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Product Intelligence and Experience Summit

March 15-16 • San Francisco, CA

Competitive Intelligence Battlecards

March 16, 9:45am

Eric Kuhnen is the Principal and a Managing Partner of Focal Partners

Consulting. Eric is an expert in competitive analysis and response, and brings

more than 20 years of experience in product research, development and

management to every project. Before joining Focal Partners, Eric was

responsible for competitive positioning, product marketing, and product

management at Astoria Software (acquired by TransPerfect), GoRemote

(acquired by iPass), and Oracle Corporation. Since 1990, Eric has managed the

launch of nine different software products across four different disciplines: SaaS,

enterprise, equipment control, and government.

View presentation online at:

www.jpkgroupsummits.com/attendee2

Eric Kuhnen – Focal Partners

Session examines the value of aligning objection handling

with buying criteria developed from Win-Loss interviews to

yield concrete, useful recommendations

Battle cards

“»At its core, a battle card is a tool for helping sales teams

win the hearts and minds of their prospective customers.

General Points

»Layout »Data and Content »Recommendations

Layout

Northrop Grumman Information & Technology (IT) has a major presence in homeland

security initiatives. They are a leader in public safety systems and one of the world’s

largest suppliers of 911 First Responder Computer-Aided Dispatch systems. The sector is

a top-tier integrator of large-scale information systems for customers such as the Internal

Revenue Service, Department of Homeland Security, Federal Aviation Administration and

Department of Justice. Their focus is on Strategic Security, Engineering & Science,

Training & Simulation, Base & Range Operations and Enterprise IT solutions & products.

Specifically, their homeland security technologies and programs include:

• Emergency Preparedness Federation (EMPRED FED). EMPRED FED is a suite

of training simulation, control, interface and visualization tools that offers

comprehensive solutions to help planners, strategists, emergency responders and

post-disaster recovery teams prepare for and handle emergency situations;

• Emergency Management Integrated Solutions Center (EMISC). A joint program

conducted by Northrop Grumman and the University of Alabama in Huntsville,

the EMISC integrates emergency management/disaster preparedness modeling and

simulation applications, including those associated with U.S. Department of

Defense capabilities, into a distributed modeling and simulation network to enable

collaborative planning, analysis, training and exercises;

• Support Planning Integrated Data Enterprise Readiness System (SPIDERS).

SPIDERS is a Web-based readiness planning and decision support application

used by the Defense Logistics Agency and the Federal Emergency Management

Agency for wartime readiness and disaster relief planning;

• First Responder Authentication Credential (FRAC). FRAC is an identity

management credential for emergency personnel that details what attributes an

individual possesses, such as firefighting, law enforcement, hazardous materials,

medical, communications, public health or emergency management skills.

• Wireless Broadband Networks. Northrop Grumman will demonstrate its

comprehensive wireless network features and functionalities that can dramatically

enhance and secure communications, information sharing and collaboration for

public safety agencies; and

• Case Management Frameworks. Northrop Grumman integrates commercial-off-

the-shelf applications and service oriented architecture into an effective case

management framework solution for secure collaboration of critical information

within government and industry.

• Lots of reading

• Nothing to draw the eye

• Indistinct audience

Data and Content

• Biased research

• No objection handling

Recommendations

• In a discussion about technology

advantages, none of the

recommended points is relevant

A Battle Card Combining All Three Problems

A Battle Card Combining All Three Problems

A Battle Card Combining All Three Problems

(This table runs on for four pages)

A Battle Card Combining All Three Problems

10 pages of data to produce six mediocre conclusions

• Innuendo: draws no specific conclusion

• Unsubstantiated TCO: no corroborating data in the report

• Unproven claims: cites no independent source

• “Naked” technical capability: not aligned with project goals

• Implied interest: not aligned with customer interest

• Snarky come-back: …and it stinks.

“»Let Sales teams do what they do best: understanding

the prospect's pains, budget, decision-making process,

etc.

»Let competitive intelligence teams do what they do best:

“connect the dots” for Sales teams

Key Point #1

Building a better battle cardMaking better “recommendations”

Recommendations: Aligned by Sales Sequence

»Initial Pitch

Establish XYZ as a strong leader in the BPM/BAM market with over 300 BPM implementations in the world’s top-performing companies, including 24 of the Fortune 100.

»Follow-up Pitch

ABC will position XYZ as a

small firm with narrow

offerings and questionable

viability. Stress that XYZ is a

$500M middleware

specialist.

Recommendations: Aligned by Sales Sequence…but still Laying Traps

»Initial Pitch

Explain how SuperBPM adds a key piece for XYZ’s SuperCEPevents processing strategy. There is a symbiotic relationship between event processing and business process execution; events can trigger business processes or vice versa. Emphasize that no other vendor has this capability.

»Follow-up Pitch

Emphasize that in BPM and CEP,

XYZ is recognized by Gartner and

Forrester as supplying far superior

capability by integrating these

operations into a single product,

whereas ABC’s product integration

is still in transition and it will charge

the customer to complete the work.

Objection Handling: Aligned by Buying Criteria

»Decision Factor

»Product Integration

»The Competitor Says

»Nemesis FAS provides the

only multi-channel sales,

service, marketing, and

transaction solution pre-

integrated with core

banking.

»What You Say

»Despite acquiring the core

technology in 2006,

Nemesis FAS is not

integrated with Nemesis

Business Process

Management (BPM), CEP,

or Business Transaction

Monitoring (BTM) solutions.

Customers report that

Nemesis FAS

implementations require

many complex product

integrations over a long

period of time.

Objection Handling: Aligned by Buying Criteria…and Strengths & Weaknesses

»Decision Factors that play

to the competitor’s

strengths

»Your Action: counter-

punch

»Pricing

»Nemesis is willing to earn

your business with deep

discounts to our licensing

and support fees.

»Nemesis does not discount

maintenance fees. In fact,

once you’re locked into

Nemesis, their pattern is to

charge much higher annual

maintenance costs.

Objection Handling: Aligned by Buying Criteria…and Strengths & Weaknesses

»Decision Factors that

expose the competitor’s

weakness

»Your Action: attack! »Predictive Analytics

»Nemesis FAS’s predictive

analytics automatically

learns from each interaction

by updating it models with

empirical data observations.

»Nemesis FAS’s real-time

visualization uses the same

technology as our solution,

but it lacks XYZ’s ability to

blend data from multiple

sources to you to make

better decisions about

creating new service

offerings.

Reasons for Losing (22 Losses)More unfavorable

(26 Wins) Reasons for WinningMore favorable

Understanding IT Strategy 21.6%

Business Process Knowledge 19.5%

Proposed Solution 17.5%

Technical Expertise 12.8%

Timeline Plan 11.3%

8.7%Price/Value Ratio

8.6%References

Imp

act

23.3% Price/Value Ratio

22.6% Implementation Partners

19.1% Understanding IT Strategy

13.1% Timeline Plan

13.0% Technical Expertise

5.5%References

3.2%Business Process Knowledge

“Wizard Chart” Courtesy PSP Enterprises, Inc.

“»Win-Loss Data drives toward better Battle Cards

Building a better battle cardOrganize your data by audience

Battle Card Audiences

»Sales Teams

»Points to make in the sales pitch»Objection handling organized by buying criteria and strengths, weaknesses»Weaknesses in the competitor’s strategy and operations»Sales approach and process

»Example:

»High employee turn-over.

ABC Consulting’s employee

turnover is high, and ABC

faces an immediate shortage

of field skills to support

customer migrations and new

projects.

Battle Card Audiences

»Sales Teams

»Points to make in the sales pitch»Objection handling organized by buying criteria and strengths, weaknesses»Weaknesses in the competitor’s strategy and operations»Sales approach and process

»Example:

»Educates the banking prospect about the

trend toward next-generation customers

»Promotes the “intelligent personalization”

concept

»Shows Nemesis FAS correlating information

from multiple sources

»Promotes Nemesis FAS as a self-learning

engine that recommends products and services

in real time

»Disparages rule-based systems.

»Cites customer references tailored to specific

goals:

»Improve cross-sell and retention

»Maximize the revenue impact of each contact

due to constraints on outbound selling

Battle Card Audiences

»Sales Engineers

»Solution overview

»Weaknesses in the

competitor’s product design

and implementation

»Example:

»NEMESIS FAS JUDGMENT BUILDER»A graphical development tool for configuring decision services, the services that allow FAS applications to monitor activity, gather statistics, and make recommendations.»Deployed as a standard plug-in to the Eclipse environment.»Used to define and manage Inline Services. All aspects of Inline Services are exposed in Judgment Builder. The target user of Judgment Builder is an IT professional with a basic knowledge of Java and a general understanding of application development and lifecycle issues.

Battle Card Audiences

»Sales Engineers

»Solution overview

»Weaknesses in the

competitor’s product design

and implementation

»Example:

»No migration tools for upgrading from ABC BPM 10 to 11. The transition from ABC BPM Suite 10 to 11 is a major product revision, not a straightforward upgrade. It is particularly difficult for existing Juicy Fruit Software implementations, which requires a multistep migration from 10 to 11 to get functionality comparable to what was had previously.

Building a better battle cardMake it easy to find information

A good one-page example for inside sales teams

Use Executive Summaries

A one-page overview of the top

three points in the critical sections

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1 CONFIDENTIAL AND PROPRIETARY. FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY.

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Battlecard: Oracle Real-time Decisions Market: Real-time Cross-sell for Banking

Focal Partners (www.FocalPartners.com)

650-380-5862

ekuhnen@focalpartners.com

SOLUTION OVERVIEW

• Oracle Real-Time Decisions (RTD) combines both rules and predictive analytics to power adaptive solutions for real-time enterprise decision management. Oracle RTD consists of four key components: Decision Center, Decision Manager, Decision Studio, and Real-Time Decision Server.

• Oracle RTD is a part of Oracle’s Business Intelligence solutions within the Oracle Middleware Software Group.

KEY WEAKNESSES TO ATTACK

• Product Integration: Oracle says: “The only multi-channel sales, service, marketing, and transaction solution pre-integrated with core banking.” Attack with: Despite acquiring the core technology in 2006, Oracle RTD is not integrated with Oracle Business Process Management (BPM), Complex Event Processing (CEP), or Business Transaction Monitoring (BTM) solution.

• Personalization: Oracle says: “Oracle RTD improves your overall business responsiveness with optimized, personalized customer interactions flows driven by self-adapting decisions that adjust in real-time, thereby maximizing the benefit of each opportunity.” Attack with: While Oracle RTD’s decision technology can adjust in real time, RTD is not built to correlate disparate data streams at very high data rates. In fact, Oracle RTD works best in a batch-processing mode on historical data; so it is only as useful as yesterday’s data is available.

• Comprehensive Solution: Oracle says: “Oracle has a comprehensive and industry-leading solution to meet the needs of real-time decisioning for responsive customer engagement in many industries.” Attack with: To differentiate its services, Banks need real-time information from disparate customer touch-points, strong analytics, and linked business process management. CLIENT SOLUTION, not Oracle RTD, offers Banks the ability to incorporate all three of these in a single solution.

KEY STRENGTHS TO COUNTER

• Vendor Viability: Oracle says: “Oracle has one of the largest service organizations in the world.” Counter with: Relatively few of Oracle’s Professional Service engineers are trained in Oracle RTD deployments. Therefore, Oracle supplements its highly specialized Oracle RTD integration team with junior engineers learning on the job. By contrast, since CLIENT SOLUTION is based on CLIENT’s core technology, a large segment of CLIENT’s professional services team is always qualified to help customers build solutions around CLIENT SOLUTION.

• Pricing: Oracle says: “Oracle is willing to earn your business with deep discounts to our licensing and support fees.” Counter with: Don’t be fooled by initial pricing. According to one Gartner analyst, “It's easy to [fall] out of compliance with Oracle licensing. They do nothing to help people stay in compliance. Then they audit you and hand you a big bill.”

• Incumbency: Oracle says: “As an existing Oracle customer, we can give you the total solution.” Counter with: Oracle RTD is not integrated with other Fusion Middleware components. In fact, Oracle makes more money scaring customers away from best-of-breed solutions and then charging to integrate Oracle RTD into the Oracle stack.

RECOMMENDATIONS

• Where Oracle is the incumbent, negotiate directly with line-of-business executives, who will be receptive to the way CLIENT solves their business problems and drives revenue.

• Frame the discussion around complex event processing and extol CLIENT SOLUTION SUITE’s real-time architecture in delivering event-based solutions. Help prospects understand that CLIENT SOLUTION SUITE sets the gold standard for performance by delivering powerful algorithmic responsive customer engagement strategies.

• Emphasize that CLIENT solutions are proven at the top 20 Banks and more than 250 Capital Market firms. Then show how the CLIENT SOLUTION employs CEP to quickly discover and respond to customer opportunities including examples of capturing channel activity in real time, unlocking value and risk for Banks, and creating real-time, dynamic responses.

Avoid TL;DR

• Battle cards are the result of

tremendous amounts of

research

• Make your research and

conclusions “scannable” and

“digestible”

Avoid TL;DR

• Battle cards are the result of

tremendous amounts of

research

• Make your research and

conclusions “scannable” and

“digestible”

»Example:

»Explain how Savvion has been proven to work at the enterprise level. Savvion works at either departmental level or enterprise levels. Savvion BPM suite is highly scalable, high performance and highly available.

Tablet Friendly

• Navigation buttons

• 1-2 pages per section

• Links to source material

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1 CONFIDENTIAL AND PROPRIETARY. FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY.

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Battlecard: Oracle Real-time Decisions Market: Real-time Cross-sell for Banking

Focal Partners (www.FocalPartners.com)

650-380-5862

ekuhnen@focalpartners.com

SOLUTION OVERVIEW

• Oracle Real-Time Decisions (RTD) combines both rules and predictive analytics to power adaptive solutions for real-time enterprise decision management. Oracle RTD consists of four key components: Decision Center, Decision Manager, Decision Studio, and Real-Time Decision Server.

• Oracle RTD is a part of Oracle’s Business Intelligence solutions within the Oracle Middleware Software Group.

KEY WEAKNESSES TO ATTACK

• Product Integration: Oracle says: “The only multi-channel sales, service, marketing, and transaction solution pre-integrated with core banking.” Attack with: Despite acquiring the core technology in 2006, Oracle RTD is not integrated with Oracle Business Process Management (BPM), Complex Event Processing (CEP), or Business Transaction Monitoring (BTM) solution.

• Personalization: Oracle says: “Oracle RTD improves your overall business responsiveness with optimized, personalized customer interactions flows driven by self-adapting decisions that adjust in real-time, thereby maximizing the benefit of each opportunity.” Attack with: While Oracle RTD’s decision technology can adjust in real time, RTD is not built to correlate disparate data streams at very high data rates. In fact, Oracle RTD works best in a batch-processing mode on historical data; so it is only as useful as yesterday’s data is available.

• Comprehensive Solution: Oracle says: “Oracle has a comprehensive and industry-leading solution to meet the needs of real-time decisioning for responsive customer engagement in many industries.” Attack with: To differentiate its services, Banks need real-time information from disparate customer touch-points, strong analytics, and linked business process management. CLIENT SOLUTION, not Oracle RTD, offers Banks the ability to incorporate all three of these in a single solution.

KEY STRENGTHS TO COUNTER

• Vendor Viability: Oracle says: “Oracle has one of the largest service organizations in the world.” Counter with: Relatively few of Oracle’s Professional Service engineers are trained in Oracle RTD deployments. Therefore, Oracle supplements its highly specialized Oracle RTD integration team with junior engineers learning on the job. By contrast, since CLIENT SOLUTION is based on CLIENT’s core technology, a large segment of CLIENT’s professional services team is always qualified to help customers build solutions around CLIENT SOLUTION.

• Pricing: Oracle says: “Oracle is willing to earn your business with deep discounts to our licensing and support fees.” Counter with: Don’t be fooled by initial pricing. According to one Gartner analyst, “It's easy to [fall] out of compliance with Oracle licensing. They do nothing to help people stay in compliance. Then they audit you and hand you a big bill.”

• Incumbency: Oracle says: “As an existing Oracle customer, we can give you the total solution.” Counter with: Oracle RTD is not integrated with other Fusion Middleware components. In fact, Oracle makes more money scaring customers away from best-of-breed solutions and then charging to integrate Oracle RTD into the Oracle stack.

RECOMMENDATIONS

• Where Oracle is the incumbent, negotiate directly with line-of-business executives, who will be receptive to the way CLIENT solves their business problems and drives revenue.

• Frame the discussion around complex event processing and extol CLIENT SOLUTION SUITE’s real-time architecture in delivering event-based solutions. Help prospects understand that CLIENT SOLUTION SUITE sets the gold standard for performance by delivering powerful algorithmic responsive customer engagement strategies.

• Emphasize that CLIENT solutions are proven at the top 20 Banks and more than 250 Capital Market firms. Then show how the CLIENT SOLUTION employs CEP to quickly discover and respond to customer opportunities including examples of capturing channel activity in real time, unlocking value and risk for Banks, and creating real-time, dynamic responses.

Final Thoughts

What We’ve Covered Today

»A battle card is a tool for helping sales teams win hearts and minds»Battle cards get confusing when authors don’t pay attention to layout, data/content, and recommendations»Competitive intelligence teams do best when they “connect the dots” for Sales teams

»Win-Loss Data drives

toward better Battle Cards

»Make better

“recommendations”

»Organize your data by

audience

»Make it easy to find

information

Thank-you