Category Archives: Marketing Strategy

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 →

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 →

Apple Worms

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Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but it is also the cheapest form of revenue. Apple has devolved from being a generator of disruptive innovations to instigator of imitations. This week’s iOS 7 preview is meeting with weird-not-rave reviews noting that the mobile operating system borrows design elements from Microsoft Vista and Google’s Android. The big hype is that the UI design is completely overhauled, meaning that Apple is now copying Microsoft’s mode of destroying what people have become accustomed to using, and by jettisoning that investment may also jettison customers. One commenter rudely said: “Say what you want about Apple products, but at least they always had their own vibe. The new update eliminates that. Now, iPhones and iPads will look like more expensive versions of their Android cousins. That green felt and wood aesthetic that Apple was so excited to discard at least allowed Apple to … Continue reading →

Sales Quality

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A sales manager asked me to suspend marketing for a couple of months because he could not keep-up with in-bound leads, ones which were achieving an 80% win/loss rate. Peter Drucker must have been smiling from above, for I had fulfilled his mandate, that “The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.” Salesmen/women want to sell. When marketing strategy is well developed, it generates highly-qualified leads and biases prospects before they start researching alternatives. Give a salesman an unqualified lead and I’ll show you a salesman who will never buy you a beer. Give a salesman a lead so well qualified that the customer sells himself, and that same salesman will ask you to be his kid’s godparent. Much of the legendary marketing/sales friction comes from marketing abandoning quality for quantity. Some marketers want to generate a large volume of leads (which makes them look effective) and have salespeople … Continue reading →

Pricing Pugilism

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I once raised the price of a product as more competitors entered our market and they were lowering their prices. My boss looked at me as if something were growing out of my head. The COO publicly second-guessed my decision for a year. Our competitors made it a selling point. Yet our top-line revenues rose, unit sales increased, and we drove two top competitors out of our market segments and one into bankruptcy. Pricing is mainly science, but it requires a bit of black art. Measuring the market and triangulating the three major pricing perspectives is essential to ballparking product pricing. But in ever shifting markets and especially in those where there are both young and mature players, pricing also requires thinking beyond mechanical elements and entering the mind of the market itself. While composing a customer satisfaction survey, I decided to add a pricing measurement. I did so mainly … Continue reading →