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 [...]
A Special Offer
For reasons completely unbeknownst to me, last night while I was catching up on Mad Men, I had this inspiration — so I’m putting this out there (I haven’t yet decided if I’m stupid for doing this). Prior to running conferences, I ran marketing for a startup (Ping Identity). Ping was very successful while I [...]
Age, Technology and Defrag
I’m just off the phone with Buzz Bruggeman of ActiveWords. I’ve known Buzz for some time (he’s one of those ultra-connected guys that always seems to be thinking about edgy things), and I’m very glad to be getting Buzz involved in a discussion topic for Defrag. A few months back, Buzz approached me with this [...]
The Real Seed Of A Startup Is A Need
With all due respect to the genius that is Jessica Hagy and Indexed, the seed of a startup is *NOT* cheap technology, disgruntled workers, and an anemic economy. While that portion of the Venn diagram represents the ideal soil for starting a company, the real seed of a startup is a need. Every successful startup [...]
What Every CMO Needs to Know about Content Strategy
I recently concluded a very detailed study of the most influential technical documentation sites of 2010 to determine what made them influential. What I discovered transcended documentation to include all product and service related content. Today there are companies that using content in strategic ways that are not being discussed for competitive reasons. These companies [...]
SAP Business ByDesign Video – Plain and Simple, Making Fun of …Wow, ERP!
We’re just having an intense internal debate in the Enterprise Irregulars group whether SAP’s Business ByDesign (ByD) is late to the market and what it all means, when hot off the press here’s a promotional video, that’s not so much ByD advertising but a SMB / SME SaaS 101, and a very good one at [...]
Banned BuzzWords and Dilbert
Dennis Howlett just killed 80% of marketing communication by “banning” these buzzwords: Awesome Cloud Cool Game-changing Innovation Revolutionize Social Transformational With these gone, what’s left to write about? Oh, I know, here’s the solution. In the meantime, some fun a’la Dilbert:
What's Your Favorite Position?
Calm Down!!!! Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 5 of Storming the Castle, in which we’re discussing what it takes to create powerful positioning and the first steps for initial market entry. As always comments are more than welcome. We’re onto the fifth major milestone in our customer-centric GTM quest — Initial Market Penetration. But before [...]
Where's the Personalization in the Enterprise Software Buying Experience?
Can someone please point me to all those great personalized B2B web sites? You know the ones… they kinda ask you as you hit the home page who you are, gather some basic demographics/firmographics and then proceed to customize the content experience for you so you’re more likely to find what you need. I [...]
Evolutionary v. Intelligent Design Marketers: Which one are you?
To set the stage… I’m a scientist at heart. Before I got into tech I was working on my PhD in neuroscience. So its with healthy skepticism (a valuable trait in a scientist) that I looked at Intelligent Design – a reformulation of Creationism as the explanation for how we got here and where we [...]
