What client engagement marked the turning point?

In spring 2002, we reinvented GISTICS for the fourth time. This reinvention meant systematizing what we had learned over the last 14 years about hi-tech markets, successful business strategies, and how and why customers buy complex technologies and intangible services.

We started with what we call executive business-case white papers – investment analyses that justify the purchase of new technology, using highly visual explanations and novel activity-based research data. In that spring, we set out to become the premier supplier of executive business-case white papers in the world.
Why executive business-case white papers? Now more than ever before, senior executives need great volumes of data and information distilled into the essence of their concern: “How does this particular technology (that people in my firm want us to buy) help us grow, serve customers, reduce cost, or increase the value of our business?”

These executives want the “gist” of the what, why, where, how and from whom to buy and successfully use a new technology. Distilling the essence and illuminating the heart of the matter defines who we are: gist-ics.

Our executive white papers get to the gist of a new technology and a lot more. For their intended readers, our white papers illuminate an attainable opportunity. Our white papers help build bridges among various constituencies and groups within an organization about what to accomplish. Most importantly, our white papers give support and tools of persuasion to the visionaries, change agents, and solution advocates inside a buying-firm – and the principal subscribers to our opt-in publishing process and responder database.

Mastering the development and distribution of white papers enabled us to quickly build a worldwide trust network – visionaries, change agents, and solution advocates – who can, when motivated and empowered with our support, remove or reduce barriers within their organizations to technology selection and deployment.

We believe that small groups of individuals can facilitate significant if not historic change by eliminating barriers to change from inside an organization or society. We also know that attempts at radical, forceful change often create overwhelming resistance to change and whatever social or economic good that agents of the change sought to realize.

White paper factory
By fall 2002, we put 100 percent of our energy, knowledge, and creativity into becoming a white paper factory. This meant building a completely streamlined system for delivering finished products – white papers – that meet or exceed customer standards for quality, value, and satisfaction.

From our first white paper commission, we heard from our clients and readers (our clients’ customers and business partners) comments such as, “You really illuminate what’s possible.” “You give our prospective customers the clarity and information to move forward with our technology.” “You help us build a can-do spirit within our team and the courage to make it happen for our firm.”

Adobe, Our Defining Client
In fall 2002, an Adobe product-marketing executive asked if we could help relaunch one of their advanced server products and expand its market. She sounded slightly concerned. She knew that advertising or direct mail would not work. Her sales force did not have a good story to tell. Her industry partners did not understand how to sell the gee-whiz technology.

She needed someone to help create a simple and compelling story that would inspire prospective business partners to co-market their graphics servers and end-use customers to sign checks. In short, she wanted help in the creation of a new market for Adobe.

We started with a structured information-gathering device that we call a Project Definition Worksheet. From our experience, we knew that clients know 95 percent of what they need to know to succeed; they just can’t organize what they know in a meaningful and useful way. They cannot access what they know. They suffer from infoglut, analysis paralysis, or second guessing, especially among diverse teams in established corporate cultures.

The Adobe executive filled out our Project Definition Worksheet and, in the process, saw their go-to-market strategy in a whole new light. Our structured information-gathering process illuminated the real work that we collectively had to get done: Develop a brand-positioning strategy that Adobe’s partners and customers will instantly recognize as brilliant and steal it, i.e., make it their strategy too.

With this sharpened clarity of purpose, we developed four work products:

• A buying logic that distilled into five propositions the argument or case we intended to make; each proposition logically progressed from the opening proposition. The buying logic concluded with an integrated messaging strategy – the conclusion to buy.
• A series of essential questions that our intended readers would recognize as sharp, well-phrased, and very relevant – questions for which they actively sought answers and some they had not yet framed in a conscious manner.
• A chart and diagram – a visual explanation – that answered all or a portion of each essential question.
• A cover-page spectacle that contained a snappy and well-phrased title, subtitle, and one-line teaser – a telegraphic synopsis of the white paper designed to arrest the attention of the targeted reader.

Our white papers break down a complex technology into meaningful, bite-size chunks of business-related insights, strategies, and recommendations – all delivered in a logical progression of visual explanations: charts, graphs, and illustrations.

In the case of Adobe, we delivered their white paper on time and at the agreed upon price. The client loved it. Her field sales people loved it. They took some of the graphics and reused them in their presentations. More importantly, Adobe’s key business partners, EMC Documentum, ClearStory, Corbis, NetXposure, Getty Images, IBM, and Freedman International, loved it. Our strategy worked: an entire value chain of industry partners adopted Adobe’s brand positioning of its graphics server and made it their own. And yes, each of these Adobe partners later commissioned their own white papers from us. As of the third quarter of 2005, GISTICS will complete its sixth white paper for Adobe and its fourth for Documentum.

Accidental Success at 90 Degrees From Plan
Not only did this white paper kickstart a new market for Adobe, selling several million dollars of Adobe technology, this white paper defined our most strategic customer: a hi-tech firm that must create a new industry value chain or group of partners that each adds new value to the solution that the end-chain customers buy and use.

In 2006, our clients started to ask if we could publish social networking Websites around the subject of their executive white papers, adding blogs, forum discussions, Webcast presentations, teleconferences and interviews.

We this a launched us into an entirely new and unexpected direction: co-creators of online communities of practice and market makers for new solutions that master practitioners had only just “solutioneered” and wants to talk about with his or her community of practice.

And as Uncle Walt Disney would say, that’s a whole other story for some other time. Until then…