Evel Knievel, corporate positioning & corporate message development

B2B tech companies are often run by engineers. Engineers are great at talking about technology, but not so great at translating the technology into business benefits that people actually believe.

Being smart, engineers recognise the problem and take a running jump from tech-speak to Big Business Benefits like generating revenue or increasing profitability.  They approach this in the same way that Evel Knievel used to approach things like the Snake River Canyon — because they recognise how far away the Land of Benefits is from the World of Technology.

The result also parallels Evel Knievel’s attempt at crossing his own private chasm: they fall down.

The truth is, you can’t leap from tech features to Big Business Benefits.  You have to build a bridge between them.  Better still, you need to swing across on a Vine.

That’s what the Velocity Hierarchy of Benefits is all about. It’s a killer slide that’s popping up with alarming frequency in our presentations to clients.  We’ve just written a paper about it which you’re welcome to read.

One of the more interesting things the Hierarchy exposes is the inverse relationship between Credibility and Perceived Value: your prospects believe the claims they don’t care much about and care a lot about the ones they don’t believe.

We attack this problem by creating links, or Vines, between  the higher order benefits and the deep tech below.  When it works, the technology story brings credibility to the business benefit claims and the business benefits bring relevance to the technology features.

No sense summarising the paper here. It’s only four pages long with a few pretty pictures thrown in.  Give it a read and let us know what you think.