At first, the group focused on the typical challenge of the multimedia industry: How can we explain our products to our customers - when our products are so complex that even our salesforce needs six months of training before it can do a demo? Walsh hit on a different question: "What if we don't explain the products? What if we just find a way to show what they do?" That simple notion was the beginning of a whole new marketing strategy.
The team designed a CD that showed real customers who had used Macromedia software to do cool stuff. The "Showcase CD" included the experience of one customer who used the software to put his résumé on the Internet (in 1994, a landmark breakthrough) and got more than 100,000 responses. USA Today picked up the story and ran it on page one.
Results: The audience for Showcase and for the software that it demonstrated grew like mold in a petri dish. "We shipped millions of CDs," Walsh says. "It was like having a 24-hour salesforce that never whined or asked for a raise." The boost from the CD helped Macromedia's total sales grow from $56 million in 1995 to $116 million less than two years later.
Conclusion: Inexperience is an undervalued asset. Walsh credits several of his success stories to his outsider status. "People who spend a long time working at the same place tend to try out variations on the same ideas," he says. "Too much knowledge can get in the way of fresh thinking."
Coordinates: Miles Walsh, mwalsh@flycast.com
Cheryl Dahle (cdahle@fastcompany.com) is Fast Company's Web Editor.
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