Author Archives: admin

Antisocial Media

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“Twitter is an ‘all about me’ place. So is Facebook. Both will be replaced with something else someday.” The radio host who said this, a man who lives in the social space as part of his livelihood, was making a fairly shrewd observation. Perhaps the condition is temporary, but most social media is about micropublishing, allowing everyone and their grandpa to broadcast to anyone who remotely cares. As proven in the last election cycle, everyone voicing their opinions and preferences online strains the patience of others, and over time reduces the desire to participate. As a young store clerk in a Forever 21 outlet recently said to me “Facebook is too noisy. Nobody my age hangs out there.” Sadly, a lot of marketers are in the “all about me” mode of social, and achieving the same sad results. I scanned a few B2B twitter accounts to spot check social activity … Continue reading →

The Price Isn’t Right

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“We lose money on every deal, but we make it up in volume.” That cold joke was tossed around a dying company I worked for a couple of decades ago. Yet behind the gallows humor was a bare truth; the company was bleeding and part of the problem was in pricing our deals. Knowing what to charge is non-trivial, but survival-level important. This is especially true for start-ups: Price too high and you earn no revenues. Price too low and you slowly spiral into the muck of bankruptcy. Knowing what to charge for products and services is often treated like a voodoo ritual, where mystic insight from corporate elders drive the decision. I once took over a marketing department for a software company and asked the innocent question “How did you decide on the product’s price?” The grizzled CEO said “That’s what all products in this market cost.” Unsatisfied with … Continue reading →

Segment Sense

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Ten out of ten start-ups don’t segment their markets well or at all. Oddly, a number of temporarily successful companies don’t either. Segmenting is one of the essential marketing strategy disciplines and yet the least practiced. Many start-ups skip it thinking that they intuitively know their market segments or, worse yet, that they will try-and-pivot their way to success. Of the companies that at least take a stab at segmenting, they often do a poor job. One of our earliest clients – a post-IPO success story facing an industry shake-out and forced pivot – confided they had chosen an industry verticals segmentation plan because “It’s as good as any other.” Such lackluster segmentation sentiment is dangerous because segmentation is the foundation for your go-to-market strategy, and the one that accelerates early revenue while solidifying a survivable niche from whence to grow. Failure to segment is tantamount to failure. Let us … Continue reading →

Founders Confess

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Founders have more war stories than some combat vets. SandHill.com and Silicon Strategies Marketing recently co-sponsored a survey of founders. We were intent on discovering what founders did and did not know about marketing when they launched their first company. The results were interesting though predictable. Most of the mistakes to which founders confess are well known to me and amply illustrated in the Start-up CEOs Marketing Manual. Yet the survey nicely summarizes those places where even founders clearly see how their lack of marketing strategy savvy caused them harm. Unrealistic markets: Founders admit that they knew the size of their total market and planned for selling to everybody instead of smaller addressable and realistic markets. This led many survey respondents to misallocate promotion resources, span to Buy influencers: Most founders entered markets not knowing that many people influence buying decisions, and worse yet not learning their clustered motivations. Fulfilling … Continue reading →

Tidal Waves

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Death of the caterpillar is the birth of a butterfly. Someone should mention this to the publishers of every major magazine. Pew Research, the busy bodies constantly reporting on what we people are doing, recently noted that magazine advertising rates are sinking faster than congressional approval ratings. Advertising pages in the top magazines have dropped an average of 18% in the last year, repeating an annual trend that began in 2008, two years before the original iPad was introduced. At this rate magazines will soon pay you to read them in the distant hope that advertisers will care. Every market changes, but some change very fast (the iron ore industry moves a bit more slowly than high tech and publishing). Established franchises can disappear when their markets rapidly change if they fail to see, accept and respond to the change. Microsoft has publicly confessed that they were slow to respond … Continue reading →

Analyze This

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Now is the time to get good at math, you crazy college kids. I was browsing an Accenture report concerning the state of the analytics market, the field where advanced math is applied to business problems. Accenture predicts a dearth of data wizards in the coming decade, which means rapid salary inflations for anyone with education or experience in statistics and research methodologies, and who can apply that knowledge to huge data repositories. Digitally divining new profitability will be in demand for all but the most mundane of industries, which makes a great fit for gigantic multi-national firms with ample budgets. Small players will benefit too, but differently. Like life, markets find a way. In the analytics market we see several common business models. Some vendors provide customized services to help enterprises gather, process and profit from data. Others provide both packaged and client-specific modeling. A few of the brave … Continue reading →

Bad News

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“Sometimes, I think my most important job as a CEO is to listen for bad news. If you don’t act on it, your people will eventually stop bringing bad news to your attention and that is the beginning of the end.” – Bill Gates, former world richest and Microsoft founder Someone should tell Gates that Ballmer is bad news. In Silicon Valley, “IPO” has been replaced by “pivot” as the most popular and over used word. Pivoting is changing the direction or even the product a company offers when it becomes painfully apparent that the original concept isn’t selling. Some pivots are minor, such as retargeting to new segments. Others are major, like when I assisted one post-IPO company transition from being a hardware vendor into a software supplier. Nearly every pivot is instigated by bad news. Something within the product-to-customer pipeline gets stuck, meeting friction or outright resistance. Sometimes … Continue reading →