B2B and Social – selling ice-cream in the desert?
Lately I see a lot of “news” on B2B from a place I wouldn’t expect: Social. In my opinion Social and B2B have absolutely no business with each other (see my freeBook on Social Business) Joshua Paul is my superhero of the day here, with an utter nonsense post titled 10 Secrets of the B2B [...]
Why Online / Offline Mobile Integration is Going to be a Huge Business
“People still want calls.” When I first got into VC I decided I better have some investment themes. My macro theme was “great entrepreneurs” who mapped to my belief system about the kind of entrepreneurs I wanted to work with. My background was 8 years of telecoms & mobile and 8 years of cloud computing [...]
The (ERP) Shootout That Isn’t.
<rant> We’ve often discussed SaaS Suites, ERP, specific vendors like SAP and Netsuite, so seeing this tweet by SAP a good month ago of course piqued my curiosity: @SAPByDesign RT @VendorShootout: Business #ByDesign: The Most Complete,Adaptable OnDemand Business Solution http://spr.ly/6019RH4S #erp <-reg 2 download Wow. It looks like SAP’s SaaS offering, Business ByDesign won some [...]
10 Marketing Lessons for Early-Stage Tech Startups
I made every textbook mistake at my first startup, which is why I believe I was much more effective at my second one. I have adopted the motto “good judgment comes from experience, but experience comes from bad judgment.“ We need to learn from doing, by trial-and-error. If I can help you avoid some [...]
The Blurry B2B Buying Process | New Breed of B2B Buyer #2
The new breed of B2B buyer remains elusive throughout the B2B buying process, blurring in and out of focus and engaging directly with sales only when there is clear value to be gained.
RIP: Ubuntu ShipIT
Canonical (previous CloudAve coverage), the commercial company behind Ubuntu Linux Distro, yesterday announced that they are ending the ShipIT program. ShipIT was a hugely successful marketing attempt by Canonical where they shipped Ubuntu Linux to any place in the world for free. In fact, I would even claim that this program is partly responsible for [...]
What Every Entrepreneur Could Learn from Justin Bieber
This article originally appeared on TechCrunch. I know what you’re thinking – link bait title, right? Wrong. I will stand 100% behind my assertions in this post. Justin Bieber is unbelievably entrepreneurial and most of you will never know it because he serves a target demo that doesn’t include you. I promise you can [...]
Sales 2.0: The Swiss Army Knife Needs to be Expanded
Normally I leave the sales punditry to those trying to sell telemarketing services or the next greatest sales methodology. At times these sales to Sales pitches feel like the latest management fads I so often witnessed while working at A.T. Kearney. But occasionally a “sales” strategy” article motivates me to act. As he often does, [...]
Startup Sales – Why Hiring Seasoned Reps May Not Work
A while back I wrote a bunch of posts on Sales & Marketing and have been meaning to get back to that theme for a while. Even if you don’t have “direct” sales I would tell you that “everything is a sale” including fund raising, hiring, getting press and doing business development. So I hope [...]
Who Says Enterprise Software Isn’t Sexy? Ok, Just Cool…
Or at least customers using SAP are making cool things…
NetSuite Fights Hairball Epidemic with New Release and Edgy Marketing Campaign
NetSuite’s marketing team has been known for their edginess, starting from pranks like the SAP for the Rest of Us Party during SAP’s annual conference to staging a shootout at the anti-SAP Conference or releasing edgy videos a’la Mac vs. Windows. Today they are doing it again, by establishing the Hairball Institute for Business: (The [...]
Getting Past Passive
Okay, this is a bit of a rant, but here goes… I was reading this article this morning, and one sentence stood out: “Peter Drucker once said that ‘the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.’” The purpose of a business is to *create* a customer. As in actively bring to [...]
SaaS Product Marketing – Upgrade and Upsell Strategy
I think it would be hard to overemphasize the importance of upgrades and upsells in SaaS product marketing. In an industry where free trials, freemium versions, bargain basement subscription prices and simply hoping to recover customer acquisition cost with first year revenue are the norm, few things are sweeter than a customer that actually [...]
Is Social Media Marketing A Crock?
I recently had the pleasure of attending a dinner for startup VPs of Marketing. I had a great time chatting with peers and laughing about the unrealistic demands we all face. “Get me in the Journal and fill the pipeline–but don’t spend any money.”The …
Free Webinar on the Business of Being Social and Why You Should Care
I’ve been a fan of blueKiwi for a little while now. For those of you not familiar blueKiwi, they are a social business software company which allows customers, partners, and employees to effectively collaborate with one another. I believe they have a very interesting vision for both customer and employee engagement and they are executing on that [...]
