So, here you have a company that apparently has sales/marketing issues. I actually have a contact (pure anecdote I know, forgive me) who knows company and told me product great, sales dept a disaster… so if you watch this video, note that at 3:30 the CEO, Pandey, says “Reliability, reliability, reliability” is what they sell. It’s their purpose. Okay, great. Their product is critical to companies and if it just plain works consistently it is a big win. You can trust Nutanix because they’re reliable.
Now, you go to their website and what you expect to see is a simple, clearly told story that their sales force can use to explain their purpose: RELIABLE PRODUCTS/SERVICES.
Here’s their website…
You get an image of a guy wearing a Nutanix-branded racing helmet! So clearly, the website is saying, "We are all about speed. We sell hyperconverged infrastructure. (I know nothing about tech, but…) so this “hyper” converged sounds like it’s about speed, excitement and looking slick and cool. Is idea that guy who buys Nutanix will feel cool? Look cool to his boss? This does not radiate an aura of reliability at all. When I think of racing I think speed, danger, risk, excitement, beating the competition by being faster.
Then the next header reads,
“Free yourself from the complexity and cost of legacy IT, and embrace the power of cloud. Your enterprise cloud journey starts here.”
So, now they’re selling SIMPLICITY and LOWER COST than legacy IT and POWER and the EXCITEMENT of beginning a “CLOUD JOURNEY.”
This is an absolute storytelling disaster. It is a symptom of a company led by a man who doesn’t know the most fundamental, basic thing about human communication. You need to have a clear vision, share it with your staff, communicate it to customers and get investors excited. Is it any wonder that they have needed to change business models? Only one of two things can be true: 1) They know what they’re doing but haven’t figured out how to communicate it effectively yet. 2) They don’t know what they’re doing. This is not to say they’re untalented or stupid. They obviously have a good product.
But until this is fixed, I’m out. You have to tell a coherent, intelligent story. If you look at Crowdstrike, their CEO seems a 1,000x sharper than Pandey. Everything about the Crowdstrike story lines up. They need to be fast to stay ahead of hackers, malicious players, etc. They have a slick brand, the CEO literally races cars. They use Mario Andretti in ads because speed is critical to their business. Stopping malicious players fast is essential to business. Again, this is ultra basic and a starting point, nothing more.
If the leader, company, products/services and messaging are all clear, simple-to-understand, make sense and feel authentic and aligned it doesn’t guarantee anything. But if the story is not in perfect shape it is impossible to succeed. It is like firing an arrow with bad form - the more time goes on the further off course the arrow flies.
For this guy to bark “reliability” three times on Cramer and then not even include the word reliable on his website is comically awful. Prediction: company will eventually be sold for much less than it could have been if leaders could simply tell a lean, mean story. They’re like a hunk showing up to a date in culottes, the packaging is off. This feels to me like nerds desperate to be cool. Obviously this is pure gut feeling (hey, Saul uses it too!) but I like CEOs who radiate quiet strength and confidence, who have nothing to prove, and tell consistent stories backed by pure logic from day one.
Fool On
BroadwayDan