Category: articles

B2B Selling and Industry Marketing I would argue that B2B sales and marketing is vertical by definition.  This is true even for horizontal companies at the bottom of the stack.  In fact, my first marketing role was doing industry marketing for Bay Networks.  Our industry efforts were highly effective and appreciated by the field and product teams and the last time that I checked routers are routers……… When I think about the core functions of marketing: Segmentation Use case definition Value proposition creation Positioning and differentiation Partnering and product development Sales enablement Lead and awareness generation I’m hard pressed to[…]

Is Your Marketing Mix Right? Great ingredients with the wrong mix makes bad cakes.  Good ingredients with the right mix can make great cakes. What is the marketing mix?  To me it’s the marketing plan cut by: Business goals (revenue, deals, share, satisfaction, etc.) 4P goals (awareness, leads, sales tools, in-bound product/partner input) Market segments (horizontal and industry) and titles Geographies Channel (direct, indirect, joint) Offering (solution, application, platform) Function (AR, PR, website, events, direct, emarketing, social, collateral, etc.) Medium and media Organizational (marketing, sales, engineering, finance, etc.) As an example, if we are selling cloud computing middleware into financial[…]

Question: ‘How’s it going?’  Answer: ‘53’. If you’re team doesn’t speak like this, enter MSU. Make stuff up (metrics, content or processes). Someone says: ‘It’s really hard to measure awareness or know what the response rate will be or to know how many references we need or know how much time it will take or how much it will cost or how successful we will be…….’ If you hear this, I guarantee that you are failing. You run a business, you need to get people to make business decisions and be accountable for those decisions. The business scorecard is numbers,[…]

30% happens, plan for it. 3:1 ratios between suspects, prospects, leads, qualified leads, opportunities and deals is my experience. $100 per lead is in the ballpark (I’ve seen much higher and lower but this is the average in my experience). 20-30% of your marketing budget should be flexible ‘dry powder’ because something always comes up. Launches are for rookies, campaigns are for pros and programs are for real-deal players. A launch that supports a campaign that supports a program is great. In my mind, launches are about 3Ps, campaigns 1P (promotion) and programs are about 4Ps. Random acts usually start[…]

After 2 years of consulting, 2 years of venture capital, 2 years of business school, I took my first marketing job doing industry marketing for Wellfleet Communications which then became Bay Networks. At that point in my career, I could have written a book on strategy. I’d analyzed 100s of businesses, studied how Sun Tzu could have beat Jack Welch until Jack read leadership secrets of Attila the Hun, but in any case, they both were going down at the hands of Andreessen and company. Three months into the job, my very successful colleague came in my cube and said[…]

Jiggles is the name that I proposed for my wife’s business idea to address overweight children. She was horrified.  But she’s a doctor, what does she know about marketing anyway? My point to her was that the name was as important as the business model. Groupon. Easy to spell. Easy to say. Is the business model. Positions and differentiates against known category. Short. Unique. Web searchable. Unlikely to have translation problems. Doesn’t limit company too much (think Documentum when world went to web content). Has favorable emotive qualities. Can’t turn it into an acroynym or shorten. Could be used as[…]

We have the short version and longer ‘if you’re gonna eat shit don’t nibble version’. Short version Less is more in communications with investors.  Nail the whole thing down in really basic terms (see growth strategies) and coach your CEO like crazy not to get off script or opine.  Just make sure CFO is prepared.  If you have a good CFO, they will do this for you and you only need to simplify the go-to-market and market situation for them. 53 beta customers, 9 POCs, 3 in production, 456,782 revenue, 2.1M next year, 350M market in 3 years, #1 distribution[…]

Fire fast, hire slow. Smart, tough, beer-test. Skills, technical experience, domain experience, process experience, attitude, fit. Work style:  Producers, Administrators, Entrepreneurs, Integrators (copyright Ichak Adizes). (I’m PI by the way) Myers Briggs personality types. (I’m ENTJ by the way). Goals, situation, compensation, risk. Need 3 qualified and pick 1. Never pick 1 without having 3 qualified. What does the team need? What do you need? Better be real clear here before you start interviewing so you can filter feedback, sell your choice to the team and effectively on-board. Open ended questions, drill-down/drill-down/drill-down. Qualify, qualify, qualify. What if this happens? That’s[…]

There are many ways to grow, why do we make it confusing? Companies get stuck because of either: a) product b) market or c) channel. Don’t create a growth strategy without first understanding what is limiting the company. Growth is then about fixing the above problem (singular as in fixing one is better than fixing three). New markets: geographies, verticals, horizontals New products: enhancements, modules, platforms, applications New channels: OEM, VAR, Integrator, Web, Distributor (incl. service providers), new Sales Reps Organizing this dialog and being very precise is important because this is the diagnosis stage. This is your 2×2 matrix[…]

Functions and Roles:  Frameworks for Success Technology businesses are hard on marketers for 3 reasons; a) the product obsoletes itself every 3-5 years b) technical differences matter c) the investor model rewards winner takes all strategies. The result is that very smart competitive folks try to self-organize into effective teams to beat the competition to the punch of a sustainable (read profitable) customer vision. Unfortunately, this vision point is just that, an unknowable end-point. That means its a journey and that spells complexity which in turn can spell waste. If teams spend the bulk of their time explaining things to[…]