The hidden power of customer development

September 2, 2009

Things are not always what they seem! For example many companies do not have the growth or lead generation capability that they would like. Usually the gut reaction is to throw more marketing spend, channels or tools at the problem. However, many times the root cause of the problem is actually that the product and [...]

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Marketing is a house

July 1, 2009

Building a competitive marketing capability is like building a house. The walls are your website. Email marketing is your heating system. Advertising is your windows. If you have a crappy old boiler you are wasting a ton of money and energy. A new boiler will take advantage of best-practice techniques like segmentation, pacing, and relevance. [...]

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Top 5 marketing automation questions answered

May 18, 2009

What is marketing automation? Marketing automation tools are designed to improve demand generation, leads and deals by turning one-off campaigns with no history into automated sequences of events that can be triggered by sophisticated lead scores. What does marketing automation include? These tools typically include email send, survey and the landing page functionality as well [...]

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How can you use surveys to get more for your marketing spend?

April 30, 2009

If you are spending on marketing assets you can use surveys to determine the priority of assets you may need to create based on actual market demand. This is a better way to allocate spend on these assets than “by the gut”.
Here are examples of real questions I use to determine priority.

Would you be interested [...]

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Using surveys to improve sales

April 28, 2009

These are actual questions that I used in a survey to assess what elements of the sales process needed improvement to improve the lead to deal conversion rate. I ask these types of questions on a weekly basis – this drives business decisions and by the next week I will be asking new questions.

The above [...]

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Common startup marketing mistake: Letting your Google adwords run………

April 13, 2009

Recently I have run across numerous companies that have a set level of spend per month on Google adwords which keeps running month after month with no clarity on what the company is getting for this spend. In my opinion there is a better way to allocate marketing dollars. I can see how this happens. [...]

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Startup marketing plan requires focus as opposed to large company portfolio strategy

April 13, 2009

Large companies often have a broad portfolio of marketing activities. Startup companies on the other hand, not only DO NOT need a broad portfolio of activities initially, but can actually suffer from too many marketing activities. 1 or 2 high-performance marketing activities can form a great foundation for a smaller company and then the trick [...]

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Low-probability experimentation is a guaranteed waste

April 13, 2009

When experimenting in order to discover lead generation breakthroughs it is critical to focus on high-probability experimentation – The more experience in the team the more chance the experiments are high-probability. And it takes creative (sometimes unconventional) ideas to achieve breakthroughs. I cannot over-emphasize the importance of high-probability experiments. Low-probability experiments often means marketing money [...]

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Profound change means there is a premium for startup marketing talent

April 10, 2009

This is a time of profound change in the way that companies can market themselves. On a yearly basis new ways of marketing become available that did not previously exist in history. SEO, SEM, email marketing, social marketing are just a few examples. Each of these new types of marketing is complicated in their own [...]

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5 useful marketing answers for startup CEOs

February 10, 2009

1. Is your management team steering your company blind? Is your management team making decisions based on data from the marketplace on a regular basis? Good marketing allows management teams to ask almost any question they want from the marketplace and get an immediate answer. Do your potential customers want a whitepaper? 68% say yes. [...]

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