Wisdom - Real-life 4

This story dramatically underlines the value of your own product as a marketing asset. I was given the assignment this year of greatly increasing the US visibility and revenues of Panda Software, a strong European anti-virus developer. The thing about anti-virus is that it’s a commodity space. Therefore, the service has some value even if unbranded. I took an internal suggestion and decided to test a controlled giveaway program. Our space was the Small to Medium Enterprise (SME) and our target was the overworked IT manager in those companies and institutions. Called IT @ Home and positioned under the Panda Challenge umbrella, our program was simple: if you were an IT Manager, we wanted you to have a full year of our professional AV product for your use at home, at no cost or obligation. We rolled out the program initially through W2Knews, a publication strongly identified with the IT network manager audience. Interestingly, we found that the offers only had legs when made editorially. We expanded through other technology newsletters like The Anchor Desk. The response was instant — and all told we gave away over 10,000 of these products to a very focused audience. To ensure that these were mostly IT decision-makers, we made the offers through sharply focused IT publications and research orgs (never flat Web sites), and we took down the download links within a couple of days. We did tolerate a percentage of unqualifieds. Now, in following up on these downloads we found that the audience greatly appreciated the gift. This made it easy to talk to them. A plus was that in many cases these managers found viruses on their own home machines — machines they thought were fully protected! This opened up the door to quoting Panda Av on their corporate networks. It became ridiculous — everyone, including the media, was finding viruses on their home machines! This became The Panda Challenge and it did wonders during the virus storms of late August. I’m a strong believer in the popcorn-popper, which means that there has to be a whole process of following up individually on each lead. (This does mean you have to invest in sophisticated event-driven sequential autoresponders — as offered by Campaign from Arial Software, or by GetResponse.) So we devised a whole series of follow-up offers that followed the internal motto: Serving the Underserved. The dirty secret in B2B software is that the big enterprises get all the

benefits while the SMEs get underserved. So we made a specialty of identifying programs that our competition only pulled out for the biggest accounts, and made them available to virtually every business: Competitive Renewals, Employee Free Seats, Free Network Detox, Free Phone Support, etc. These were highly effective poppers. Our campaign to leverage the resources we had actually delivered an effective positioning of the company as the SME IT Manager’s friend. How effective was it? Well, after a couple agonizing months, the sales and revenues took off, starting in the bottom of the summer, and eventually doubled in range. You can see the graph at www.techtransform.com/id344.htm. The ultimate test? After I wrapped up, Panda continued to use IT @ Home and has made this program and its positioning as its centerpiece for 2004. Which means that Symantec, McAfee, and Trend Micro had better watch their rears!

Riggs Eckelberry, Principal, TechTransform, http://www.techtransform.com