sales

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 [...]