Blog

I have spent my career in the software technology business. Software is an intangible object. A bunch of zeros and ones stored on a device or media. I have traveled the planet creating belief in those 0’s and 1’s. It’s not about the software. It’s about what the software can do for you.

Many of the technology companies I’ve worked with bring an engineer’s view to their products and services. They talk about how much faster it is. Or how much smaller. This technical feature. That technical feature. Few people care about the technical features (except other engineers). Fewer still who are part of the buying process.

My former partner Bob Green and I invented host based email in the early 80’s. We created the product largely to satisfy our own needs to not be interrupted by the telephone. We commercialized the product and sold it around the world. Once of the first papers I wrote about using email was The Unoffice. In photographs and words, I described how Bob and I both worked from home and how we used email to run a virtual office. We used our personal experiences to project a vision of how prospective customers could have a vision of what it was like to use email.

Technology companies need to learn how to make their story personal. Rather than talk about features and benefits, show how customers have changed their businesses and lives by adopting your product. Include customer quotes that talk about the personal impact of adopting the technology for their business. Share these stories both inside and outside the company.

Most technology companies that have been around for a while have these personal stories. An engineering culture needs help to see the value in this story telling and even more help to Paint a Vision of what their products and services can do for clients.

As for the two sailboats and the fishing boat in the photo that accompanies this posting. That’s a personal story about how two families almost missed each other by a bay.