Author Archives: admin

Break Down

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I spent last Friday coaching a well funded start-up on the fundamentals of market segmentation. Yes, in Silicon Valley you can still romance venture capitalists without a complete go-to-market strategy. Segmentation is the second most fundamental marketing strategy activity, and one that founders rarely contemplate while running headlong into a market. Granted, between technology vision and early adopter myopia, there is little reason to segment market in the earliest phases of corporate life. But go beyond the early days and quick sales to innovators and early adopters and you will see a company flounder as sales slow and individuals attempt selling to anyone. Since new products don’t fill anybody’s whole product definition, selling to everyone means selling to almost no one. Next comes an entry in the dead pool. Founders tend not to segment for several reasons, none of which are rational: Ignorance: Some founders don’t know what market segmentation … Continue reading →

Emotion Promotion

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Even heartless people have emotions. Well, perhaps not politicians, but people to who you sell products do. Even battle-hardened CTOs have emotions that can be leveraged to market your wares. Identifying and correctly touching those emotions is a tricky process and one that can backfire fatally if you choose wrong. It is the difference between smiling at the pretty girl at the end of the bar and stalking her … two different emotional responses producing either romance or incarceration. Silicon Strategies Marketing’s most popular white paper is “Selling Empathy – the power of positioning and branding.” In it we discuss how emotions work in marketing technology products to IT people, and how emotional drivers should become part of your brand. Every human brain, aside from those in drug addicts and congressmen, has left and right hemispheres that process all we know about the world around us. Emotions swirling in the … Continue reading →

Integrated Biased

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We’re all biased, even those who allegedly are not. We come by it innocently enough because our biases were taught to us. Some we picked up listening to our parents. Weaker minds are warped by politicians and pundits. Instincts are actionable biases learned through Darwinian selection. Brand marketing’s primary job is to teach bias to buyers and cause customers to favor one brand over others. But then again, I’m a little biased on the subject. Stripped of fluffy pseudo-psych speech, biasing is a Maslow tool, designed primarily to avoid risk and in more rare cases obtain self actualization or esteem.  Marketing’s job is to determine which direction (safety or self) will motivate buyers and then teach customers their newfound bias. Apple is masterful at instilling self-esteem bias in gadget buyers. IBM remains very good at selling safety bias to CIOs. Donald Trump is biased about his ego, and that manages … Continue reading →

Trust Me

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Trust me, I’m in marketing. If that line made your skin crawl, then you experienced an important aspect of marketing, namely a lack of trust (even Seth Godin noted an inherent instinct to distrust marketers). Where trust is lacking, so are sales. Mistrust prevents people from taking promotions, products and sales people seriously. It is an ancient survival mechanism adapted for modern ages. (Mis)trust involves balancing risk and rewards. For example, locales where gun ownership is low tend to have higher burglary rates, which demonstrates that even the dumbest of criminals weigh risk and rewards. If risk is low, humans will accept nearly any reward. Where there is any risk, escalating degrees of mistrust develop. You may hesitate a second before spending a dollar on a soda brand you have never tasted, but you’ll hesitate forever when encountering a pushy car salesman who guides you directly toward $70,000 Escalade when … Continue reading →

Founder Delusions

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“Can you help us break past our plateau?” was what the tech company founder asked me … the first time. This eventually became an enjoyable question after a decade of marketing consulting. Every so often, a founder calls the Silicon Strategies Marketing offices with a plateau complaint. I noticed various patterns with one uniting theme; that founders were all nearsighted and unable to focus on anything but the tree directly in front of them. Those different founders were at different points in corporate growth, and yet they all suffered from market myopia. If your revenues are stuck and no amount of money seems to move them higher, then ask yourself if you might suffer from one of these founder delusions. Primary Founders Delusion — the untested idea: Most tech products come from a founder identifying a feature or product niche through their insights into technology and some aspect of business … Continue reading →

Biasing Buyers

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The oddest request I ever received from the head of a sales organization was “Can you stop promoting the product for a couple of months?” It was an old company with a new product that had gone nowhere before I took the reigns of their marketing department. I established a strategy that relied on precise market segmentation, focusing on the top two segments, then making buyers and strategic partners believe we were the only serious product in the market. Sales jumped 26% in the first year, we chased two competitors completely out of our target segments, and had a sales close rate above 80%. The poor sales folks couldn’t keep up with incoming calls. The strategy was to bias the opinions of buyers. This required them believing that we not only cured the generic problem (which our competitors did too) but we also cured the buyers personal job-related problem (in … Continue reading →

Suffering Surveys

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I thought my client had stopped breathing. We were going over elements of a large-scale survey he wanted Silicon Strategies Marketing to do for them. The mechanics were fine, the methodology was agreeable, and the timelines were A-OK. But when the cost to incentivize respondents was presented, I momentarily mistook his slacked jaw expression as a sign of a cerebral stroke. He quickly reached into his desk draw, took a slug from a flask, then asked if the incentive amount was a typographical error. The benefit behind primary research is that it delivers precise answers about your market. Surveying remains the best way to build quantified business cases and MRD‘s. However, surveying on the cheap produces unreliable results, and surveying in some ways is getting more expensive by the minute. The basic problem is that unless the subject matter of a survey really excites people, they would rather not invest … Continue reading →