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Surviving Nuclear Winter: 10 Item Checklist for Selling Content Processing

After a month of international travel and dozens of meetings, I went through my old-fashioned paper notebook and looked at the comments I wrote to myself. I am not sure if these are useful, but I thought I would save myself the hassle of creating a file and storing it in my “Book Notes” folder on my desk top computer. If you want to critique, refine, or criticize these thoughts, please, use the comments section to the Web log. I received a flurry of emails from PR mavens last night who discovered that pulling this goose’s tail feathers produces a couple of loud honks and fierce beak peck.

Set Up

It should come as no surprise that two of the high profile search vendors have been working overtime to generate PR buzz and revenue. Furthermore, I have documented the sad fate of content processing companies who post a Web site, invite people to contact the company, and then don’t respond. You can plow through the postings on this diary / Web log and find these articles about SurfRay, TeezIR, and other firms. Finally, there are quite a few start ups. I met with two in San Jose and one in Utrecht that show significant promise. These outfits are in pre-divestment mode, so each has to hit up mom and dad for cash to keep the lights on.

These points, then, are designed to encapsulate what I thought as I pondered these meetings and the information I gathered about content processing in the last month. If the list is useful, great. If it annoys you, use the comments to tell. I don’t need to hear from Trent or Sky for a PR Webinar.

The List

Here are the 10 tips:

1. Have a market on which you focus. One of the major weaknesses of the pre-Microsoft Fast Search & Transfer was that it was a search company, a business intelligence company, a content management company, etc. If you are everything to all markets, how am I to know what market you are trying to reach.
2. Solve a problem. I often don’t have a clue about what a content processing system is supposed to do or actually does. I have seen enough algorithms in my 64 years, and I don’t want to work through a modification of hyperbolic geometry to see congruence across search queries. by the way, I am now reading e: The Story of a Number. I highly recommend Eli Mao’s book. I just don’t want numerical recipes in a briefing; I want a solution.
3. Define your words. So what’s search already? What’s a social search? What’s a knowledge problem? Each of these is goose feathers. I posted on the Web log a list of tag lines from search vendors. I did it as a way to show the hopeless jargon used to explain what a content processing company does. Don’t speak in haiku form?
4. Think about partnering. Some of the organizations with which I speak reject the notion of partnering. That’s limiting in my opinion. Consider partner plays.
5. Be realistic about Google. Google is becoming the Internet and it will be making an effort to have a similar impact on commercial organizations. You have to consider how you can get out of Google’s way, take advantage of Google and remain three feet away from the juggernaut, or how to surf on Google. To tell me that you don’t see Google as having an impact on your venture is, from my point, of view not realistic.
6. Keep the PR mavens away from me. I am allergic to this breed. My PR advisors have known me for 25 years, and I keep them six feet away. If I do this to the people I pay, what will I do with your PR people?
7. Do exactly what you tell me you will do. I get lots of “Sorry, I got swamped”, “An emergency kept me out of the office for the last two days”, and “I forgot.” I get my feathers standing up when I hear variations on the throw away “Let’s do lunch.” How can you sell or convince anyone that your company is for real if you can’t keep a commitment you made. I am not standing inside the speaker’s brain saying, “Tell him we will send the ftp location”. Common behavior. Bad behavior.
8. Provide a demo that works. I received a briefing from a company in Italy. The firm sent me a build of the product. I had to install a virtual machine to run the code. At launch, I had to insert a dongle. After that, the software did not work as advertised. Sure, I could have asked Don and Stu to spend hours, maybe days, trying to get the system to index my test corpus of 500 Mb of patents. I didn’t. I wrote off the company as “not ready for prime time.” Calling me and then saying, “Yes, that was an issue” does zero to change my view of the company as disorganized.
9. Have a Web site that I can use. Search and content processing companies make my life tough when I have to use their Web sites to find information. I posted a link to an Autonomy story a few days ago. The story was not on the company’s Web site. It’s there now, but the annoyance of having to chase around for a verification of an announcement makes work for me. Try and find the historical information on Open Text’s Web site about its 1995 Web index. I couldn’t find it, and I was trying to call attention to a very useful service. When I can’t get the informato0in from the source, I shift into investigator mode and hunt for information. When that happens, I report what I find. You can see that in the TeezIR profile I wrote in September.
10. Be truthful. If you tell me that sales are great and I find out that a company with more than three dozen sales professionals closed about $6 million in sales in the last 12 weeks, I experience cognitive dissonance. In short, I don’t believe a single thing I hear from the company’s executives. I hear so much baloney I sometimes think I work in a Nebraska meat processing company, not commercial intelligence and analysis.

Wrap Up

There you have my checklist for surviving the nuclear winter that is approaching. Am I reasonable? Unreasonable? Help me refine my thinking.

Stephen Arnold, October 10, 2008

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