Marketing
Say you've got a new product release. You’re super excited about your app’s new Feature X. It’s very innovative. Product marketing sees it as long-needed differentiator. Sales sees it as a silver bullet: “with Feature X, our competition is screwed.” Everyone’s excited. Then
Management
I often get asked by technical founders what business / marketing / strategy books they should read. While there are many excellent relatively new books (e.g., The Lean Startup), the primary purpose of this post is to list a set of classic business books that most (older) business people have read
Marketing
Theodore Levitt At some point in every marketer's career they produce a data sheet that looks like this: Our product uses state-of-the-art technology including a MapReduce distributed backend processing engine with predictive analytics including multivariate adaptive regression splines, support vector machine classification, and naive Bayesean
Marketing
[Major revision 5/11/14 5:10 PM] * "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics" -- Benjamin Disraeli. * "All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values." -- Marshall McLuhan, philosopher of communications theory and coiner of the phrase "the medium is the
Leadership
In business we have a sad tendency to copy success blindly. I remember the first time I read about this I didn't even understand what I was reading: "Nothing in business is so remarkable as the conflicting variety of success formulas offered by its numerous practitioners and
Grateful Dead
For a change of pace, I thought I'd do a quick post with some of my favorite quotes. * "In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable." -- Dwight Eisenhower * "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the
Marketing
I just finished reading Phil Fernandez's recent book, Revenue Disruption, and I have to say that I recommend it highly. Fundamentally, Fernandez argues that the old Chinese Wall between sales and marketing needs to be torn down. Instead, companies need to think of a continuous process, executed collaboratively
Marketing
This post was inspired by a recent beer with long-term colleague, friend, and fellow volleyball dad, Paul Albright, now chief revenue officer at Marketo. The question we discussed was how can a company sell current product capabilities but also market vision at the same? (For brevity's sake
Marketing
As a marketing guy turned CEO, I have the relatively rare experience of having seen marketing from inside the organization as well as from above it. Yesterday, the SV Forum Marketing SIG invited me to give a presentation where I discussed marketing from the CEO's perspective. I'
Management
I've always found business to have a fair amount of accidental, built-in hubris, largely resulting from the strategy formulation process. I remember one time at Business Objects we had a strategy offsite where, in our infinite wisdom and with a fair bit of groupthink, we came up
Marketing
I stumbled into this press release during my morning reading (ParAccel Triples Revenue, Doubles Customers and Appoints New Executive Team in 2010) and felt an overwhelming and immediate need to use it as an educational example in public relations (PR). CAMPBELL, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--ParAccel, Inc., provider of the world’
Marketing
In a age where some 30% of the US adult population is technically obese, if you're like most people, then you're probably trying to keep an eye on your weight, and therefore on your daily food intake as measured by things like number of calories, grams
