Don’t Let Product Management Turn Into “The Roadmap Guys”
At many enterprise software companies product management (PM) ends up defaulting into a role that I can’t stand: The Roadmap Guys*. Like a restaurant with one item on the menu, the company defaults into ordering one thing from product management: a roadmap pitch. “The VP of PM is in Boston and Providence this week, can […]
What Top CMO’s Care About (Demand Gen Persona) – Part 1 of 4
Top Trends for 2018 Highlight Greater Orchestration In March 2016, Constellation introduced four personas of the modern CMO (see Figure 1). This framework provided CMO’s with a model to think about the role of strategy versus execution and audience development versus audience acquisition. Over the past eight weeks, conversations with demand generation focused […]
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 […]
