Positioning Flashcards
Barry Sowerwine Competitive Positioning
“You know, I believe that only the paranoid survive. I always look at the competitive landscape. But fundamentally I don’t think that anyone else in this space gets it. It’s not about the demo! (SAP’s product demo’s well…) It’s about the experience the user has all the way from the beginning, through to the end.
Take Qliksense – it’s leveraging html5, looks a hell of a lot better…but you know the first thing you have to do? You have to decide what chart type to pick. Business users are not graphic designers. If you ask me how I want to see the data, I won’t know. That’s the beauty of the Tableau experience. You don’t have to know. You start dragging and dropping and it does it for you like magic.
One of the biggest challenges users have is connecting to the data. In QlikView if you want to connect to data you have to build a QVD file. And if that sounds technical, it is. With Tableau? A couple clicks. Then once you connect, how hard is it to glean insight? How hard is it to upgrade? Does it take an army off consultants and 6 months? Or does it self-upgrade?
Yeah. SAP Lumira has a good demo. I think that’s what’s wrong with the software industry.”
Drive positioning
“What does it take to transform an organization? If you’re trying to bring about an analytical culture throughout your organization, you can’t just enable your best analysts. And you can’t just put software on everyone’s desktop and expect it to change the company.
Drive is a methodology that outlines the tools and the processes you need to transform your entire organization. It’s a roadmap that can take you through a transformation, to an analytical culture in which each of your people is asking questions about the business and improving it with data.”
Customer Story - (Major Airline…wink wink)
I wont name the company but one off our customers literally found $178M of billing errors that occurred over a four year time period from their strategic suppliers. I mean this was literally FOUND MONEY, of course the question they had after finding it was “Why are we just now finding it?” And as they peeled back the onion what they determined is, the people who traditionally worked with data were people with technical expertise. But you put the power of data in the hand of people with domain expertise, they’re going to see things and that’s exactly what happened.
We don’t just have…
“We don’t just have reference-able customers, we have a cult following”
We use our own products - dogfooding
We use our own products. Its interesting how many software companies don’t use what they sell. Doesn’t that blow your mind?? They don’t even use their own products. How can you truly understand what your customers are feeling and experiencing unless you do it your self?
Henry Ford Quote
“If I would of asked people what they wanted, they would of said faster horses”
Why hold back people who want to leverage their data?
I fundamentally believe if there is someone in your organization that wants to contribute, make a difference, leverage their own ingenuity and creativity - why would you not let them do it?
A fundamental break from the past - Comparing the past to the future, looking back it is so obvious.
You know, Pat Hanaran’s background is a great example of breaking free from the past. Pat worked at Pixar before movies leveraged computers. In fact, all animated films prior lost money. Now computers are used in every movie. There will come a day not long from now that we are going to look back and we’re not even fathom that people felt the pain of working with data. There is going to come a day that analytical reasoning, facts and the ability to glean insights from data is going to become a requirement for all knowledge workers. No one can imagine not having a computer to do their job, one day they will not be able to imagine not having a tool that can help them gain insights from their massive investment in data.
What we do
We help people see and understand their data. We basically put people at the front of the process and let the software fade to the background….I like to call it simplicity masking complexity
Limits the…
Limits the boundaries of their intellectual exploration
I want a discount
Our policy is not to discount because we believe in the value our software provides. To prove this I am happy to give you a free trial and help you get started. I know our competitors are cheaper, but I recommend you try using their software too before you buy.
Pitfall #5: Deploying Tableau as a Developer Centric Tool
If you really want to get the most out of Tableau then you need an agile development strategy for data models combined with end-user self-service. Tableau is the easiest to use tool on the market for developing sophisticated dashboards and doing ad-hoc analysis.
Put that power in the hands of your business users and unleash an army of data workers within your company.
Don’t let a small team of IT developers be your bottleneck. Don’t be afraid to throw raw data out there without definitions.
Be agile and incrementally build definitions into your sources in conjunction with the business custodians of the data.
Establish a core team of data visualization experts (Center of Excellence) that can come alongside your business users to teach them how to self-serv
You need to treat your data like what it is…
A Strategic Asset
Competitors are “closing the gap”
One theme I touch on when customers are talking about the gap, is that our competitors focus on the “what” – we focus on the “why”. They focus on trying to close the gap of a function matrix, we focus on enabling people to address real problems. They assume users aren’t smart and need to be guided through everything, we assume users are smart and create ways to augment their intelligence and show their creativity. They’re playing catchup in a market they still don’t understand the spirit of.
McKee Foods Excel Quote
“I only every open excel to show others how to format data for Tableau, that is its only purpose now” - Brad Slaughter
