Category Archives: Product Marketing

Bad News

Posted on by

“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 In Silicon Valley, “IPO” has been replaced by “pivot” as the most popular and over used word.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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

“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 →

Sales Quality

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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 →

Buzz Kill

Posted on by

Two cynical definitions of language neatly describe many marketing communications: The music with which we charm the serpents guarding another’s treasure … and The source of misunderstandings. Marketing’s job is to charm people out of their money, preferably by articulating the true value of necessary products. Yet many marketing managers slip straight to snake oil salesmanship and leverage a ton of text and bunkers filled with buzzwords to attempt recruiting prospects. Misuse of language is a chief cause of unhappy customers and board members. The first task in marketing communications is to promote value. Here at Silicon Strategies Marketing, we defined (copyright alert) value as “the intersection of need and differentiation.” Value intersections tend to be precise, and the language used to describe a particular value must be as well. Generalized and buzzword-heavy statements like “the most cost-effective, easy-to-use, and universally accessible” detract from precise value articulation. The results are … Continue reading →

Wanting Needs

Posted on by

No marketing person has ever created a “need.” It is an enduring myth that marketing creates needs, which in a moment you will see is simply impossible. Many marketers have found other careers after beating their heads against the wall that separates “need” from “want”, and marketing products in exactly the wrong way. This flat forehead syndrome exists because of myth alone, and it is time to slay it. Needs are preexisting conditions. As Maslow so painfully noted, there is a stacked list of needs. Yet Maslow was mistaken about the definition of “need” himself, for as you ascend his pyramid, his “needs” become aspirations. Maslow may have maladjusted marketers by creating a false sense of what a need is. Food, water, shelter are personal needs. Accounting and inventory are corporate needs. “Wants” are a different subject. When new products are created, they are never “needs” at first and thus … Continue reading →