sales
Sales and marketing: why can’t we all just get along?
I had dinner the other night with an old friend and colleague. At present, she’s the virtual VP of marketing at a start up, and is butting heads with the actual VP of sales.
Nothing we haven’t seen before, I’m afraid. (If prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, then the world’s oldest intra-company battle has got [...]
Be nice to me today: I gave blood to get this rebate
As I do pretty regularly, I gave blood last week. Twice, actually.
The first time was with the American Red Cross, for which I received thanks, a bottle of water, a bottle of juice, a small bag of raisins, and a packet of Oreos.
The second time was pulling together the documentation required to get a [...]
What’s in Your Sales Guide?
I just finished up an interesting project for a client: a sales guide for a new product area for them. It’s been a while since I worked on a sales guide, and I had a really good time with it. So what went into it?
Background information: The product area is relatively new, and has just [...]
When asked a question, answering it is helpful
Mario Sanchez of Shoestring Branding relates a classic car-buying tale: car dealers that won’t answer questions. Even when the question is, “I want to buy a car now. Do you have this, and how much is it?” How many businesses would kill to have someone just email them and say, “I want one, let’s make [...]
Microsoft’s customer caricatures, for all the world to watch
By now everybody has seen the painful Microsoft sales “motivation” video about Vista SP1. Like most of these kinds of corporate videos, it’s hard to imagine provoking a response in its intended viewer other than a general feeling of malaise because one’s life has led to this moment. (If you haven’t seen it, go here [...]
You Can’t Handle Sales
Busy in upstate New York meeting with my fellow opinionated marketers this week, so I’ll just offer you this video, which anybody who’s spent time with salespeople should appreciate:
Helping shorten the sales cycle
I have a client with a relatively high cost, enterprise level software product - and the usual attendant lllloooooonnnngggg sales cycle. I’ve lived through this before, and every time I end up scratching my head and asking myself just what marketing can do to help shorten the sales cycle.
Sometimes these things just have to run [...]
Pragmatic Marketing Rule #6
This post is the sixth in a series inspired by Pragmatic Marketing’s 20 Rules of Product Management rules for technology marketing.
RULE #6: Product management should help sales channels, not individual sales people.
Obviously, when you’re developing market approaches and sales tools, you’re product and company will be best served by your focusing on those that can be widely [...]
