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 […]
Why Macy’s Struggles Expose a Deeper Crisis in B2C Marketing Automation
Tragic news has just come out stating that over 10,000 people will lose their jobs at Macy’s. The iconic retailer is struggling to adapt to a more modern and relevant form of consumer engagement and commerce. Contrary to what the media suggests, the lessons here aren’t just about transitioning to online sales. Retailers are […]
What Marketers Can Learn from Donald Trump
While we won’t go into my views on the election here (see my Twitter account if you want color in that department), I will say that all marketers and solution sellers can learn one “yuge” lesson from Donald Trump: understanding your audience and talking to them in their terms will take you a long, long […]
The end of marketing
This is going to be political but you won’t be able to tell which side I’m on (if you choose to read on). You might ask, why on earth would I get involved even tangentially in politics right now and the simple answer is that it impacts CRM and I have a viewpoint. But as […]
