Author Archives: admin

Complex Customers

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Executive assistants have veto power over multi-million dollar software sales. Complex selling involves a lot of complexity, none more complex than having to deal with many different stakeholders with very different motivations. Once two or more people collaborate on a purchase decision, they raise questions, voice objections, derail progress and drag-out your sales cycle until the Second Coming. Sometimes the lowest caste can kill a sales single handedly. IT techies are the worst in many respects – having been one in a former career, I can attest to their ultimate veto power. Tell an avid Windows admin that you want to install a Linux infrastructure and you’ll meet a wall that howitzers couldn’t knock over. Techies know nothing happens without their expert participation, and they gladly use their veto power to guard their empires. Marketing and sales need to manage the sales cycle, engaging stakeholders at points in time when … Continue reading →

Visualizing Innovation, Value and Brand

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When innovating a market, there are three specific intersections that define your products, your value propositions and your brand. Visualizing these intersections leads to a very clear understanding where to focus your outbound marketing. Our new Silicon Strategies Marketing white paper – – creates the visualization framework you need to communicate within your organization so everyone is clear on how to communicate to the market. Download now and see how intersections between the possible, desirable, needs, differentiations, thoughts and feelings define your brand.

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Marketing Fail

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Marketing jobs have the shelf life of milk. In the tech industry, marketing people move around a lot. Unlike code cutters, their skills can be well used up to the limits of their experience, then they see little incremental improvement from their activities. Seeing the end of a good run, they look for other companies – smaller in size, with new products, or just something exciting. Other times they get fired. Marketing can fail. What confounds many in management is which part of marketing failed and why. Marketing is both strategy and execution, and are typically carried-out by different people or teams. When sales are slow, management wants to know why and occasionally even marketing cannot (or will not) clearly identify what is not working. Obfuscating marketing malfunctions has become more difficult in the digital age because we can measure what is and is not succeeding, at least at the … Continue reading →

Disruption Risk

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Disrupting risk is a key element to disrupting markets, the national pastime here in Silicon Valley. Attend any VC pitch event, and the word “disruption” is tossed about as lightly as conjunctions, though few people truly understand what disruption is. Classically defined, disruption means “to destroy the normal continuance or unity.” Not cause a bump, waver or undulation, but to completely alter what has been. One good entrepreneurial practice is to look for stagnant industries, ones that have not materially changed for ages, and then figure out what customers what to change. Circuit City started that way, by examining what people hated about the consumer electronics industry and then engineering it out of their stores (an advantage management wizzed away out of competitive fear). Risk is an often overlooked element in creating disruption. Humans are risk managers. Perceived risk motivates action (and inaction). This is why politicians use the Lie … Continue reading →

Pointed Communications

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A relative of mine tells her stories … for hours … before ending them with her point. Good thing she isn’t in marketing. Get to the point quickly, then fill in the gaps. I was recently reminded of this while being a judge for the CODiE awards. I think I’m in my 573rd year of being a CODiE judge. The contestant’s presenter launched into a live demo of the product without summarizing what the product did much less its key value propositions. Thankfully he skipped the all-too-common dozen or so slides providing background about the company and other snore generators. He was like my relative, all too eager to tell his story as opposed to telling me why I should care. With attention spans shrinking fast as content explodes, getting to the point becomes ever more important. Telling people why they should care up front causes them to care. When … Continue reading →

Behaving

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My favorite stolen line is that you should never allow customers to engage in unsupervised thinking. As marketers, we are tasked with encouraging specific customer behaviors. Some of these behaviors are rationally based, such as buying software with a known minimal return on investment. Others are completely emotional, such as Volvo suggesting that you are less likely to die a violent automotive death in their cars. Each is designed to get customers to take a specific action, and in complex business-to-business (B2B) sales, this may be a long series of tiny behaviors involving many stakeholders. Unsupervised customers behave as well as unsupervised children. Amazon is in the retail business, not the technology business (that is if you ignore their Elastic Compute Cloud offering). Thus they encourage consumer buying habits. One consumer behavior they need to control is to not allow customers to shop elsewhere – putting Amazon products in customer … Continue reading →

Wrong Research

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The two biggest wastes of market research money are performing the wrong research, then performing research wrong. Market research doesn’t have to be expensive. Yet not performing research is more expensive because it leads to bad strategic business decisions, inappropriate campaign tactics, and your sales team compensating for poor marketing results via buying three martinis for every prospect they take to lunch. Given that everyone has to do market research, they most often waste their research budget studying the wrong thing, and then studying it incorrectly (or, upon occasion studying the right topic the wrong way). In either case it is pure waste – money spent for no meaningful result or, worse yet, guiding a company down the long, dark road to bankruptcy. Performing the wrong research comes in two flavors. First is the natural bias every human carries with them, seeing the world through their personal frame of reference. … Continue reading →