Why Your Marketing Campaign Sucks
Creating awareness for your brand and products is one of the lifebloods of technology startups yet in a world where so many companies are being created it becomes difficult to rise above the noise. Ever notice how some companies tend to be in the press all the time and your big new product launch struggled [...]
CxO Talk episode 1: Guy Kawasaki on influence for APEs
CxO Talk, my new talk show with co-host Vala Afshar, debuted with a conversation on marketing and influence with author and investor Guy Kawasaki. Guy’s most recent book, titled APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur, is a practical handbook for self-publishing a book and using social media to get the word out and sell copies. CxO Talk is [...]
The Law of Attach Rates, And Why Partners Can’t Really Move the Needle For You (Directly)
I want to spend a little time on some learnings about Strategic Partners in SaaS. First, let me be clear — to make it in SaaS, you’re probably going to need to achieve real success with Strategic Partners. Because it takes a Village. And because your partners will likely, through integrations in particular, make your [...]
A Little Less About Pricing. A Little More About Deal Size. Please.
It’s not that this is rocket science. It isn’t. But if you haven’t lived it, understand that Deal Size is the single most important factor in your SaaS business model. Because it will completely define how you do sales and marketing, and to a just somewhat lesser extent, prioritize feature development and product/engineering.
rPath Press Release: False Promise of PaaS and Impact on Businesses
To add context to the discussion and why I perceive rPath’s use of the term PaaS is actually a misuse of the term, I am posting a press release I got from them on May 9th 2012 with the above title and the content below. ################################################################## Is PaaS (Platform as a Service) an all-encompassing solution [...]
Two Years Of OpenStack: Looking From The Other Side
Yesterday I wrote a post about OpenStack and talked about the concerns among the developers that there is too much emphasis given to marketing than engineering. Yesterday, we publicly came to know about how OpenStack developers from the original Anso Labs team are quitting Rackspace to Nebula, it raises some troubling questions. OpenStackers dismiss this [...]
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 [...]
