No Marketing Plan—Only Clever Tactics

 You may have already read at least one of the many books by Tom Peters. He was especially popular during the 80s with books like: Thriving on Chaos (1987) or Passion for Excellence (1985). In his book, In Search of Excellence (1982), he listed some forty companies with what he called “excellence in performance.” But by the late 80s only a handful of the companies in Peters’ list remained, and most had disappeared as noted by Richard T. Pascale Managing on the Edge). Tom Peters’ books promoted a management style focused on tactics.

Peters’ tactical approach may have helped managers in a short period in the early 80s, but today the business environment continues to morph into more complexity and competition. Strategic management has become more necessary in an aggressive and dynamic environment.

Strategy calls for an industry wide view over time and a continuous process of monitoring and navigating the business. No one type of strategic style dominates. The concepts of strategy function well depending on the context of the business in its environment.

The Vantive Corporation, founded in 1990, had also disappeared, like so many of Peters’ “companies of excellence.” It vanished into the ashes of the companies that ran on some sort of ‘thriving chaos’ at that time when high-performance tactics were in vogue. To use Vantive as an example now is like setting up a crime scene investigation after the bodies are long gone and all that is left are memories and ghosts. And in a since, now, as where Vantive is concerned, I’m a Monday armchair quarterback. Nevertheless it serves to illuminate how trends in management styles need to change and lead a company ahead the shifting currents.

In the case of Vantive, senior management had left the building and new CEOs came and went. Perhaps one of the reasons is simply that they could no longer navigate the company merely with clever tactics. They were at a loss about what to do next. They needed a map and compass. They needed to adapt to new management styles. Swift adaptations would have enabled them to lead the growth of the Internet rather than slip behind. By the late 90s, they could have seized that idea of cloud computing, like Salesforce.com.

In the 1970s and 80s, the business environment grew relatively easily compared to the present. Now the marketability of products and services in the new millennium faces a global, competitive economy.

During my days at Vantive, I witnessed how Vantive, once the leader and arguably the inventor of CRM software, was running on the fumes of tactics, but without much, if any, company-wide strategic approach or even strategic marketing planning. New, formidable competitors began to raise their heads over the horizon and with a broader, more adaptive style.

Siebel Systems began to pass by Vantive by 1996 on the new freeways of competition. Thomas Siebel most likely began to apply a more strategic approach to management, creating products more closely adapted to the clients’ needs. Siebel had Vantive as a set of basic applications that, nevertheless, required redesign. By using detailed feedback from clients, Siebel Systems developed a suite of products, delivering more refined and sophisticated requirements of the CRM marketing.

As a product marketing manager of the CRM products, I had never seen a Vantive marketing plan and never heard of one. One manager did write a nice analysis of the telecommunications industry as a potential market. In his book, Taking Careof eBusiness(2001), Thomas Spiebel pointed out that Siebel Systems did maintain a corporate strategy plan and a strategic marketing plan and also took into account its clients’ strategic marketing and sales plans.

If a Vantive marketing plan did exist, I never saw one, which is equivalent to none existed, since Marketing Plans should be shared with at least the senior and the middle level managers. Developing and maintaining a Marketing Plan would have been best practice at the time. Since Vantive Corporation had not adapted to the new competitors and the more sophisticated client requirements, it fell behind.

Had Vantive developed a strategic approach, the company would have benefited with a stronger chance at guiding the tactics as well as a viewing at least three years ahead. This meant that there was hardly a whisper of strategy. Most everyone seemed to be working in the realm of tactics.

Once or twice I eagerly offered to develop a marketing plan. The management above me looked at me as if I were speaking German. Along with a couple of colleagues, I did write a lot of White Papers, some of them describing the benefits of the products for the customers, but even then, I wrote more White Papers focused more on the technology. There was a lot of clamor about the n-tier architecture, which at the time was a hot topic much like cloud computing today. There is a difference between tactics and strategy. The strategic marketing process develops these areas:

• Identifying and defining the markets that match the products delivered by the company
• Qualify and quantify the needs of the groups of clients in these markets
• Develop and articulate the value proposition for these groups
• Communicate the value proposition and the benefits to the clients to everyone in the company involved in delivering the product and services and obtain their buy-in
• Monitor the value delivered and evaluate the process for constant improvements

For this process to work, we have to be client-driven. In the case of Vantive, this was not happening. Here’s at least one of the reasons why.

As a product marketing manager, part of my responsibilities at Vantive was to visit clients and take notes of what they had to say about the products. This was a great way to learn the clients’ point of view and the requirements for the specific client groups (market segments) for the products. This information becomes highly valuable when preparing the launch for the next product version.

Collecting feedback and suggestions and even complaints from clients was a large part of my job or so I believed. I summarized and categorized the information and used it for the next formal MRD (marketing requirements document), which is used to establish the technical functions and features in practical response to the market needs per each segment. To achieve a good sample of feedback from clients, I canvassed the Bay Area and Silicon Valley clients. It was the area closest to Vantive headquarters in Santa Clara, California. However, large corporate clients in Europe wanted to voice their concerns and ideas for improving the products. So, my manager approved the expenses for me to visit a number of key accounts in Europe, all of them major corporations.

Before debarking on my European tour, my supervisor tasked me to set an agenda, a plan: arrange with the key software engineers to set a date for the next release for Vantive SFA (sales force automation) and, in particular VOTG (Vantive on the Go). VOTG was a complicated and inefficient software component designed to enable sales or field service professionals to enter new information about clients on their laptops and then later and connect to the network at the time when the Internet was still limited by cables. No wireless solution prevailed yet. Once connected to the Internet VOTG was supposed to synchronize the new client information from the laptop (or even the PDA) to the central database. VOTG did not always function correctly. Sometimes it would synchronize the field data with the central database and sometimes not, depending on several parameters. Meanwhile Siebel had developed a powerful synchronization capability and had it patented. As part of my agenda for my European tour, I was charged to reassure the European clients that a new and improved version of VOTG would be launched on a given date. The competition had clearly bypassed Vantive by then.

When I returned from my European tour, I carefully summarized the feedback from the European clients. I was eager and ready to present the new information garnered from so many key accounts in Europe. I carried out my job dutifully, consisting mostly of specific chores, tactics, but without the substance of a strategy behind it. After all the travel, the expenses and information gathering, though, surprisingly, my supervisors were not interested in the customer feedback. During a long trip through Europe, it turned out also that the managers above me had decided to forget the next new and improved VOTG and most of all any launch date as if they were afraid to tame the monster in the closet.

The inevitable began to take place. It was no huge surprise at the time. The Vantive Corporation fell and an ambulance was driving it to the emergency room. Senior managers were gracefully and politely pointing their fingers at each other and anyone for the disaster. The company became just another piece of flattened road-kill on Strategy Highway. Vantive was flat-lining and PeopleSoft had stepped in to resuscitate it by buying up Vantive’s customer base as well as by re-designing the various software products in the PeopleTools technology. But PeopleSoft, too, was almost as strategically weak as its acquisitions.

In the final autopsy, Vantive died from Strategy Failure. The heart was not given enough care to strengthen it to confront the competitors. It did not adapt to the shifting winds of technology and client demands. In the end, Oracle stepped in a bought out both PeopleSoft and Siebel. Oracle thrives on competition. Larry Ellison’s leadership and aggressive strategy combines textbook plans with the extra kick of the battle plans by the likes of SunTzu.