Author Archive
So you want to be in marketing…
The other day, a friend asked me if I’d look at the resume of the son of one of her friends. He’s a relatively recent - a couple of years out - college grad, who’s been marking time in a dead-end-ish job, taking a few courses, and otherwise doing the type of scratching out a [...]
F-R-E-E that spells free
….credit report dot com, baby.
For the last several months, the freecreditreport.com jingle has been rattling around in my skull, aided an abetted by my niece Caroline, whose skull it has also been rattling around in. (We have started to drive everyone else in the family crazy by egging each other on to sing it. For [...]
B2B Blogs - Not for the faint of heart
Over on B2B Online, Paul Gillen has a brief piece on a recent Forrester Research report (by Laura Ramos) on the drop-off in the number of new corporate B2B blogs, 2007 over 2006. Paul notes the report’s reason why so many B2B blogs fail: they’re treated by marketing as if they’re just another PR vehicle. [...]
Don’t Know Much about History…
Well, that’s not exactly true. I know plenty about history.
And after listening to a webinar replay from a prospective client, I know plenty about their history, too.
What I don’t know is how that history directly connects to the value they provide to their customers. And that’s because they didn’t make the connection for me. (The [...]
One Bad Apple experience…
I’ve been doing a win-loss survey for a client of mine, and we’re offering the lost accounts an incentive to participate - a $25 iTunes card. Because it’s more convenient all-round, I agreed to purchase and expense the cards, and then decided it was more convenient all-round if I purchased virtual gift cards online.
So far, [...]
Waste of Bandwidth e-mail marketing
It doesn’t happen all the time, but occasionally someone who has read one of my blogs - or somehow discovered me somewhere out there - contacts me to request a meeting for some reason or another. I’ve had people who want to talk to me about potential project work, about job searches, about my reviewing [...]
A few lessons from Mad Men
As is so often the case with popular TV shows, I’m a little late to the game, just having started watching Mad Men last week when they began marathoning last year’s episodes in anticipation of the start of the year. For those who haven’t seen it yet, Mad Men is about a fictitious Madison Avenue [...]
Budget-Schmudget: Things to do when the faucet’s turned off
I know, I know.
A recession - or a crypto-recession, or whatever it is we’ve got going on here - is not the time to stop spending on marketing.
But we all know how budgets work, especially marketing budgets, especially in small companies.
A few deals get canceled or pushed out a quarter or two. Cash [...]
Conflict Resolution: How can we be both too expensive and too cheap?
I’m in the midst of a Win-Loss analysis project for a client. Lucky me! It’s one of my favorite things to do, and while I wouldn’t quite do it for free… As always - it’s been really interesting to speak with customers, as well as with the ones who got away.
I focused on the Win [...]
Too many cooks? Just how many folks does it take to make a B2B technology purchase decision
I was looking through an extract from Marketing Sherpa’s Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007-2008, which is already yesterday’s news, since the 2008-2009 edition is now available.
One thing that struck me was their chart on how many people were involved in a technology marketing purchase of over $25K.
For small companies (100-500 employees), the [...]
