Startup Lessons: Taunt the bully — if you have a difference to flaunt
Lesson #1 from the untold stories of Appirio
This post is the second part in a series. The original post sets the context, provides the disclaimers, and gives a preview of all of the lessons.
A few weeks before we announced the Appirio acquisition I socially ran into a senior executive from Accenture. He told me they had looked at Appirio but several executives at his firm had flagged serious potential culture issues because one of the founders “hated” Accenture.
I almost fell down laughing, they were talking about me ! Of course I don’t “hate” Accenture. Life is too short and important to apply that level of emotion to a company. So how did this happen ?
I’d like to claim harassing Accenture was my idea or even came from others at Appirio. In reality, early on we learned from Marc Benioff (in conversations and later in his book) how he relentlessly targeted Siebel in the early days of salesforce to get themselves on the map. We began to do the same.
In early 2009, Tiger Woods was the world’s most known athlete. He had just dramatically won his most impressive US Open championship a few months earlier and Accenture featured him in nearly every ad they ran on TV or print. It was target too tempting to resist.
We posted the picture shown here along with a mocking blog on how behind GSIs were with the cloud. It went viral inside of the salesforce team. Accenture complained to them and sent Appirio — at the time a fifty person company — a cease and desist. When we essentially ignored that, they had IMG, Tiger’s management company threaten legal action (see below). We did eventually take the image down but not before bloggers and execs inside of salesforce had gotten the idea we were a threat to Accenture (as a follow up our 2010 cloud predictions stated “The most innovative thing we expect from Accenture next year is a replacement for its Tiger Woods ad campaign”.)
We continued mocking Accenture for years. One year they were in a keynote at Dreamforce but had a demo that showed it was running on “localhost”. Naturally, I shared their lameness with prospects and partners live as the keynote was occurring. Another year we mocked their lack of ratings from actual customers on the AppExchange. Again and again, we heard how Accenture was upset and raising the issue directly with salesforce. They explicitly asked us to be banned from events they were the lead sponsors on.
All their attention towards us did was ignite interest. It was like high school, everyone wanted to know the gossip. Salesforce Account Executives heard about Appirio through this drama and wanted to learn more about the story and us. We were a fraction of the size of Accenture’s cloud practice but were constantly mentioned together. It helped put Appirio on the map.
The irony of the perception that we/I “hated” Accenture was that I started my career there. After graduating from college I worked at their Center for Strategic Technology in Palo Alto. It was an incredibly rewarding part of my life that created relationships I cherish to this day.
Our taunting of Accenture worked because we had a different message (cloud was bigger, happening faster, and was more relevant to the enterprise than they thought) and because we knew their size would keep them from responding quickly to any individual action. The lack of scale is a massive disadvantage versus larger players, but focus and the ability to be provocative remain the domain of the little guy.
If you identify a ground truth your competitor cannot escape from (e.g. pricing model, partners, etc.), and you can draw a stark contrast, aggressively taunting them can be highly effective. You can reduce the playing field of competition and reduce the advantage of scale. Imagine the scene in the movie 300 where just a handful of men (300) hold off an army of hundreds of thousands because the enemy must engage them in a valley that is only a few feet wide. Accenture had to fight in our valley because we had said cloud was going to ubiquitous and upend the legacy vendors of SAP and Oracle. For many years Accenture, even if they believed this, could not aggressively acknowledge this belief because of the size of their own SAP and Oracle practices. They were less able to take advantage of their scale, industry knowledge and many other factors because we narrowed the field of battle. The dominant factor became whether or not they actually believed in the cloud — and if they didn’t believe how could they truly help a company who was trying to move to it. Eventually as their cloud business grew (and on premise shrank) this ground truth shifted and Accenture could mimic our statements and approach. But for many years our taunting of Accenture (and their response) enabled us to stay in the ring with a gorilla ~1000X our size.
