Branding
I first read The One to One Future by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers in 1997, four years after it was published. As a marketer, the book made a big impression on me. It was revolutionary stuff: we should make the paradigm shift from mass marketing to individualized marketing. When
Demandgen
Download USS_Nimitz_%28CVN-68%29_general_quarters_drill%2C_ca._2013.oga It’s that time of year, I suppose. You’ve hopefully approved your 2021 operating plan by now -- even if you’re on an increasingly popular 1/31 fiscal year end. You’ve signed up for some
Enterprise
(This is the second in a three-part restructuring and build-out of a previous post. See note [1] for details.) In the prior post we introduced repeatable sales process as the Holy Grail of enterprise software sales and, unlike some who toss the term around rather casually, we defined a repeatable
Enterprise
(This is the first in a three-part restructuring and build-out of the prior post. See note [1] for details.) The number one question go-to-market question in any enterprise software startup is: "do you have a repeatable sales process?" or, in more contemporary Silicon Valley patois, "do you
Branding
Decades ago I had the pleasure of watching a branding video, created by a San Francisco ad agency, narrated by an advertising executive with a familiar voice who'd narrated scores of commercials [1]. It was, I believe, entitled Staying in Character and while I've searched the
Demandgen
Back in the day I was taught that marketers do three things, memorized via the acronym STP: segment, target, position. * Divide the audience into different segments. For example, dividing consumers by demographics or dividing businesses by size or industry. * Select the segments that the company wishes to target for its
Demandgen
There's a common debate out there, it goes something like this: "Our sales development representatives (SDRs) need to look for pain: finding business owners with a problem and the ability to get budget to go fix it." Versus: "No, our SDRs need to look for
Management
The folks at Plannuh, specifically Peter Mahoney, Scott Todaro, and Dan Faulkner, asked me to write the foreword for their new book, The Next CMO: A Guide to Marketing Operational Excellence. (Free download here.) Here's what I wrote for them. CMO is a hard job. Early in my
Marketing
I spoke this morning to a private equity (PE) firm's gathering of portfolio company CEOs, CROs, and CMOs. Our topic, one of my favorites, was how to get sales and marketing working together to drive business results. While I talked about the predictable subject of alignment, I covered
Finance
The other day I heard a startup executive say, "we will start to accelerate sales hiring -- hiring reps beyond the current staffing levels and the current plan -- once we start to see the pipeline to support it." What comes first: the pipeline or the egg? Or,
GTM
I was talking with my old friend, Mark Tice, the other day and he referred to a startup mistake as, "on his top ten list." Ever the blogger, I replied, "what are the other nine?" Mark's been a startup CEO twice, selling two companies
Branding
Software startups seem drawn by sirens to brand their features. Hey, Apple does it. Think: Siri, Facetime. Microsoft tries it: Cortana. Starbucks even brands a cup size: Venti. So if they can do it, we should too, right? Wrong [1]. But it's so cool. Imagine it's