Competing – James Doman-Pipe

Going to market through a platform ecosystem

My first real job in marketing began with a data entry gig as part of an internship: sorting out Excel lists of leads, importing and de-duplicating into a CRM. What was expected to take two weeks took two days instead. So I broadened out: writing some blog posts, tweeting, and playing around with the website. I was employee number four. Fast forward 10 months, and I’d been working with them throughout my last year of university, and fell nicely into a full-time position in the now-10 people startup. We were PredictiveIntent: a flexible recommendation platform, first developed for mobile network operator media portals (remember those?). Our audience then? Anything, and anyone. The sales team (the CEO and one account manager) […]

Positioning against Goliath (and multiple Davids, too)

When you’re in a highly competitive industry, your business needs to stand out. But too often, companies rely on competing on issues that are relatively basic, common, and just not that important in the grand scheme of things — price and features included! At Kayako (recently acquired), we successfully competed against some of the biggest names in software — Zendesk, Intercom, Salesforce — as well as probably hundreds of smaller businesses with similar software propositions. On reflection, here are a few things I think contributed to our ability to stand out and win customers in a crowded marketplace. We focused on just two customer personas By understanding how these two different personas thought about customer service and the way they […]