We had just finalized our mission statement - Nexient’s two-part positioning that our people were firmly on board with. Well, the second part of it anyway…

“Because life is too short for crappy software…”

The first, more boring part of our mission statement had taken up the lion share of the work….

To build software people love to use so our clients thrive…

…but our employees had made it clear that the parenthetical comment we added (almost as an afterthought) was the best part. So we settled in on this as a great way to express what we stood for.

In previous articles I’ve shared the evolution of our offering to that of product mindset. In my last article with Allen Debes we described how we introduced our third arc, “category creating services”, which in our context was product consulting or full product team provision. Instead of sticking with a “project mindset” - focusing on pre-determined deliverables, time and budgets - a “product mindset” focuses on creating software to best answer the client’s needs. In other words, exactly what our mission statement conveyed - building amazing software instead of optimizing existing crappy software.

Testing our differentiating approach at a new client pitch

Our first test of this approach was to lead with this positioning at an in-person prospect meeting. For reasons I’ll get into later, not only was this a huge risk for us, it also went against pretty much everything I'd been taught in my experience in large consulting firms. The same went for everyone else around me on the team. This was for two distinct reasons:

1. The safe approach for a consulting firm is to cast a wide net by describing enterprise challenges, and then getting the client to speak up about which one is their biggest pain point. For us to zero in on one single pain point meant that we were forgoing the chance to say we could do a lot of other things (and accordingly give up the opportunity to be considered for lots of other work);
2. Our industry has come a long way since 2019 with tone of voice and brand positioning. Today it is far more common to use authentic, slightly disruptive, everyday language in marketing and sales. Five years ago, professional services would more commonly keep their tone professional and at arms length. To go into a meeting with a potential new client and put our differentiating statement “out there” was quite brave.

But we had said we wanted to stand out among the other 10,000 firms around the globe who were doing outsourced software development. So on the first slide in our deck, we just put the words, “Life’s too short for crappy software.”

This potential client was a major player in the business of precious stones. The nature of their product, and the enormous amount of responsibility their daily operations carried, meant their brand was premium, grown up and no nonsense. So it was a bit of a risk kicking off with our fun, witty and youthful positioning.

A quick comparison between product and services testing

I mentioned earlier that we were essentially testing our new approach at this new client pitch. My analogy for what we were doing here was something that I had done many times in building software products. As a product manager, I had learned the hard way that you can do lots of surveys asking people questions like “Would you buy this product?” or “Would you pay $x per month for this product?” In a survey, people will tell you what they think you want to hear. When you actually try to sell them that product at that price, you start to get the real feedback. Several objections will usually come up and you only learn then why they don’t want to buy the product.

To combat this, a common technique to test new products is “fake door testing”. A proposed product is marketed with the in-app flow looking like it is already for sale. When people get to the purchase page, they discover that the product is not yet available. Their journey however has captured valuable information by prioritizing the product. This is a way of stripping out the psychology of a survey and counting how many people actually hit “purchase” in the app.

The closest way to try this in services is to just lean in to the new approach and see whether the prospect buys it. This would be an expensive experiment for us. In this instance, at least two of us and the prospect were flying to Ann Arbor, MI from the West Coast for the meeting. Getting a prospect to take a lengthy in-person meeting did not happen very often. And with us only acquiring around one new client per month the stakes were high.

Starting our pitch with a memorable opener

I was assigned the role of kicking off our presentation - a single slide with these words: “Life’s too short for crappy software”. When I presented it and introduced the company with the new positioning, it was difficult to read the room. To be honest I think they were a bit surprised and didn’t quite know how to take me beginning with such down to earth humor. But they didn’t have a negative reaction either.

We went through the whole four-hour pitch with a lot of detailed presentations. At the end, they said they’d like to start a new engagement with us. I asked them what their take was on the approach. They told me they loved it and that it was one of the reasons why they chose to move forward with us. Not only did it stand out as different, they liked that it was authentic, setting us up as someone they could work with.

1. Selling is the best market research - there are a lot of different ways to approach it, but to really get people’s honest feedback on pricing and product, you need to try to sell it to them. It’s only when you try to get them to pay you that the real feedback comes out.
2. You don’t know until you try it - we had done a lot of thinking and talking about our positioning, but we wouldn’t really know if we had got it right until we tested it with prospects and clients. This was only a single data point, so we had more testing to do before we were 100% sure, but it was a great start to getting confirmation that we had the positioning right.
3. You have to close off opportunities to stand out - in services, you can’t do everything well, especially if you are a small or medium services company. In order to stand out, you will have to go deep on a specific offering. Doing this means you have to admit you don’t do a lot of other things. It can be hard to do at first, but it’s the best way to get to a leadership position.