Sales take place when a buyer has convinced him or herself of the value of a purchase — and generally not until then. And in a connected, social, and content rich world, much of the buying process takes place before the prospect has even engaged with us. It’s now generally accepted that in B2B, more …
Category Archive: Product Marketing
Apr 30
The Content Factory
Content is (once again) king. Everywhere you look, the marketing discussion centers around using “content” to drive marketing results. For all the buzz, two key facts are consistently overlooked: Building effective content is hard. Doing it consistently is very hard. I’m not going to pretend to have the all the answers to make it easy. …
Apr 21
Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit — Some Nuggets from the Trends in B2B Panel
I had a great time yesterday at the Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit yesterday. It’s always invigorating to step away from the day-to-day and see what others are doing, and how they’re thinking about their work. I was fortunate enough to be asked to sit on the ‘Newest Trends in B2B Marketing’ panel along with some very …
Mar 27
Oh no, not the wall of words — anything but that
Remember when you were 6 years old and just starting to read chapter books? If you were anything like me, you preferred books that had a nice mix of words and pictures. It’s not that I was lazy, I was just overwhelmed by a mega-sized serving of words without visual interruption. I had to …
Mar 04
A New Model for Marketing
I’m convinced that many of us are working with a busted model. Marketing has changed radically over the last ten years as has our customers’ buying process. But many of us haven’t changed how we think about our function. I was fortunate enough to work with Marketing Profs to publish my thoughts on what …
Feb 27
The Innovation We Need
I’m in tech. In tech, we market innovation. We let you do something you couldn’t do before. We have a better way, a faster way, a cheaper way. We are, therefore we innovate. But here’s a secret, I’m sick of innovation. Now before you start labeling me some sort of Luddite, let me explain — …
Nov 20
Getting Wonky. About economics, waste, and software products.
Call me a geek, but I dig economics. Always have. In particular, microeconomics and its intersection with buyer behavior, incentives, and choice. To get (more than a little) wonky, I always thought ‘dead weight loss’ — the notional loss of value based on inefficient delivery of goods or services — was pretty interesting. OK, …
Nov 08
The Age of ME (It’s About the Users, Dummy)
I’ve been wrestling with this post for a few weeks now. What I want to talk about is user-centricity. But that sounds like pop-business BS or some MBA-ish clinical term. The kernel of my thought is we need to make all of our marketing efforts more about the human beings who will use our products …
Oct 24
Enterprise Sales is Dead. Long Live Enterprise Sales.
The demise of the traditional enterprise software sales model is widely reported. And widely, and joyously, celebrated. And for good reason. The model has bugs. Lots of them. It’s expensive (personnel, travel). It’s time consuming. Picking good reps is hard; many fail. Finding good sales engineers is incredibly hard — often even good reps …
Oct 09
Of Inverted Pyramids, PR Math, and Reductions
At their core, great marketers are great communicators. Period. We must be sufficiently technical to truly understand our industry, our competitors, our differentiation. We need to be critical thinkers and masters of metrics. If we’re really going to kick ass, we need to be thoughtful strategist and bold leaders. But above all else, we must …
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