Most Marketing Advice Tells Us How to Market to Marketers
Think about it–the experts out there writing marketing advice as part of their content marketing strategies are all selling something. They’re either selling software, consulting, or some other product. And the audience they’re selling to are marketers. Sure, many of them have practices or history that involved marketing to non-marketers, but right now what they’re […]
Authentication as a Service: Slow Progress, But Are We There Yet?
Authentication as a Service solves a problem every Cloud Developer, mobile or desktop, has to solve. As one player in the space, AuthRocket, puts it: Do you really want to write code for users, forgotten passwords, permissions, and admin panels again? To that I would add, “Do you really want to have to be a world class […]
Good Customer Experience Trumps Good Customer Service. Bad CUX Trumps All. A Tale of Chukka Boots and Photoshop.
Good Customer Experience trumps Good Customer Service, even if you are Zappo’s. My wife quit buying shoes from Zappo’s after they sent her the wrong pair of shoes for the third time and she had to return them. They didn’t do it all on the same transaction, it happened over a fairly long period of […]

Cloud Applications, Packaging for Simplicity and Value
A Salesforce.com announcement today on product packaging got me thinking about the way cloud vendors package and sell products. Actually I guess a better way to say that would be, I’m thinking about how customers want to consume cloud apps. The way we think about apps is in general, colored by a lot of legacy […]
Don’t Bury the Map With the Treasure: Thin Clients Trump Apps in Walled Gardens
One of the questions every SaaS company will have to be able to answer for their customers is, “What happens if you go under?” It’s actually a fascinating question, and one you have a chance as a vendor to think about and turn to your advantage. For example, one of my SaaS ventures was Helpstream. […]

Building a Customer Experience Strategy
This sounds like an ambitious post and I guess it is, but let me say up front that there is no “one size fits all” answer to how to build a customer experience strategy. There are though, some things that you should consider and some tips that are working for some of my clients. What […]

Technology and the Effective Marketer (Part Two)
In part two of this series I’ll focus on the comprehensive marketing technology solution and then in part 3 we’ll look at customer intelligence driven marketing, the customer data value chain and the technology that underpins that approach. One of…
Big Data is a Small Market Compared to Suburban Data
Big Data is all the rage, and seem to be one of the prime targets for new entrepreneurial ventures since VC-dom started to move from Consumer Internet to Enterprise recently. Yet, I remain skeptical about Big Data for a variety of reasons. As I’ve noted before, it seems to be a premature optimization for most companies. That post […]