The Marketplace of One

We sell an app called Configuration Manager for Jira ( or CMJ for short). It basically takes all the settings and ...wait for it... configurations of your Jira issue tracking system and saves them all so you can have a good copy of all that, so you can migrate between servers, so you can move to the cloud. Get it?

But it's actually super cool. Have you gone through the experience of buying a new phone and being able to just pair with the old one to make the new one have everything set up the way your old phone was set up? It does that, only for tricky systems.

Its one of my 3 favorite apps that we sell, because I've been the guy with 2000 servers that needed constant updating and configuration changes. If I had a tool like this where I could've done all the complex tasks this easily, it would've saved me hours and hours. Like, a day every month worth of hours.

The Marketplace of One

If I were tasked with selling this, I would talk about it being a big fat "save button" for Jira. If you're a sys admin type, you want tools like this, because they're a big time saver. Look, it's not like sysadmins are lazy; but they have bigger more interesting fish to fry than hand-typing configurations back in when someone blows up a server, or when they need to add more for capacity, or migrate, or whatever. I'd sell to the ease of use.

But that's one app, one person, one sales approach. If I were selling this to a consultant who does a company's Jira work for them, I'd talk about how you can templatize your most common settings, then customize them for your client, then snap off a save state so you can bring that client back up in no time, in the event of a failure. I would use this tool for migration tasks, because it's faster than the native tools that do similar work. It's a linchpin tool for a channel solution provider type.

Marketing works best when you market just for me. You're not selling to 10,000 admins. You're selling to one admin and one admin and one admin and one admin - you get it.

This Approach Can Be Baked into Such a Simple Process

What I can never understand is why organizations tend to lose sight of how easy it is to market to one person. It's all about segmentation. That's such a basic task. You can do it with paper and pencil. You can do it with pointing at people. The fact we have such powerful technology to allow us to do it digitally and with great nuance only makes the excuses that we don't do it more hollow.

• Who is the buyer?
• What is their goal?
• What are they most worried about?
• What do they NOT care about?
• What is our approach for this buyer?
• What do we have to say?
• What's the next best step?

In my example above, I gave two potential buyers: systems administrator and consultant/solutions provider. (They're both technically admins, but one works for the company and the other serves the company.) They want different things. They need different assurances. Without answering the above-listed questions, how could someone say they have a plan in place to market?

Product Knowledge AND Customer Knowledge

I love talking with Petar and Boris and George about Configuration Manager for Jira (they made it). Mostly, I love telling them my weird story lines like "the save button for Jira" so that they can explain when I'm wrong, nudge me until I'm right. I love asking questions until I know the product and can talk about it like I use it every day (which I do not).

But I also love talking to our customers. At TEAM 23 in April, I only got to hang around the booth for a few hours, but I was able to talk with a few people from some companies you know. One guy really surprised me because he said, "I know your apps pretty well-" (which would be tough because we have like 200, but okay) - "but what I'm here to find out about is your security stuff. How secure are your apps?"

I had to ask if he was teasing me. He said no, why?

I pointed to the brand new award our CISO Doug Kersten's team won (with a whole lot of other support) for enterprise security just a few hours ago on the same day. The guy raised both eyebrows, shrugged, and said, "Okay, tell me more."

Now, I want to BS you and tell you I know all about security. But I was lucky, because I'd just heard Doug talking about it, so I said everything I could remember.

Something Something ISO 27001, something something 27017, SOC 2, Type 1, etc.

THAT was what the marketplace of One was about to this guy. Security. He worked in the world where security was more important than most other factors, and so that was what it took to sell him.

But This Doesn't Scale, Chris

I know. I know you've been aching to point that out. It DOES scale. There aren't 10,000 stories for each of the 10,000 buyers. Instead, it's more that you have to group or cluster up the details people want to know about so that you can sprinkle them in where needed.

• One End User License Agreement - important for big enterprise and government buyers, also for cost-conscious
• ISO/SOC/etc enterprise grade security - important for sensitive industries
• Flexible configuration methods - important for sys admins

And on and on. It's about finding the stories that match your various marketplaces of one at ONE level. At the other, it's about segmenting so that you can customize your messaging as much as possible.

I Don't Talk Much About Marketing

I've been doing leadership work for the last few years, so not as much focus of mine lands on marketing, but I think about it every day. As a buyer, as a company that markets, as someone who's done work with the biggest brands in the world over the last 20 years.

But I think leadership is partly about sharing information you think might benefit others to incorporate. And that's why I wrote this for you today.

You're a marketplace of one. What matters when YOU buy things for work, for yourself?

Chris...