Technical Marketing (GTM) Strategy

The following excerpts reflect my academic interests and strategy developments over the past five years, focused on technology investments. As organizations transition to the cloud and adapt to containerization, I've explored how products and services can be marketed. My hands-on sales experience has inspired private journaling on pricing models and a deeper interest in pricing strategy. Below are ideas and technical challenges that captivate me.

(Disclaimer: All materials are self-created by Samuel Castaneda, intended to showcase creative thinking and skills in market entry and commercialization as part of my career development journey.)

Economic Moats & Transitions to Next Gen Technologies

Three attributes that kill profitability of XaaS offers.

  1. Churn

  2. Costs

  3. Commoditization

 Sales and marketing expenses can range from 50% to over 500% of totally company revenues as the company invests to acquire new customers, add units of future value, and increase market share. Often companies that reach the 3-5 year mark see shrinkage in total cost of goods sold (COGs) and are just in early stages of monetizing premium account services of the core subscription which represent 2-10% of total revenue. They usually have realistic models indicating positive cash flow, GAAP profits.

Question: How do you develop multiple consumption models?

Question: What is required to offer technology operations as a managed service?

Iron Triangle of Offer Definition

  • Portfolio & Pricing

  • Financial Keys

  • Customer Engagement Model

Key Focus: The profit horizon of an XaaS offer should influence how a provider engineers the financial model, designs the portfolio, sets pricing, and matures the customer engagement model for the offer.

  

Marketeering / Strategy Development of Migration

Some of my working experience brough unique learning opportunities to solve strategy gaps by proactively listening to experts walkthrough technical processes and developing a commercialization approach for product and services. I refer to this positively as “Marketeering,” in order to relate to the skillsets involved in learning to develop models for technical processes and market product and service attributes to enable sales activities. The learning process was a powerful sales enablement experience to effectively communicate the project method and strategy to win deals in complex technical sales. Learning through early adopter projects, some of these ideas were adopted into improving company wide sales approach methods and arguments for migration of legacy MES systems to NextGen technologies.

Unique Experiences & Achievements

  • Visual Storytelling for Technical Solutions

  • Narration and Analytical Communication Development for Technical Sales

  • Developing Articulate Sales Concepts for Pioneer Projects / Early Adopter Investment

Best Practice & Innovation

Through playing a role as the “Best Practice & Innovation Chapter Lead” I functioned as a liaison between customers and product experts wanting to participate in a collaborative workspace to focus on frontier market developments, technology best practices, and requirement discovery that often led to influencing the product roadmap. In this role, success was about finding a balance between goals of internal leaders and active listening to the “voice of the customer.” The progression of technical discovery manifested a big challenge to weigh investment cost and strategy commitment behind efforts to materialize products and services.

Customer voice sets the way forward…in most cases. The challenge is putting the right people in the room to have an effective discussion and move towards a practical solution. I like to keep this graphic of the “Elephant in the Room” as a reminder that today’s world of specialization can be problematic when the full picture is difficult to grasp because experts can be too close to the problem. Skillsets that can translate technical feasibility into marketed solutions are a extremely valuable to any product development organization!

Innovation Sprints Deployed:

  1. Business Continuity & Best Practice Scenario Planning

  2. MES Migration Concept Strategy

  3. Technical Architecture & High Availability Concepts (OpenShift & Azure HCI)

  4. Personalized Therapy Traceability

  5. MSI Technology Protocol Enhancements (Rockwell / DeltaV Systems Integration)

  6. DDA vs RDA Validation Methodology Approach Development

As a result of technical sprints being very helpful to realize solution improvements I proposed a different process dimension to the Market Launch. Using sprints, its possible to pilot concepts and product functions with more effectiveness than launching “Early Adopter” projects at full scale. one of the benefits in this proposed initiative would be an improvement of sales accuracy and honesty. Often, early adopter projects are beneficial towards product development but integrity in the sales process can be tested and potential long term damage to trust should be avoided while exploring new concepts with customers.