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By Peter Longini
Evangelism can be a lonely calling. Take the case of Ray Schraff, Manager of Product Evangelism for enterprise software maker Hyland Software in Cleveland, Ohio. “Microsoft has over a thousand technical and product evangelists,” Schraff pointed out. “In Seattle or Silicon Valley, I’d just have to mention my title and people would know what it was. But Cleveland isn’t Silicon Valley. So I have to explain what an evangelist is. One person I ran into who had never heard the term before asked me: Do you evangelize on TV?”
The Mission
Well, not exactly on TV. But showbiz – or at least the more showman-like aspects of the business world – really are central to what technology product evangelists do for a living. And, like their counterparts in the clergy, the evangelist’s overriding mission is to cultivate true believers – to inspire others to have faith in the product or service.
One way Schraff likes to explain his work is by quoting from Guy Kawasaki’s book Selling the Dream. Kawasaki was one of the original evangelists for Apple’s McIntosh and one of his early tasks involved going out and convincing software companies to write code for a computer that didn’t actually exist yet. The first line of his book reads: ‘evangelism is the process of convincing people to believe in your product or idea as much as you do.’ It is now the mantra of today’s professional product evangelist.
Conjuring Visions
“I explain to people that we drive the adoption of our software and translate technology into business English and vice-versa,” Schraff notes. “We create a vision for people of what they can do with our product. Our role fits in between the technical people and the sales people, but we can understand both.”
That translation function assumes a number of forms. Some of the most important involve the creation and presentation of dazzling demos, Flash videos, Blogs, RSS feeds, sound tracks, and value-driven collateral to infuse the message with emotion and persuade both internal and outside audiences of the product’s compelling business solutions and ROI.
“When a product evangelist, or PE, gives a presentation, the whole idea is that you’re trying to move the audience to action. That’s why the presentations PEs do are very animated, very dynamic,” he said. You want the people walking out from the presentation to feel as though they can’t wait to get back to the office and start working, to start building something based on what they just saw.”
The Bully Pulpit
Those messages are not just directed to skeptics. “In many cases, people have already bought the software and they’re just going to the presentation to get ideas. So we try to do that in a compelling and motivational way,” Schraff observed. “It’s almost like a TV infomercial where the announcer is saying ‘…but that’s not all! You can also do this and this and this! And if you already have this, well maybe you’ve never tried this!’ So people walk away energized.”
Of course, not everyone is cut out to be an evangelist, Schraff admits. Nor is every product in need of one at each stage of its life-cycle; only newer and more complex products fully benefit from evangelism. “The people who do this are able to understand technology and put together demos using the software in business solution contexts. And on the other side, they’re able to talk about business value and ROIs and solution selling. It’s kind of a hybrid role, so the skill set is complex. And because a product evangelist gives a lot of presentations and flash movies and demos and webinars, they need the ability to design, create and deliver great high energy presentations that have serious visual appeal. Creativity is one of the key traits of a PE. They’re creative and high energy and very charismatic…..they have what I call ‘eye sparkle’.”
But it wasn’t until the new millennium that Hyland, whose sophisticated content management technology includes more than 100 separate modules, really got the religion. “Originally we were called product managers,” Schraff explained. “In the year 2000, when they created the PE role, we had sales people and we had developers. Our marketing team was mainly focused on things like the logistics of trade shows, planning events, creating and printing vertical-oriented collateral, supporting the channel, generating leads, and managing analyst relations. But because of the complexity of the enterprise software, they recognized that they needed a kind of in-between role for people who had more technical skills than you might need for traditional Marketing alone. Also, PEs don’t create the product roadmap. They can influence it, but they don’t own it. That was another reason we changed the job title.”
Rising Vertically
Today Hyland, which prides itself on being driven by its customers’ specific needs, doesn’t even have formal product managers making market-based or analyst-based roadmap decisions, Schraff explains. “That function is typically performed by flexible groupings of industry managers, industry solution engineers, development managers, and executives. Much of the input to the product roadmap comes from customer and partner advisory boards. Our CEO even puts his cell phone number on the public website so customers can call him directly if need be to discuss their needs and ideas. So even our highest level executives and vice presidents are extremely close to the customers.”
To help, the company has built a series of mechanisms for capturing that customer input. “A lot of that information is coming into our vertical sales and marketing teams,” he said. “We have what we call VOGUEs – Vertical OnBase Groups of User Experts, organized by industry. For example, we have a VOGUE for the insurance industry where there may be 40 or 50 insurance companies. So as insurance providers, they’re talking about what we need to do for their industry with the software. VOGUE member organizations are typically some of our biggest and most active users.”
Preparing the Word
“Then we have Web sites where they can submit requests as a group and say ‘here are our official insurance industry requests: your product needs this major piece of functionality.’ We have these organized for all our verticals,” he said. “If it was a financial customer; even when they’d call tech support, the people they’d be talking to work with financial services customers all day.”
Vertical marketing managers at Hyland drive most of the company’s traditional, industry-specific marketing communications programs, messaging and collateral creation. At the same time, however, the company’s PEs are working closely with Hyland’s own sales force. Their job: to figure out the right messaging, prepare collateral, offer training webinars, and in other ways create content so that end users can form a vision of the problems the company’s products will solve for them and how it will produce a return on their investment.
“The first thing we usually create is what we call a Product Brief, and it has two parts,” Schraff explained. “The first two pages are called a product overview; that actually goes to customers. The back two pages are more of a sales rapid training sheet – tips and tricks aimed specifically at selling the product: what’s the competitive environment? What are our ROI practices? What are demo tips? What resources do we have internally? The first users are our internal sales and sales channel folks. But the overview eventually goes all the way out to customers and prospects.”
Healing the Pain
“It’s a framework based on support of solution selling, so it’s talking about which business problems and what pain points this is going to solve. And what is the business value. There’s very little highly technical feature explanation,” he said. “At the same time, the PEs are typically producing PowerPoint presentations that they’ll present as webinars. My team gives two product webinars every week and it’s all on the extranet. So it’s for customers.
“An outstanding PE fully productizes and creates most of the product-centric, business-related collateral,” Schraff said, noting how a product-related explanation which may have initially been directed toward one individual becomes a standardized company message directed to all. “We fill in the information holes around a product; and if you really get it right, the individual calls stop coming in because now everybody has direct access to the information themselves, right on our channel extranet, exactly when they need it – not just when a PE is available.”
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