are just looking for a quick win, they may not be ready We wanted to learn more about the problems our Part II: for the journey. customers have that are more extensive and pervasive Remember, your category also needs to be lucrative than the challenges that can be solved by Mass Category Design enough to satisfy your ambitions – especially if you’re Notification. And by listening to our customers, Is Powerful, but VC-funded. Gong is a great example of a company that we realized there was a bigger market opportunity ran into this restriction. While they were the clear to provide solutions to meet these needs. A more Not For All leaders of the Conversation Intelligence category, they consolidated way to keep people safe and systems found that space to be too restrictive. Ultimately they running. And that’s how we landed on critical event decided to step outside of it. management…If done right, it’s going to have huge returns on investment for our business.” Udi Ledorgor, the company’s CMO states, “In Gong’s Jeff and his team were clearly on to something and the case, we walked away from the legacy Conversation strategy proved to be right. Since the company started Intelligence category to create the revenue intelligence working on Critical Event Management back in 2016, category, which helped us get the attention of senior the stock is up several-fold and the company now has a sales leaders, who won’t typically take a call with a market cap over $5 billion. solution provider they perceive as being tactical, which is one of the problems plaguing the Conversation Prepare to be king – or someone If you have investors Intelligence category.” else will “who are cautious Category design doesn’t always require Will you be prepared to lead this category once it’s and want to only go the entire company to shift gears established? Or will you be merely preparing the way after easily-defined While some of the examples I’ve shared involve the for a competitor to take the crown once the category is entire company focusing on a new category, that built? You need to answer this before you begin. markets in a me-too doesn’t always have to be the case. In a more mature Consider the Salesforce example from earlier. Salesforce way, you have the company, you can design a category for a new product, didn’t just establish the cloud-based software category, wrong investors. even when one of your legacy cash cows sits squarely they prepared to build, grow, and lead the category ” in an existing one. from day one. While they started as a CRM company, Consider Everbridge, a publicly-traded SaaS company it wasn’t long before they introduced other types — Kevin Maney of applications to the cloud. Through continuous that built its business in the “Mass Notification” innovation and heavy marketing, Salesforce was able category. When the company set its sights on something to maintain its position as the “category king” even more ambitious, called critical event management, that as the category grew and other cloud-based software didn’t mean it had to give up its presence in an existing companies emerged. category. Instead, category design was something additive that helped the company expand what was Consider what Bill Macaitis, Salesforce’s former SVP of possible. Marketing, told me. “At Salesforce we always believed “We knew we would always be able to solve the our brand was the sum of every single interaction a problems that are inherent within the mass notification customer had with us. This meant we were constantly category, but we’re interested in solving bigger and evolving and re-inventing how we could delight our broader problems,” Jeff Benanto, a marketing director customers at every stage. There was no endpoint, just at Everbridge (EVBG), told me in this interview about a long journey of customer-centric touchpoints.” Hear the company’s category design process. more on this in this interview with Bill. The Newcomer’s Guide to Category Design 17