Marketers to Silicon Valley: Help Us Get Ahead of Consumer – Advertising Age – Digital Interesting article on F1000 marketing looking to the valley for social media insight. How did a completely unknown start-up named Huddler find itself huddled in a Menlo Park restaurant with 26 top execs from the No. 2 advertiser in the…
4 things that will improve your organic SEO Great blog post on how to improve your organic SEO! So, if you are a company trying to tell people about you and your product nowadays, command and control style communications is dead … you have to think of joining the communities that have developed around you,…
The latest hot trend in social media: leaving it | Anthill Magazine Interesting article on social media use, particularly the comments from Seth Godin. Chris Brogan, author of the bestselling book Trust Agents, makes adept use of social media, especially through Twitter and his blog. Yet, as he wrote in a post earlier this year,…
Branding is Dead: Guest Post | Sales Machine | BNET Great post on why marketing programs should focus on demonstrating customer value rather than branding. Here’s the problem. Branding initiatives are too often based on one-way communication. This contradicts sound communication theory. Communication does not occur when the sender delivers a message. It occurs when…
Ah the proverbial sales funnel. All of us in sales have lived by it and some of us have died by it in our careers. What is it? Has it changed? Who changed it? The sales funnel is a metric driven tool used to measure sales conversion ratios. That is to say the percentage that…
* Marketing & Selling is harder than ever before, you need the right domain expertise to succeed * Runways are shorter, you need to achieve customer & revenue traction faster than ever before * More competition than ever before, it’s vital to get your messaging, value prop & differentiation right * Would you skimp on…
I was thrown the question, who should a startup hire first … a domain expert or a marketing expert? In one corner, the idea is that that startups must always hire a marketing domain expert. The CEO can probably size the market but its the market knowledge that’s needed next. In the other corner, the…
While it’s always been important to have sales & marketing aligned, it’s never been more imperative than in today’s world of selling and marketing. It’s harder than ever before to engage new prospects and customers. Partially due to the easy access to all of the information on the web, prospects and customers feel entitled to…
Below is a good article from the SJ Mercury News this weekend on the global investment in clean tech. In 2009, there was $162B invested globally in clean tech and China is investing at double the rate of the US. What does this portend for US based clean tech companies? It will be increasingly imperative…
Every three months or so I receive a call from the same sales rep. He immediately launches in to a sales pitch without any regard to what my needs are, in this case I don’t need what he sells. Yet he hasn’t bothered to ask me any questions that would properly qualify me as a…