Are you a marketer in a small technology company? It’s been hard work being a smaller vendor in a competitive market space these past few years, eh?
In more robust economic times, small company agility can be a valuable marketing tool: “We can deliver new features faster than larger, more sluggish vendors.” But as sales cycles have been drawn out and big wins harder to close, the bigger players have had a whole lot more stored fat to draw energy from.
Opportunities do present themselves, even in the most difficult of times, however, if you are tuned in to you competitors and looking for those weaknesses in the defense to take advantage of.
One of my favorite tactics is to spring into action when a competitor gets acquired by one of the big players — such as IBM, Oracle, HP or Microsoft. When a small, agile company gets absorbed by an industry giant, the smaller vendor’s customers who may have been perfectly happy with their vendor have to ask themselves some questions:
- Is the acquiring company going to modify the acquired company’s roadmap? (Probably)
- Will the acquired company be forced to integrate with some other offerings in the acquiring company’s portfolio? (Probably)
- Will execution lag while the regulatory aspect of an acquisition takes place and decisions about organization and potential “resource optimizations” are investigated? (ABSOLUTELY)
A client company executed this tactic recently — and the results were immediate and (predictably) positive. RSD issued a press release in response to the news that IBM intended to acquire PSS Systems. PSS Atlas competes with one of RSD’s latest offerings from their RSD GLASS Information Governance suite. The basic concept was simple: PSS Atlas customers will need to have an answer to management’s obvious question: “Is the IBM acquisition a good thing, or a bad thing?” Raise doubt in the PSS Atlas customer’s mind by presenting an offer: “For the amount you are paying PSS in maintenance, we’ll convert you to our competitive offering, RSD GLASS Mosaic.” A simple and clear alternative to the path into IBM’s software portfolio, and an opportunity for RSD to upsell the balance of their Information Governance solution.
Not only did the story get wings in the Twittersphere and over LinkedIn, but more importantly it generated an emotional response from the PSS Systems CEO, @dee_dray. “Ignore false rumors from RSD. Atlas will continue to be info governance hub for all data sources & types + enterprise execution scale.” And of course, that generated a host of retweets — all to the benefit of RSD’s disruptive tactic.
Chalk this one up for RSD!
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