Forty-four years old Shellye Archambeau is one of the most successful women in corporate America. After having spent her first 15 years at IBM, where she rose up to be the highest ranking African American woman ever in the company, she moved to many smaller, entrepreneurial companies.
She is currently the CEO of MetricStream, a provider of compliance software. She is the co-author of “Marketing That Works”, a book on entrepreneurial marketing. Shellye, is guest faculty at Stanford University and the Wharton Business School, and also a member of the Information Technology Senior Management Forum and the Forum of Women Entrepreneurs in the US. Here she shares her insights into effective marketing practices for start-ups and entrepreneurs.
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After having spent most of your career at IBM, how did you end up writing a book on entrepreneurial marketing?
Even though I spent the first 15 years at IBM, I was typically in situations where I had very little funding. Usually, I had a new function to launch, a new product to get going, a new market to tackle and things needed to be turned around. So, I worked in a very Skunkworx environment. The time at IBM gave me a lot of insight into the importance of marketing, because in selling, even if you have a big brand, if you don’t have the right marketing message, if you don’t have a clear value proposition, and the right marketing materials, your customer is not going to buy from you.
When I moved on to the entrepreneurial companies, I saw that they needed the same things. They needed a strong value proposition, they needed to have in place the materials to communicate that, and they needed to make sure they were going after the right target market. I saw a lot of people struggling with this [marketing]. This tends to be the reason why, especially for entrepreneurs, even though they have a great idea, a good product concept or a good service concept, it never makes it out of the garage.
Why do many entrepreneurs mess up? What should they do differently?
Couple of reasons. One, entrepreneurs get very passionate about what they are building and sometimes they fall in love with their product. When you fall in love with somebody, you are blinded from everything else. When you are in love with your product, it’s the same thing. You don’t see the flaws, you don’t see what needs to be worked at, you are so in love, your view becomes narrow.
What actually needs to happen is, before you actually start building that product, when you have the concept, you need to start thinking about who is this product going to work for? Then you need to start having conversations with those types of people or companies to ensure that the concept you have is one that actually meets a real need.
Before you actually start taking the time to build out your concept, you should start having conversations with people within companies to ensure that the need they are seeing is a need they can fill. If you are working in an environment where you are already touching those kinds of companies, you can have those conversations and try to understand not just if your product is valuable, but if you are going to pay for it? How much would you pay for it? You can do that kind of research informally before you get started.
The other thing you need to do when you have those conversations, find someone who says, “oh, I will absolutely pay for this if I can have this.” So you say, “Oh, great! Would you be first beta, I won’t even charge you.” One of the things you need first is your very first customer, which is typically the hardest customer to get. Another thing is to get involved in some groups or organizations that are in this area of interest. Link with people because it helps you figure out what’s happening in the market, what’s going on. Because once you have built a product you don’t want to find out that someone else has it too.
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