Category Archives: Management

Observations on managing of technology companies

Survey Sadism

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I was abused for want of a smoothie. I have recently habituated Jamba Juice, a now sprawling franchise that started SLO (San Luis Obispo). In a well-intended effort to assure satisfaction, they randomly offer customers the opportunity to get two smoothies for the price of one if they complete an online survey. Nice approach, and I was willing to participate given that I perform a lot of market research via surveys and understand the benefits. Willing that is until I hit the second screen. After passing the first page of questions, their survey software politely announced that I was 3% done – I had a long road still ahead. I continued, mainly to see how long and horrible their survey instrument might be and did not find out for another five minutes. Avoiding critiques about some survey mechanics (there were flaws), I can safely say the survey was far too … Continue reading →

Cunning Codgers

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It is an old adage, normally spoken by old people, but true none the less. Old age and cunning will overcome youth and enthusiasm every time. I was recently reminded of this when the subject of Silicon Valley age discrimination erupted at a lunch meeting (some grumpy old man at the table had a lot to say about it). Anyone who denies that older people in general, and older marketers in particular are discriminated against in Silicon Valley has not been paying attention. Even the a-little-too-hip-for-their-own-good San Francisco Chronicle has covered the story. Old dogs are not allowed to hunt in Silicon Valley. Which is a shame because acquired cunning is more valuable than youthful enthusiasm. Marketing is a science, and as such can be very precise. Marketing spend and capital burn rates are minimized, and market outreach is maximized with precision. Yet Silicon Valley has a never ending desire … 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 →

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 →

Homicidal Salesmen

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Great leads keep sales people from poisoning your morning coffee. A set of recent surveys show that marketing folks are split in their lead generation intensions and how they measure campaign success. Approximately 50% of aggregated respondents use lead quality and quantity to gauge campaign effectiveness while 70% claim their content marketing efforts are all about generating a large quantity of leads. In other words, their actions and their measurement means are not aligned. This exposes an enduring truth about marketing and the divide between them and potential sales assassins. Some marketers think their job is to send as many leads to the sales team as possible, then let salesmen sort out the good from the bad from the oh so very ugly. This is way some sales people are two steps away from becoming serial killers, because they are overworked in the sorting processes and earning less per unit … Continue reading →

Stop Researching

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“Researching to 100% assuredness is 100% stupid,” surmised a wise old marketer. Marketing research is essential, but so is action. Perfect knowledge is impossible in the same way as constantly moving one half of the remaining distance toward an object. At some point you have to stop researching because diminishing rates of risk reduction make no since given the cost of research and the costs of delay. But like many alcoholics, knowing when enough-is-enough is clouded by your direct participation. One way to triangulate when to quit researching is to pair the costs of too much research verses too little. We all do this informally, but two problems evolve from hipshot restraint. First is that everybody has a different perception of risk based on their perspective. Start-up entrepreneurs are likely to short research in order to get to market quickly – to obtain first mover advantage. They will override the … Continue reading →