What is a successful company? So I have a definition, first and foremost, profitable. A company that is profitable is a mature company. Very much like when you have a kid and you pay for their tuition, you pay for their rent, you pay for their car, they are not mature. The day that they stand on their own feet and don’t need a penny from you, that’s when they are mature. Same for a company, if you keep infusing money from investors round after round, they are not a mature company. 

And a not mature company is extremely fragile and sensitive. Wars, for example, in Israel, Corona, the market goes up, the market goes down. Many, many good companies disappear because they ran out of money at the wrong time. Second reason why profitability is so important, because at the end you want the company to be profitable. So if you focus on it from day one, you are more likely to build it correctly to be profitable. If you spend $50 million to build the products and whatever, and then you say, oh, I need to be profitable, chances are it’s going to be very difficult to do. Second, it should be fast growing. It’s not very interesting to keep, to have a company that kind of stays flat forever. It’s okay if you want to retire, that’s wonderful. 

But if you want a successful company, you want it to have an engine in it that keeps growing all the time and hopefully even accelerating the growth. And the last item, which I know I’m fairly unique in thinking about it, is it has to all be done with a modest investment. What is modest? A million, two million, three million, five million? Definitely not 50 million or 100 million. You can build very successful companies with very small investments. And that’s what we’re trying to teach in here. So beyond the foundation course, we also have workshops, and we will talk about one of them soon enough. And the real thing is the residency program. 

As you can see from the picture, suddenly I put doctors in here, and the reason is that’s the profession where after they finish six years of school, they graduate, they have an MD, and anybody who cares about their life would not go to a doctor like that. So they have to go to a hospital, specialize for four or five years, and only then you really start to trust them as professionals. But if you think about building a company, so you have two guys at Shmonema Time, they have a great idea. Never in their life did they sell anything, never in their life did they manage anything, they have an algorithm, and investors give them $10 million, and they have no clue what they’re doing. Not because they’re idiots, they just don’t have the experience, and there’s nobody there to help them. 

So I believe that really to understand how you build a company, you need to have support for a fairly long time, because at every step of the way, there are new challenges and new questions that you need to ask yourself and answer. So this is what we do now, you will later on hear about from one company that we have IntelliChain, give the other part of the presentation, and so you will see what we do. So as you recall, last time were showing you this video, I’m going to show it again, but this time I’m going to give an explanation because it was kind of out of context, so I’m going to give you the context. So Ray Kinsella, an Iowa farmer, lives with his wife on their corn farm in Iowa. Iowa is in the middle of nowhere, for those who don’t know. 

And the cornfields are the middle of nowhere of the middle of nowhere. And one day Ray hears a mysterious voice, if you build it, he will come. Interpreting this as an instruction, Ray decides to transform a portion of his cornfield into a baseball field. And now comes the real point, to his astonishment, the ghosts of all -time legendary baseball players appear in the field. אם תביאו את זה, הוא יולדה הוא יולדה הוא יולדה כבר דבר אולי כבר לעשות שפה כשגדל לפ Alexandre כך באמת שגדל בפרוס, כך קצת לחגל פסט אני רק ע recruitment משותן היותר סוף אניpretty אני קצת נפגת נגד September כשאפשר ‫בין זקות שמרצות, ‫מרצות שמרצות ככה, ‫שמרצות שמרצות ככה, ‫מרצות שמרצות. ‫מה זו מרצות? ‫אני עושה על מרצות, ‫מרצות, מרצות, ‫מה אני רואה בסרט? ‫אז מרצות ‫היא עד שני קריטירי. ‫הוא שוב שאתה רוצה את נשבותי. 

So a brand is always aimed at the group of people you want to influence. And that’s the very important thing. So if you have a very niche product, probably your brand is only important for you that only 20 ,000 people will know. If you sell Coke, you want everybody to know about it. So a brand is always aimed at your prospects. You want them to know your name and something about you. Not more. They don’t need to know your product. They don’t need to know the feature. They don’t need to know anything. They just need to know something about you. And they need to have positive feelings about it. So you really want them to say, wow, SmartUp is a really good company. What are they doing? I don’t know, but people say good things about them. That’s enough. That’s enough. 

And that’s difficult to accomplish. The most important thing is it does not have to talk about your product. So when I say branding first, most people say, wait a minute, what am I going to talk about? I don’t have the product yet. It doesn’t matter. Because think about it, even if you had the product, what are you going to say about it? In two words, in a sentence, nobody will understand it anyway. Nobody is going to sit to see a demo for half an hour if they never heard about you. So really, it doesn’t matter that you don’t have the product. I’m going to show it again and again during that presentation. So what is marketing? I’m talking about branding and branding. So what’s the difference between marketing and branding? So marketing is the process of basically lead generation. 

You want to start selling, you need to talk to specific people to sell the product, or you want them to come to your website to act upon it. So marketing is the process of generating sales or generating leads for sales. Branding, on the other hand, is the bad broken foundation for successful and cost -effectively generation. And if you think about it, if you send an email and nobody ever heard about you, chances are 98 % will not open your email and probably most of them will ask to be unsubscribed. But if they know your name and say, oh, interesting, what is smart up? I know, I heard about them several times from my friends. I don’t know what they’re doing, but here I got an email and let’s see what they say. 

Last week, or actually last month, it was almost, I talked about the SEO, Search Engine Optimization as a really good way of generating or creating a brand. And I will repeat on it very quickly just so to refresh your memory and then we’ll look at other things. So long tail, as you can see, there is a dinosaur with a long tail. And what the dinosaur means, these are the words that people search for, like. And the long tail are long terms that very few people search for, but there’s no competition. Nobody else put information on the web for this. As Chris Anderson said, the best way to dominate the web in the face of stiff competition is to optimize for long tail search. What is the advantage when you do branding about long tail? 

The advantage is that this, as far as I know, is one of the few where you have inbound, so you don’t do anything, you don’t reach out to anybody. People search for something in Google or on the web and they come to you. Everything else I’m going to show you today has an outbound. I do something, I reach out to people, I show you a lot of things, how to do it, but that’s the reason I love long tail SEO and start with long tail SEO always, if possible. So what’s the challenge? Each keyword in the long tail has very few searches every month. So think about you want to create long tail, like TripAdvisor. So they have information about 50 ,000 hotels. How many times people search for a certain hotel in a small village somewhere? 

Very few times, but there are 50 ,000 hotels, so combined you can generate a lot of traffic. But to reach high traffic, you need thousands if not millions of pages and how do you cost effectively create millions of pages? So the answer is to have a database of information. And I can show you now that there are actually many companies that do it on databases of information. We did it at Zoom Info. And here’s how it goes. Amazon, they have a page for every possible product. You type in a product, there’s a good chance you’re going to get Amazon, especially if you type in a name of a book. They will show up. So how do they do it? They have a large database of products. It’s really simple. 

But what they do is they create a page, pair, product, static page that Google crawls and indexes. That’s the way it works. LinkedIn, you type in a name of a person, there’s a good chance that you’re going to get LinkedIn in one of the first results. Why? Because every person has a page, a static page that LinkedIn puts out for Google to crawl. Crunchbase, same thing. Per company, they used to have it only on companies that raised money. Then they expanded and added millions of other companies for many databases, just so that they have expanded their long tail and the traffic. Facebook, same thing. Freeepadvisor, as I mentioned before, same thing. Zeelo I showed last time, it’s a website by basically a realtor that put a page, pair, address, pair, apartment, or house in the US. These are just a sample. 

There are probably hundreds of companies like that do long tail branding. Okay. But what if I don’t have an idea for an SEO long tail option? Is that it? No more branding? So what we’re going to cover today is this. So I bring in here three options. We’re going to talk about two of them this time. And hopefully next time we’ll talk about the third option. The one that is the most favorable to me after SEO long tail is to position the company as a thought leader or an important researcher or just as a leader. You will see many examples of that. So once you position yourself in, remember, prospects. So you always focus on a certain set of prospects. Once you position yourself as a leader or a researcher, people start listening to you. 

What we are going to, this presentation is going to be divided into two. We have a break in the middle and then Roy from Intelligent will talk about his experience and how they position the company as a thought leader. The other option is to organize contests, championships, whatever it is. People love those. They respond to them and we will give you examples of that. Or you provide free products. People like free stuff. They pay attention to it. Those of you who have kids know many times in the cereal box there is some stupid thing in it and the kids say, I want that one because it has a little Mickey Mouse or whatever it is. So free products always work but you have to be smart about what you do. So we are talking about free products next time around. 

So as I said, there is a workshop so we start with it. I want to give you guys homework. So we are not going to do it here, we are going to do it at home. So as I talk and describe all kinds of ideas I would like each and every one of you to think about their own business, their own company and if not, invent one. But start to think how do you create a brand for your company and I give you here the steps you need to think through. First of all, you need to think about who your prospects are. Kids age 11 to 13 in Jerusalem, okay? That’s your prospects. Or companies that have more than 10 company cars whatever it is but you have to define as accurately as possible who your prospects are. 

And the reason is that many times your branding will focus exactly on that definition. Define the problems you try to solve not the solution, the problem. What are you trying to do? A very important question. Many times you think they have a problem they just never heard about it. A typical example well I can do their work twice as fast I have a machine that will do it well they don’t have a problem they do it like that for the last 20 years they don’t think it’s slow or not efficient. That’s what they do. They’re not searching for a solution. So the fact that you think that somebody else can do something better doesn’t mean they know it. So always think about if what you try to solve is known to your prospects. 

If not, that doesn’t mean you don’t do a brand but just don’t assume they’re looking for this problem. When they have the problem let’s assume they know they have the problem what do they do? What I described last week last time at Opster when DevOps engineers had a problem they would go to the web and look for certain error logs. So you start to think what are they doing because I want to be there when they’re searching for a solution or asking people about a solution. And the last point is very important many times forget about the problem what else can be of interest to your prospects? And you will see many examples that I’m going to bring that doesn’t talk at all about problems. It just tries to get to the audience, to the prospects and engage them somehow. So that’s your homework. 

Think about it when I talk and try to think in your head what to do with it. And then we will ask you I’ll tell you right now we will ask you to send us a one -pager answering these questions on whatever you guys are doing. And Libby has agreed to read all of them, right? She didn’t. Now she agrees, yes. Now I think that you will find this to be pretty illuminating when you try to do that really on your company and realizing hey I don’t have the answers I don’t know but it’s an important homework. Okay. So I want to take these three ideas and show you which companies we used them at. Longtail, they were Zoom, Info, Opster and Tick -Chuck. We talked about it last time so I won’t do it again. Thought leadership. 

Intelligent we will cover later on at depth with ROE. At Opster we moved from having these arrow logs to producing tremendous amount of in -depth information about elastic databases elastic search databases and we became the authority of how -tos in elastic search. It grew over time but one of the reasons that elastic acquired Opster was because of the thought leadership. And the free products actually is fairly prevalent. In Opster we had free products that would check your cluster at Zoom Info it was we gave you information for free if you gave us information for free and at Bioform we’ll talk next time. What is the Fortune 500? Anybody here knows? You’re fair, right? Not so complicated. What is the word Fortune in this Fortune? Fortune magazine, right? So here is the Fortune magazine. American Global Business Magazine. Seculation 850 and there’s another one, Circle. 

So there is the issue with the Fortune 500 and there’s another issue. 100 most powerful women. Morean, Tila, you should be there, right? Who decides that they are the most powerful women? They. They? But it’s gossip, it’s interesting. And they try to sell who is their audience, business people who want to be in the Fortune one. But who do they compete with? They compete with Forbes and Business Week, Bloomberg’s Business Week. So let’s look at them as well. So the Forbes leadership. You can start seeing that they have all kinds of magazine. 400, 30 over 30. What else do they have? So their motto of Forbes magazine is change the world. So they have expanded their set of prospects to anybody who has a vision to change the world. 

I think about their motto, usually it talks to the prospects you want to bring in. So if you want to change the world, Forbes magazine is for you. So here are the lists that they try to create. The richest Americans, that’s the Forbes 400. That’s something very surprise. I checked it three times. So under 30 should mean 30 under 30. But they have 600 names and they say it. America’s wealthiest celebrities. World top companies, the global 2000, most powerful people remember. 100 top powerful women. So they compete and the world’s billionaires. Now why do they have all of these? So let’s start with that. I know you wanted to know the name so I put it in here. So number one is not a long mask. Number one is the CEO Bernard Arnault of LV, Louis Vuitton. He’s the richest man in the… 

By the way, this is all, only all the information that is in public companies. So if he owns all kinds of other things, you don’t know a lot. Second is a long mask, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg. Nothing surprising and just so you wanted to know more, you have the list here. The number 16, a 15. There are many wealthy individuals that go under the radar because they don’t own parts of public companies. They might own huge real estate. They might be in private companies. They might have inheritance. Their information is only from owners of stock in public companies. That’s the way it works. Okay. So what are the main takeaways that we learned? Leadership. Fortune invented the term Fortune 500 and it now owns it. 

So that’s why I asked you what is the Fortune 500 and you didn’t say well, that’s something that Fortune magazine did. No, you said that’s the 500 biggest companies in the world. They own the term. Now we start to see what I mean by a brand. They did something had zero to do with their magazine. It’s just a list of companies but they have owned it and they created a brand for themselves. And it expanded their influence because now they are considered the leaders. Remember about leadership. Okay. So when they write an article about one of the Fortune 500, people would assume that they know more than anybody else about companies in the Fortune 500 because they created the list. It’s subconscious but we can’t avoid it. That’s the power of brand. 

If Fortune writes about a Fortune company, you would assume they know what they’re talking about, which is wrong. But you would assume it. Forbes created many lists. Okay. That’s their innovation. So what they did is they said, okay, Fortune owns the Fortune list. I’m going to create 100 lists, 20 lists or whatever it is. So they exploded with the number of lists. And remember, they want to change the world. So most powerful women, most powerful Americans, celebrities, yada, yada. It doesn’t matter. These lists are also gossipy. They are talking about people. Very, very important. A brand is created by repetition. If you do something one time, people will pay attention for 10 minutes and forget about it. You do it twice, they will remember it for 12 minutes. But if it shows up time and again, it sinks. 

People start to recognize it and understand it. So it’s very much like a long tail but except for a long, instead of a long tail over many terms, it’s a long tail over time. And that’s very critical. And I explain to you why. So a lot of companies when they talk about oh, I need to create a brand or I need to do marketing, they do blogs. Okay, let’s write a blog. So great. So they take two of their guys and they say write a blog. They write a blog. Then next week they say, okay, let’s write a blog again. I’m busy this week. So usually they start with a big oomph and it dissipates, it disappears. So they have, go from site to site, you will see. 

They have five blogs, they have blogs, you see five, 10 at the most, and then they get tired. So when you decide to create a brand using this, you need to build a program that is easy to generate every week something. So in these cases, the lists, they have a date. So, what? No, because you need to create something, the content has to be smart. So the lists are smart, okay, they create them, but because they know in the June issue, they have to have the 100 most powerful women. So it’s a task, they know it. And in July, it’s the wealthiest America. And in August, it is the wealthiest celebrities. So you create a mechanism that allows you to keep repetition. Very, very critical. 

Creating annual event is an easy way to create a lot of interesting content, which is what I said now about false. What I want to show you is an example of repetition, but in a slightly different way. So in 1979, long time ago, many of you were not in the world, Swedish vodka maker, Absolute vodka, tries to penetrate the U .S. Market. And they go through advertising, okay? But they go through advertising with a very innovative approach. Did anybody see an ad like that? Are you familiar with it? Okay, so they went with a slogan of Absolute Perfection. They don’t talk about anything, they just have their bottle. Here’s another example of the ads. They had a lot of ads, okay? Can you see the bottle in the traffic? Well, they printed about 1500 ads. 

And would go to, would be known as one of the best and most recognizable print campaigns of all times. When I was in the U .S., I was exposed to it and I thought it was brilliant. It was also an incredible monetary success. Skyrocketing, Absolute sales from 10 ,000 cases in 1980 to four and a half million by 2000. I took it from their side, so I don’t know what happened after. So just so you can see what they did with this creativity, okay? So this is Absolute L .A., that you think about people in L .A., you know, sitting around the pool or Aspen, which is a ski resort. You can see the ski. Absolute book. Actually, it’s a book. I put it in here so that just you can see that’s the cover of the book about this ad campaign. Absolute harmony. 

Anybody recognizes the picture? Christmas, right? Absolute revealed. And I like the London one. Can you see the bottle in the London one? You see the creativity, okay? Repetition, consistency and creativity. Create a strong brand. Notice that the ads do not talk about features or value. It’s a brand creation. It catches your imagination. You understand it’s a vodka. And you keep it in your head. Did I convince you until now that branding is very different than marketing? Okay. So I showed it to you last time, but I wanted to show again the same concept of branding, okay? So Tambour would give you the sign if you put this sign on top and then what happened? Those of you who were here last time, you know that this is what happened, right? The name Tambour became known for a store like that, okay? 

Now bear in mind that the store had many, many other things, but it’s now called Tambouria. So they created a brand, a very strong brand. Now in the last one, you can see they have a competitor called Nirlat, but this guy has a split personality that’s Tambour one side and Nirlat on the other side. So Nirlat tried to use it as a verb. It didn’t work so well. The reason I brought it again is to show you the ingenuity, the creativity, and the repetition, okay? These signs stay there on the store for years. For a small amount of money, Tambour was able to create a very strong brand using it. So you start seeing the diversity of ideas, repetition, consistency, and focus. Okay, we’re now moving to a different concept. Ink Magazine. American Business Magazine founded in 1979 in Boston. 

That’s why I wrote it because were living in Boston, sorry, felt connection by Barney Goldhursh, I would assume he’s nice too, and he’s an MIT graduate. What else can I ask for? Bostonian Jewish MIT. Ink is the voice of the American entrepreneur. We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business. The risk takers, the innovators, you, the ultra -driven go -getters. Can you guess who is the list of prospects? You guys. So the whole magazine is about startups, companies that grow fast, go -getters. So any ideas on how to do the brand? Give an idea, so what ideas? Okay, who said that? All right, so let’s look at it. The Ink 500 and the Ink 5000 competition. In 1982, three years after the launch, the magazine began publishing its Ink 100 later to become the Ink 500. 

And it’s a competition to which companies go and apply. In 2007, the list was expanded to be the Ink 5000. Okay, so to qualify for the 2024 Ink 5000, your company must have generated revenues by March 31, 2020, because they compare your revenues in 2004 compared to your revenues in 2020. So they want to make sure that you were active in 2020 and generated revenues at the beginning. Have generated at least 100 ,000 in 2020, at least 2 ,000 ,000 in 2023, and be privately held for profit based in the US and independent, not a subsidiary. So you start seeing the rules for participating. Why did they go from 500 to 5 ,000, I explained. So let’s say you are a company and you grew by 200%. Say, well, you know, 200 % is not enough. I will not apply. 

But if it’s a top 5 ,000, probably if I grew by 200%, that’s not bad. So they encourage people make this calculation should I apply or not apply, and by making it 5 ,000, many more companies apply. So why should a company apply? The top 500 companies will be featured in the magazine. And all 5 ,000 companies will be featured on their website. You get a profile. And dedicated company profile on Ink receiving millions of impressions every year. No, you don’t, but that doesn’t matter. But they give you a link so that you can put on your website a link to their website. And if you pay some money, you even get the right to copy that page and put it on your website. So nobody is doing charity. They make money along the way. 

That’s a simple way to create a brand is to talk about your prospects. Think about it all the time. Nobody can ignore when people talk about him. Not a company, not a person. So if you talk about somebody, that somebody will pay attention. So what Ink did, which is why they built the Ink 500 and Ink 5 ,000, is to talk about their prospects. Remember what their logo was? Right? We inspire, inform, and document the most fascinating people in business, the risk takers, the innovators, the people who grow fast. That’s why they do this competition. Okay. So here’s the list of the 2003, 2023. By the way, they have also international, and I didn’t see them here. Okay. So a little bit of a personal story. 

So in the competition of 1999, KiteSkin was placed number, that’s the company I started, was placed number 39 on the Ink 500. Not bad. The award was the result of 3800 % growth, basically 38 times revenue growth from 385K in 1994 to 15 million in 1998. Very nice growth, and were very happy. In the same year, because were growing so fast, of course, we wanted to squeeze all the publicity we can get. So were also placed number 11 on the New England list of fast 50 technology companies compiled by Deloitte and Touche. Why does Deloitte, an accounting firm, do this? Anybody, any idea, why would Deloitte do that? To whom? All the growing companies, they do services. They do services for growing companies. So they want to have the list and have the chance to talk to all growing companies. So they have… 

Everything is a little… Yes. Yes. Okay. So yes, we got a visit from them and they were very happy about it, and meanwhile, they described their services. So as I’m writing here in blue, a simple way to create a brand is to talk about your prospects again. I’m just showing you some really simple concepts and give you examples so you see how these things work. Okay, so let’s move to entrepreneur of the year. This time, it’s EY. Another big accounting firm. So each year, founders, I’ll copy that from their website. Founders, transformative CEOs and business leaders begin their journey to the most prestigious global award for entrepreneurs with the nomination to their local EY, blah, blah. Okay. And I wasn’t invited, that’s in June, coming soon in Monaco, but nobody invited me. On the other hand, there is a personal perspective. 

So in 1998, 1999, and 2001, I was named finalist in the entrepreneur of the year award in Boston. Yes, now you can see. So this is me with the tuxedo and, yeah, I wanted to embarrass my kids, so that’s why it’s here. Sorry, but I have to keep you branded, amused, right, listening. So here it is. This is me with one of my investors. He’s also in a tuxedo. And this is the team, or part of the team. So all sounds really great, except for this. So three -time finalist, three times and no win. Horrible. Take away. I still remember it fondly. Great branding for Ernst & Young. Okay. So you see, I didn’t win and still I remember it nicely. What are the main takeaway? Competition and context make your prospects talk to you and apply. 

Remember we talked about how do you reach them? We applied. We wanted to be on that list and on that. So we joined. It’s annual, repeatable event. So you create content in a very predictable way. People like recognition and winning. Those of you who know me, we say we are all apes. We like people to scratch on our back. So this is a scratch on the back. I even showed you a picture. How nice were. It requires some work, but it’s really easy to do. And the most interesting thing. You saw the Gala event that I went to. So I got tickets for free for me and my wife. But they said, you better bring your team. So I bought, I don’t know, like seven or eight tickets for the team for the Gala event. 

I’m not going to get it with the team not there in the room, right? So they made good money on the Gala event. Smart people, accounting firm, want to make money. Okay. So, John Deere, I bought it last time. How to create thought leadership brand for a company that manufactures plows. So they have a magazine. They started the magazine in 1895. Became very successful, reached four million readers and still in circulation and have one and a half million readers. Okay, Michelin. The Gardner Magic Quadrant. People know what it is. Yeah? Those of you who know, please raise your hands. Look at that. Look at how many people here know this. Good brand, right? So, Gardner is an IT firm, Information Technology Research and Consulting firm. Founded in 1979 by no other than Mr. Gardner. 

Now it’s a public company, revenues $6 billion and 20 ,000 employees. So they were doing something right. And I’m going to show you what they were doing something right. Who are their customers? Remember, you always have to do your branding towards a very specific set of prospects, people you can define. So it’s CIOs, chief information officers, IT executives of large organizations and government agencies. So they also work with governments and hospitals and other organizations. And also investors in technology companies. And what do they give them advice on? Which products and technologies, which CRM, which whatever, they need to buy for their organization. That’s their consultation. CIOs, the people who need to make that decision, they tell them which of the 10 different CRMs you should purchase. So here’s the magic quadrant for B2B marketing automation platforms. 

Basically, it’s just a table, it’s not a table, it’s a square, divided to four. And with names of products or companies in it. That’s all what there is here. And here are the companies, Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot, Adobe, Oracle, Creatio, Zoho, blah, blah. So on this little piece of paper, they put 11 companies that compete in that market. Do you think these companies care about that? Yes, they do. Remember prospects, when you talk about me, I care about. So here’s what the quadrant really means. It has names. The one that everybody wants to be is the top right, the leaders. The other side, the bottom left, they call them nicely niche players, which means they are small and not important. On the top, there is the challengers and at the bottom, there are the visioners. What does that mean? I don’t know. 

And the two dimensions are in this direction, completeness of vision and ability to execute on the vertical one. So what is magic about this magic? The magic about it is actually in the branding, seriously. So they put a very compact presentation and with large amounts of information, there were 11 companies mentioned in here and it’s all packed in a presentation that is very easy to follow. It’s just a picture with 11 names on it, spread over the four quadrant. And the brand talks to the prospects, both the companies that need to make a decision and the companies that appear in this chart. So it’s Zoom info. We got a call one day. They said, we really want to understand how you guys do, what you do and we want to make sure we understand it so we can present it and blah, blah, blah. 

And by the way, we can help you develop your strategy and vision for $40 ,000 a year. We will be at your service to help you develop the vision. You get it, guys? $40 ,000 and we can inch up into the vision areas or the top ones, right? The leaders. I’m just telling you reality, okay? So do you agree with the positioning of the different platforms? So do you agree with it? Well, you’re not alone. What are the criteria for the positioning of a product? I went to Wikipedia to find out and here’s what I found. In 2009, Cardner was sued by ZL Technologies for the legitimacy of the magic quadrant rating system. So Cardner filed to dismiss the case claiming freedom of speech, in the USA constitution, that’s… 

Cardner claimed its magic quadrant reports contained pure opinion, which legally means opinions that are not based on facts. What do you think happened? Yeah, what else? Other solution? Well, I’ll give you the… What happened was the court dismissed the lawsuit and accepted, dismissed it, didn’t even have a trial, said freedom of speech, done. So basically, as you can see, thought leadership is what I think and makes me a leader. I really wanted to drive that point to you. They built this, they have judgment over the world and they are immune to any. There are about 100 different magic quadrant charts on the Gardner site. Remember, the company is $6 billion. So here are some of them. Access management, account -based marketing platform analytics and business intelligence, API management, B2B marketing automation, cloud application platforms have no clue what that is. 

Communications, platform as a service, container management and blah, blah, robotic process automation, 100 of those. So you start thinking how far out they went and that’s 100, basically just 100 quadrant charts like that. But how do you make money? So remember, we talked about that. This is the classical marketing funnel. You start with awareness, then engagement, then consideration and so forth down the face. So what they created is the awareness and the engagement. That’s what branding does. And here it looks. So you go there and you see the Gardner magic quadrant for account -based marketing platforms. That’s just copied from their website. What I’m going to show you shows one under the other, but I want it to be next to one another. It gives you what it includes. Market definition, description, magic quadrant, inclusion and exclusion criteria, blah, blah. 

If you want to see it, you have to sign up. So they move from awareness to engagement. If you want to see the data, you have to sign up. So you start seeing the power and remember what I said at the beginning. How many of you know about the magic quadrant and more than half of you raised your hands? Tremendously powerful what they built. Takeaways, focus your research on your prospects. It will give you ample opportunities to talk to them and send them materials. When you talk to them, you can then start communicating. Charts and numbers make you an authority in the eyes of your prospects. Don’t ask me why. The moment you show numbers and charts, people think you know what you’re talking about. It’s magic. Always do that. What? Yeah, exactly. There’s a number there. Numbers don’t lie, right? 

People don’t read long essays. Anybody who thinks they can write, you know, long analysis of something, nobody’s going to read it. Conscious visual representation of data is intriguing. Putting there a pie chart. A pie chart catches the eye. Just at least not. So make it really easy to grasp what you say in 10 seconds. And people believe that this is reality. You can put whatever you want in the pie chart. It doesn’t matter. People believe it. Every conversation with the prospect. So let’s look at it for a moment. So you start your research by interviewing some people. But what you should remember when you talk to prospects, every time you talk to a prospect, if you capture some basic information from that prospect, it goes into your research. So if you talk to 100 prospects a month, you have 100 lines in your table. 

You can create very interesting data. That’s for his idea, by the way. Thank you. Data can be analyzed in different slices. So you can take, let’s say you have 500 lines in your database. You can now slice them by industry. So in the shoe manufacturing industry behaves like this and in the airplane industry it looks like that and blah, blah, okay? By company size, by geography, by technology. So you can take the same exact list, same way that I was talking about long tail, and generate many reports easily. Remember, it’s hard to generate new content consistently. That’s a very good way of doing it. Okay. So I’m done. Here’s the homework again. Those of you who want to take a picture are welcome. If not, we will send it to you. You will send it to you.