For The Future Indicative, Ep 1 Part 2
Transcript
ALEX EFFGEN
Welcome to the Future Indicative: a podcast on the trends, technologies, personalities, and narratives of business. My name is Alex Effgen, and today’s topic is Origin.
MATTHEW JOSEFOWICZ
“For me, the most interesting constituent was always the insurance technology leader. We were covering insurance and so the insurance CIO and their team at the end of the day was the most important customer and the most important perspective.”
ALEX EFFGEN
That was Matthew Josefowicz, entrepreneur and founder of the insurance research and advisory firm, Novarica. He’s a mentor, a friend, and a bit of a savior, but that requires you to know a little bit about me, Alex Effgen. And that’s the reason why, for this first episode, we’re covering origin.
Prior to a recent change in circumstances, I spent my last ten years with one growing company. Datos Insights is a research and advisory partner to the financial services industry. It is the combination of several research, advisory, and data companies that includes the aforementioned Novarica.
My responsibilities started with editorial, grew to oversee vendor research, manage the entire insurance pipeline of research, and then finally direct content marketing that covered insurance, banking, payments, securities, investments, and cross-practice research on cybersecurity and fraud/anti-money laundering.
I’ve learned a lot in the last decade. And all that starts with Matt, who needed an editor and technical writer in 2015 when I needed a new opportunity…But that required me not only to learn about insurance, but the world of advisory services. And I did not know anything about either. Thank God for Matt.
MATTHEW JOSEFOWICZ
“Prior to Novarica, I worked at a traditional analyst firm. And traditional analyst firms are all following the template invented by Gideon Gartner about producing reports and analyzing trends in technology.
The original audience for Gartner when he started was investment analysts, and then it morphed into internal tech buyers and then it morphed to technology marketers. And so he was trying…the Gartner organization is designed to serve all three of those constituencies. And over time, it’s become much more the last two and not so much the first one. And all the firms that arose from that and have used that template over the last 40 or 50 years—I guess 40 years—have kind of come from that model where they’re trying to serve everyone, and sometimes they have individual divisions where they’re trying to serve a specific niche.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Matt’s niche was the insurance CIO, and the ecosystem around them.
MATTHEW JOSEFOWICZ
“We designed Novarica very specifically to have that one role as our primary target customer and also our primary information source. And so that meant that every conversation that we had with an insurance CIO was valuable to us either as research or as relationship building.”
“Even the technology vendor clients, what they wanted most was to understand what that insurance technology executive cared about. And what that insurance technology executive cared about was what do all the other insurance technology executives care about.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Matt retired four years ago from active duty, but exploring Novarica’s niche has taught me that in order to find value, you need to understand need. The actual need of a customer. Answering the question of need by delivering meaning provides value. And that is–or at least should be–the business of every vertical–insurance, financial services, technology, communications, entertainment, retail, higher education, B2B, B2C, B2B2C etc–from the dawn of time to the sunset of eternity.
MATTHEW JOSEFOWICZ
“There’s a professor of entrepreneurship at Brown named Danny Warshay. And … he sent student teams out to supermarkets to find a product idea. And one student team found women in the vitamin aisle, pregnant women in the vitamin aisle, picking up a thing of vitamins, looking at it, making a face, and then putting it in their cart. And they went to them and they said, What’s happening here? And they said, Well, I need vitamins, but these are all huge and they taste gross and I hate swallowing them, but I know I need to have them.
And they were like, Oh my God, there is a market for dissolvable pregnancy vitamins. You know, pregnancy vitamin granules that dissolve in a drink and don’t taste horrible.
But if you’d asked people what they wanted, they wouldn’t necessarily be able to articulate that. So doing the research in your primary target, doing ground up research, in your primary target market, not making assumptions about what’s good for them or not trying to figure out what you want to build and why that’s good for them. But really starting from your target audience and saying, What is it that they need in the area that I’m prepared to fulfill?
To take that back to Novarica we knew the target audience was insurer CIOs. We knew the product class was information and advice.”
ALEX EFFGEN
You spell the word business with the letter S three times. But I would argue it takes four of them for a business to be in business:
SPECIALIZE: What is this?
SELL: Who needs this?
SECURE: What can disrupt this?
SCALE: How do we expand this?
Every business must address these four categories, some sooner than others, but all of them in order to survive, thrive, and get out alive.
As I said at the top, the Future Indicative is a podcast on the trends, technologies, personalities, and narratives of business, and each episode will explore them through these four categories. Let’s start with SPECIALIZE. Providing value to meet the needs of a client. As every industry tries to find savings (money, time, resources) with the deployment of artificial intelligence, the question of value needs to be reconsidered.
MATTHEW JOSEFOWICZ
“The perceived value of the traditional analyst report is shrinking. Some of these reports are still very insightful, the reports that some of these firms produce, but in the mind of the customer, they’re thinking, Well, I can get an AI to summarize the available research for me and it’ll probably be good enough.
So access to information is becoming democratized. But what they can’t replicate is trust. And what they can’t replicate is a trusted advisor and peer access.
And so I think that in a world where information is more and more accessible and more and more manipulable by generative AI, the piece that will take longer to replace or may never be replaced is the person-to-person trust, because our customers were looking for information, but they were also looking for advice, and information is a commodity, advice is very much not.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Information may be the commodity, but its value comes from communicating its meaning. This may be the Age of Information, but if it doesn’t improve our ability to communicate then it’s just an Age of Confusion.
MATTHEW JOSEFOWICZ
“We weren’t just saying, Here’s a whole bunch of information, you figure out what it means to you. We were saying, Here’s what we think this means for you, and here’s all the evidence that is behind that.
But we were doing that additional work for them, which is work they need because they don’t have time to do it themselves—of understanding the implications, understanding the guidance, thinking about their specific situation and how any piece of external information applies to that. So that was really, I think, the value that Novarica brought to the table for its clients.”
ALEX EFFGEN
With a sense of how we find something that delivers value, now we need to be able SELL it. And for that we need to communicate value. As they say in religion, “Evangelize!” How do you convince others that you can change their lives?
MATTHEW JOSEFOWICZ
“In terms of demonstrating value before the sale, we had the advantage at Novarica of not selling enterprise software or something that has a big lead time before it demonstrates value. We were able to give people reports, we were able to have free conversations with people and give them a taste of what it would be like to have access to our information and our advice.
That’s not always possible depending on the type of solution that you’re selling, whether it’s a product or service. But if you can’t do that directly, if you can’t give people a real-world taste of it, you know, a free sample, being able to have a reference client that is willing to testify on your behalf is sort of the next best thing.
So if there is somebody who can say, yeah, I worked with this company or I bought this product or service and it made my life better in this way or that way, that voice of a reference customer is 100 times more valuable than you telling them your story directly.”
ALEX EFFGEN
And how do you find them?
MATTHEW JOSEFOWICZ
“Speaking from our experience, we would go where our target audience was. The conferences that drew the executive level, the trade magazines that they were reading, making sure that we had thought leadership in those things. And then just one-to-one networking, getting introductions from our current clients or from our current research council members—the folks that we were talking to for research who weren’t clients yet.
So whatever a company’s target audience is, really thinking from inside their skin. What do they read? Where do they go? What do they care about? What’s going to get their attention in a way that’s meaningful to them.
There is a lot of the marketing world that has kind of grown up from the last 15 years that prizes engagement more than anything else.
And engagement is just a way to aggregate attention and sell it to an advertiser. What’s much more important is what does that person actually want and can you give it to them? Not how long can you keep them on your website or how many times can you get them to click on your thing, but how do you provide them with some nugget that’s meaningful to them, that’s helpful to them, and that gets them to think about you as somebody that makes their lives easier and better as opposed to just somebody that’s in their face all the time.”
ALEX EFFGEN
Thank you for joining us on Part 1 of the Future Indicative’s Origin episode. In Part 2 we’ll explore how you protect the meaning your clients value, and when ready how to deliver it to a wider clientele.
While opinions expressed are solely our own, we’d gladly connect with you on any of the topics presented for further discussion. And if you’ve heard something you like, then please spread the word. Share the link with a friend (or enemy, to make a friend), boost it on socials, or play it out loud on your phone for an admiring audience. On behalf of Indicate Marketing, I’m Alex Effgen. And we appreciate your time.
