2006 CMS Idol: Lessons for Losers

It’s no surprise to me that Hot Banana won the 2006 CMS Idol competition at the Spring 2006 Gilbane Conference on Content Management. After all, successful marketers know how to both communicate their value proposition, and differentiate themselves from the competition, without boring their prospects to death nor making them feel dumb. Hot Banana’s Chris Adams delivered an excellent demonstration of the popular marketing content management system and the audience responded by awarding the company the top spot in the twice-annual contest.

It should be noted that Hot Banana is no stranger to the top spot. They’ve won numerous awards for their product line and are often acknowledge as the “best” in their corner of the content management world. Hats off to both the development team and the marketing management and staff at Hot Banana. You deserve it.

Vasont Systems also did an excellent job with the assistance of one of the hardest working sales people in the technical publishing content management space, Bret Freeman. Brett’s efforts at demonstrating the power of the Vasont content management system earned the company the first runner up spot in the contest. He knows how to entertain a crowd and get his message across in a clear and convincing manner. Again, this is no surprise.

Unfortunately, not all contestants were as impressive. One vendor, who definitely didn’t perform well, failed for one reason and one reason only—they sent the wrong person to do their dog and pony show. The stage is no place for a novice (nor most IT pros). Let me translate—just because you are the chief executive officer, chief technology officer, head honcho, or all powerful Oz in your little world, does not mean you are qualified to represent your company in a competition.

It also doesn’t mean you are immune to criticism. In fact, your very presence in such a competition makes you—and your organization and product line—an easy target for a smackdown. This may seem obvious to most. It might explain why many vendors failed to take the CMS Idol challenge (fear of smackdown?).

In general, the CMS vendor gene pool is still heavily polluted by marketing management types—usually middle aged white guys who long for the good old days when customers sat down, shut up, and listened to their jargon-filled pitch. These guys are clueless about how the marketing world works today. Back in the day, they could make up vocabulary words, string them together with a bunch of meaningless blabber, and confuse their prospects into believing they knew what they were talking about. In the past, customers didn’t know any better and were considered dumb because they weren’t “IT savvy”. Of course, times have changed.

Today, some trade show attendees know more than the so called “experts” that are sent to staff booths and to enter contests like CMS Idol. However, the majority of attendees know relatively little about content management technologies, but they can smell vendor bullshit a mile away. Making up marketing-friendly vocabularly words and misusing industry standard terms is counterproductive and creates distrust, not new customers.

If you are a vendor that wants to know how to become a winner, look to Hot Banana. It’s not about stage presence. It’s not about knowing how to use a microphone (although that helps in certain situations). It’s not about winning contests. It’s about winning in the marketplace. It’s about understanding and respecting your audience, actually doing analysis and research, instead of trying to force feed a product you designed for one paying customer onto the rest of the market. You can spend hundreds of thousands of marketing dollars getting your name plastered all over reports from old-school industry analysts (Forrester, Gartner, etc.), or you can get with the program, earn your firm some street credibility, and learn from those who perform better than you.

Regardless of whether they won or lost the competition, each one of the vendors that participated in the 2006 CMS Idol contest is a winnner in my book. They have earned the respect of many for being willing to risk competing in a live technology demonstration. In the future, I hope more CMS vendors will be willing to step up and take the challenge. After all, if their products are really as easy and intuitive to use as their salespeople would have you believe, a seven minute demo should be a breeze.