Buyer Language, Vendor Language…And a Unified Taxonomy

Do buyers and vendors speak different languages? Sometimes it seems that way.

BUYER: “If we arrest the wrong people, our mayor may lose the next election.”

VENDOR: “The Really Cool ABIS offers tunable thresholds that allow minimization of false positives.”

Say what?

If you go to the mayor’s campaign manager and spout something about tunable thresholds, the campaign manager will tune you out.

Bredemarket already has a solution to this problem, but Liminal is offering another one.

Bredemarket’s solution: customer focused, benefits oriented

I can sum up my solution with the simple phrase “put yourself in your prospect’s shoes.”

Your prospect doesn’t care about your solution, or about your company. Your prospect only cares about its problems, such as a re-election campaign.

Here’s what a Bredemarket client might say to the mayor’s campaign manager.

VENDOR: “No mayor wants the political nightmare of arresting an innocent person because of a tech glitch. It damages community trust and creates a major liability. The Really Cool ABIS (Automated Biometric Identification System) can drastically cut down the risk of “false positives” (the system wrongly flagging an innocent person). “

Kinda long, but I had some splainin to do.

But for a vendor to say this, the vendor (or its consultant) must really know ABIS products and function as a biometric product marketing expert.

What if you don’t have a consultant who is a biometric product marketing expert?

Let’s introduce Liminal’s magic word, taxonomy.

Liminal’s solution: A Unified Market Taxonomy

I’ve discussed taxonomies before as a way to organize information. Adobe Experience Manager supports taxonomy creation and automation of same. They’re also used by the UK Home Office in its National Police Chiefs’ Council Minimum POLE Data Standards Dictionary. (POLE is an acronym standing for Person, Object, Location, Event; it has nothing to do with John Paul II.)

Liminal uses its Market Taxonomy to bring the two factions together.

“Markets are messy. Buyers describe their problems in one language, vendors describe their products in another, regulators describe obligations in a third, and practitioners try to hold all of it in their heads at once. Finding trusted market intelligence is hard enough; agreeing on what we’re even looking at is harder still.

“That’s what a market taxonomy is for: one structure that connects what buyers need to what vendors offer, with regulations and market forces shaping the picture at every level.”

So how are they linked? The demand side (buyers) mirrors the supply side (vendors) at every level.

The domain maps to the solution segment. Use cases map to solutions. Requirements map to product capabilities. And translation occurs.

In short: even if you’re not a biometric product marketing expert, Liminal lets you fake it.