Chers amis, fans de bonnes lectures,

Bienvenue aux 77 personnes qui nous ont rejoint depuis mardi dernier ! Si vous lisez ceci et n’êtes pas encore inscrit, rejoignez vite les 2 447 personnes qui ont déjà eu la bonne idée de le faire. C’est juste ici !

Cette semaine encore, je vous propose mes lectures les plus intéressantes, en mettant notamment l’accent sur un article principal et en vous partageant mon avis dessus. J’espère que cela vous sera utile.

Ecrivez-moi pour en parler, sur Linkedin ou sur Twitter. Les JCNews sont aussi disponibles sur le Blog Alan.

💡Must-read de la semaine

Chaque semaine, je publie un must-read, que vous choisissez.

👉 Celui qui définit la catégorie, la gagne (David Sacks)

Nobody ever gets fired for buying the category leader. The category leader wins the easy sales — the order taking — while also-rans must sell hard to win every deal.

Many customers will automatically order from the category leader once they understand themselves to have the problem that category solves.

The purpose of brand marketing for all SaaS companies, therefore, is the same: to establish category leadership.

J’adore cette approche sur l’importance de définir sa catégorie (le livre Play Bigger est intéressant sur le sujet).

In the case of a new category, this requires proving that the category actually exists. In the case of an existing category, it requires redefining the category around your disruption.

Je pense qu’Alan est entre les deux :

• Nous sommes une assurance santé, et la seule assurance santé digitale.
• Nous sommes en train de créer une nouvelle catégorie dans les services de santé.

Classic Salesforce ad. Even today, it’s all about category leadership.
Cell
Cell

J’adore la communication de Salesforce depuis le départ.

1) Define your category.

It is imperative that you define your category. This is best done in 2–4 clear descriptive words. Avoid flowery language; it needs to be immediately obvious what you do.

For example, Internal is “No Code Internal Tools”; Product Board is a “Product Management System”; Sendoso is a “Sending Platform” for direct mail, corporate gifts, and customer swag.

Forking existing categories around new verticals or platforms is a viable approach. In 1999, Salesforce could differentiate from CRM leader Siebel by introducing the concept of “Cloud CRM.”

The new category should underscore your differentiation.

Une catégorie doit être courte, simple à comprendre. Il y a énormément de boulot pour en arriver là.

2) If you can’t define it, redefine it.

If you’re not creating a new category, you need to redefine the existing one.

If we had been placed in the “Social Software” category, it would have been as a “challenger” or “niche player.” Jive’s sales reps could have used this to undermine us in every deal. Better not to be mentioned at all.

We advanced our own category definition, Enterprise Social Networking (ESN), a private secure social network for inside your enterprise.

Our north star was user engagement and bottom-up freemium adoption by employees. On-premise competitors deployed by IT struggled with actual usage and could not compete on these dimensions.

Approche intéressante si votre catégorie existe déjà, et comment la compartimentaliser.

3) Categories are how business understands problems.

Business understands problems by categorizing them, so convincing the world that a new category is valid is tantamount to winning.

For example, let’s say you’re a SaaS company creating tools for product managers. Your argument would go something like this: “Every other team in the company has its own system: Sales has CRM (Salesforce), the Finance team has ERP (Netsuite), Customer Support has CS Ticketing (Zendesk). But Product has been ignored. Product Managers need their own software — a Product Management System. In fact, every company needs a PMS or it will be shortchanging their product managers and ultimately their product.”

Then, every time you announce a new customer or revenue milestone or a new fundraise or a product release, you will cite it as evidence that PMS is a major new category of business software.

La dernière phrase est super importante à mon sens. Une fois qu’on a choisi sa catégorie, il faut la répéter sans cesse.

4) Use customer testimony to prove the category.

Your most powerful weapon in proving out a category is customer testimony. Prospects will naturally be suspicious of any claims you make. Your message is most credible coming from others, especially customers who can testify to their first-hand success with the product.

One of Salesforce’s most successful ad campaigns showed photos of CEOs with pull quotes about how Salesforce had helped their business become more successful.

Nous avons commencé à le faire chez Alan, et on adore l'exercice.

5) Shape the category requirements to position yourself and de-position competitors.

Once you’ve defined the category, you can flesh out the category requirements. This is the time to talk about features. You can position yourself and de-position competitors by explaining what functionality is critical for a product of this type.

If you can position yourself around an architectural strength and de-position your competitor around an architectural weakness, it will be very hard for them to respond.

Quelles sont les fonctionnalités qui vous sont uniques ? Pourquoi sont-elles différenciantes ?

6) Pick noble fights but keep it positive.

Going up against a large legacy incumbent is common when you’re redefining a category. It’s fine to draw sharp contrasts — and even pick fights — as long as you punch up not down, stay product-focused, and keep the tone positive.

In the early days of Salesforce’s ascent, Benioff obviously drew pleasure from ridiculing Oracle’s cost and complexity. When Oracle introduced its “private cloud,” an expensive on-premise database, Benioff mocked it by showing a picture of the massive piece of hardware under the headline “Beware the fake cloud.”

Lighthearted mocking of an incumbent’s legacy product is the best tone.

Il y a une bonne balance à trouver sur le ton de la marque, et comment attaquer la concurrence. Je l’ai fait ici en réaction aux courtiers et agents d’assurances. Ravi d’avoir votre feedback.

En plus d’articles triés sur le volet, je partage un principe de leadership d’Alan par semaine. Le même que je partage en interne et à nos investisseurs tous les mercredis.

👉 Sans cesse enchanter nos Membres (Healthy Business)

• Pour nous différencier par l’impact, nous avons décidé que nos produits ou nos fonctionnalités devaient être delightful (qu’on pourrait traduire par « délicieux » en français), c’est-à-dire apporter du plaisir.
• Qu'est-ce que cela implique ? Nous transformons notre produit en le rendant remarquable. Selon les mots de Seth Godin : "Soyez la vache pourpre dans un champ de Holstein monochrome." Alors, ne soyez pas un peu différent. Soyez très différent. Ne soyez pas si prudent qu'il en devient facile de vous ignorer. Donnez aux gens une raison de parler.

👉 Framework pour prendre des décisions en période de changements (a16z)

• Matrix with structurally positive changes or ephemerally negative changes. Structurally positive means that something is 10x better, 1/10th the cost (roughly speaking on improvement and cost scale!), and has finally caught on—there’s no going back to the older, worse, more expensive alternative.
• From a company’s perspective, it’s dangerous to get sucked into things that are ephemerally positive, since things are changing so quickly, but even more dangerous to ignore things that are structurally positive or structurally negative. The key is to make sure the cost structure is aligned to persevere past anything ephemerally negative and to invest in things that are truly structurally positive.

🗞Dans l’actu

📱Monde des technologies

👉 Les nouvelles perspectives du commerce online (Ben Evans)

• I think we all now understand that anyone will buy anything online, given the right experience, and if your retail model is based on being an end-point to a logistics chain then you have an existential problem.

👉 La fin d’un internet américain (Ben Evans)

• 80-90% of internet users are now outside the USA.
• By 2017, almost half of new (straight) relationships in the USA started online.
• We are entering a period of increasing regulatory expansion, overlap and competition from different jurisdictions, from the EU and UK to Singapore or Australia and, of course, China.

👉 SpaceX lance le premier vol opérationnel de la capsule Crew Dragon avec quatre astronautes à destination de l'ISS (Vox)

👉 Apple annonce un programme pour les plus petits développeurs (Apple)

• À l'avenir, les développeurs qui gagneront moins d'un million de dollars par an ne paieront plus que 15 % de commission, soit la moitié de ce qu'ils paient aujourd'hui.

🏥 Santé

👉 La start-up britannique Unmind lève 10 M$ pour une application sur la santé mentale au travail (Telegraph)

• Users are then pointed to content around mindfulness, measures to improve their sleep and other exercises that they can use daily to help manage issues such as stress.
• To date, over 350,000 people have signed up to use the app in more than 50 countries.

👉 Les Dossiers de Santé sur IPhone sont maintenant disponibles au Canada et au Royaume-Uni (Apple)

• In the US, over 500 institutions currently support Health Records on iPhone, listing more than 11,000 care locations.
• Health Records creates a direct connection between medical institutions and a patient’s iPhone, allowing users to see a central view of their allergies, conditions, immunizations, lab results, medications, procedures, and vitals across multiple institutions, and to be notified when their data is updated.
• Apple worked closely with Cerner, Epic, Allscripts, and InterSystems to enable the FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standards-based integration with the Health app for their UK and Canadian customers.

💚Alan

👉 Les communautés pour les parents sont "live" ! (Linkedin) : Discutez avec d'autres parents, modérés par des médecins, sur des thèmes comme le sommeil, l'alimentation du nourrisson, la motricité, etc…

👉 Alan apporte un soutien psychologique à ses Membres (Linkedin) : Deux confinements en un an, ça pèse sur le moral et sur la santé mentale. C'est pourquoi nous avons mis à la disposition de nos membres, une ligne gratuite pour parler avec des psychologues pendant cette période de confinement.

📕📺Livres et séries

👉 7 Power, The Foundations of Business Strategy

• 7 Powers d'Hamilton Helmer est un superbe outil pour parler de stratégie en interne. Vous devriez acheter le livre, et je vous en propose un résumé.

C’est déjà fini. Bonne semaine et à vous de jouer maintenant ! Invitez vos amis à s’inscrire, ici.