How to choose a category to compete in a world exploding with business software

As any Marketer knows, positioning products and solutions is vital to the eventual success of that product or service. In September, we explored how UnifiedVU fits in with some of the existing software categories, mainly Dashboards, Business Intelligence, Integrations and User Experience Platforms.

 

Homing into a software category we can fit in

Early this month, we also explored Master Data Management (MDM) and Customer Data Platforms (CDP).

At UnifiedVU, we are:

  • building a highly intuitive User Interface (UI) which so far has been used in three ways, these being (1) unifying data from multiple software with functionality, (2) re-skinning existing software to provide a better workflow driven UI, and (3) giving life to spreadsheets.
  • focusing on bringing everything together to help our customers understand their customers better through Single Customer View (SCV) value proposition.
  • conceptualising delivery of SCV through role based offerings, e.g. SCV for Account Managers, Accountants, etc.

At present, there is no recognised category called SCV, but there are other well known categories which UnifiedVU could adopt such as:

  • Customer Success – an outcome of UnifiedVU is increasing revenues and profitability for customers.
  • Productivity – another outcome is saving 30 minutes of time everyday.

Productivity is a large category with many diverse products from emails to task management and beyond. It does not make sense comparing UnifiedVU Platform with Trello or Google Mail.

On the other hand Customer Success is what we are trying to deliver, and a worthy category to be placed in. Still its a large category which could include traditional Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and a plethora of solutions.

However, SCV within Customer Success sector makes a better fitting.

 

G2 Crowd

Those of you who are not familiar with G2 Crowd,

is the world’s leading business software review platform, leveraging its 100,000+ user reviews read by nearly 700,000 software buyers each month to help them make better purchasing decisions. By bringing the collective power of trusted peers to the forefront, business buyers now have transparency when evaluating B2B software technologies. In addition, G2 Crowd intuitively packages insights from expert peers, everyday users, and aggregated data to score competitive products on The Grid.

 

customer-successIf we choose G2Crowd, then ideally:

Customer Service >> Customer Success >> Single Customer View

Unfortunately they do not have such a category. I’ve reached out to them to request whether its possible to create a new category for us.

At present, UnifiedVU is listed under the wrong sub-category:

IT Infrastruture >> Data Integration >> Cloud data integration

Birth of Single Customer View 2.0 (SCV 2.0)

Whilet SCV sounds fitting, the subject has been around for many years. Many vendors provide SCV solutions based on MDM technologies. Our SCV proposition is vastly different to those old technologies. Therefore SCV 2.0 is more fitting to UnifiedVU. In this scenario, MDM based solutions can be classified as SCV 1.0.

 

Siftery

According to Siftery,

We created Siftery to help businesses better discover, buy and use software.

Since discovering Siftery recently, I have identified over 50 software applications we use or interact with at UnifiedVU. After having a conversation with Vamshi Mokshagundam (CEO) and Bryan Weis (Growth Manager) at Siftery and helping them to identify few MDM vendors who offer SCV 1.0 solutions, Siftery has gone ahead and created Single Customer View as a sub-category of Customer Success. They are the first review site to do this.

I like to thank them for their foresight.

 

siftery-single-customer-view

 

Siftery has listed Relay42, Experian, PitneyBowes and BlueVenn together with UnifiedVU under SCV. In tech startup world, its vital to not be alone. You need competitors. A common question asked by our prospects are who else offer what we do. Now we have an answer to such a query.

Thanks to Siftery, we have a start now. But we need to continue educating the market on the differences between SCV 1.0 technologies and SCV 2.0. At the same time, we need other review sites to identify SCV as a sub-category. I plan to reach out to them over time.

What about you? How did you position your new product? Did it fit into an existing category? Were there many to choose from? If so, did you select more than one? If not, how did you deal with it? If you are still struggling to choose, then did above rationale help you at all?

Long live SCV 2.0!

 

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