Dear Marketing: Stop Putting the Template Over the Story
I’ve always thought that if marketers wrote newspapers, the famous New York Times headline of August 8, 1974 would have looked like this: Instead of how it actually looked, which was: What’s the difference? While both of the above presentations are structured, the newspaper doesn’t let the template get in the way of story. The […]
How To Get Your Startup a Halo
How would you like your startup to win deals not only when you win a customer evaluation, but when you tie — and even sometimes when you lose? That sounds great. But is it even possible? Amazing, yes — but you need have a halo effect working to your advantage. What is a halo effect? Per […]
Start With an Audience Not a Product If You Want to Win
Find your Audience first… Many Entrepreneurs identify too much with their product or idea. They want to go from a product idea to a plan for success. But that’s not the best way and if you insist on following that approach, it can often lead into a long blind alley. Here’s a question I saw […]
Desperate to Find Marketing Help For Your Small Business?
Desperate to find marketing help for your small business? I don’t blame you. It’s really tough to do. Almost impossible, in fact. Your choices are not happy ones: Go with the Big Name Firm, realizing that you’re such a small fish to them you’re going to get their B-, C-, or even the D-Team working […]
The Role of Professional Services in a SaaS Business
I love to create reductionist mission statements for various departments in a company. These are designed to be ultra-compact and potentially provocative. My two favorite examples thus far: Marketing exists to make sales easier. HR exists to help managers manage. I like to make them based on real-life situations, e.g., when someone running a department […]
How Do You Beat a VC’s Best Companies?
I read a great article by Tomasz Tunguz recently called, “The Best Content Marketers In The World.” Content Marketing is literally the engine that powers my bootstrapped business: CNCCookbook. It provides me with a very nice living (income on par with public company executives not counting their stock sales) and has grown quickly and consistently […]
Content Marketing Isn’t Marketing Content
Here’s a summary of a short talk on Content Marketing I gave at Demandfest, a practitioner-to-practitioner event for marketers. In today’s SaaS market, one thing stands out, nothing. There is too much noise. Standing out and engaging customers is harder than ever. And there are too many spammy approaches that hurt the brand and drain […]
The Dogshit Bar: A Memorable Market Research Concept
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve seen market research that suffers from one key problem. It goes something like this: What do you think of PRODUCT’s user interface? Do you think PRODUCT should be part of suite or a standalone module? Is the value of PRODUCT best measured per-user or per-bite? Is the PRODUCT’s […]
The Evolution of Marketing Thanks to SaaS
I was talking with my friend Tracy Eiler, author of Aligned to Achieve, the other day and she showed me a chart that they were using at InsideView to segment customers. The chart was a quadrant that mapped customers on two dimensions: renewal rate and retention rate. The idea was to use the chart to […]
Top Tech Trends for 2017
For many years, like most analyst and/or analyst firms I know, I’ve published some sort of annual “predictions” at the start of the new year. This year, in my new role (I can still say “new” for the rest of January, my 1 year anniversary isn’t till tomorrow) I’ve put together a small team (Rob […]
