Edgy Marketing: Great Plains Guy vs NetSuite Guy (Mac vs PC)
Since I’ve shared with you a video making fun of the Suites it’s only fair to show how a “suite”, NetSuite makes fun of competitors. Oh, I love edgy marketing:-) But this is nothing.. wait till they publish the SAP vs NetSuite video we’ve just seen at the SuiteCloud conference (And I can’t wait for [...]
Journeymen, Mavericks & Superstars: Understanding Salespeople at Startups
Most technology startups seem to be founded by three types of people: product managers, engineers or biz dev types (MBAs and the like). Very few of them are started, in my experience, by sales people and very few early stage companies really understand sales. That’s why I started the Sales & Marketing Series and at [...]
6 Tips for Building Relationships with Journalists
File this under both Startup Adivce and Sales & Marketing Advice. I was over at Robert Scoble’s blog Sunday night reading about the “Death of the Great Startup Launch.” I’m not 100% sure that I understood his core thesis but I *think* it was that startup events such as Demo force such a zone of secrecy [...]
Twitter is 4 today
A few months back on the 19th of November 2009 NESTA, as part of their Silicon Valley comes to the UK sequence of events, televised a discussion called “Social Media: A Force for Good?“. The panel was our very own national treasure, actor, QI master and twitterphile Stephen Fry, Biz Stone the Founder and Chief [...]
Should You Blog? (yes, and here’s how …)
I guess let’s file this under sales & marketing advice. I recently wrote a piece for Mashable on how to create a company blog. Since it’s already written (and since I promised not to republish on my blog other than a summary) if you’re interested please have a read over there. I have a very [...]
Under the Radar: Commercializing the Cloud – Apply to Present / Discount Tix Here
Under the Radar is Silicon Valley’s most established startup debut platform: a conference series organized by Dealmaker Media, covering business applications, social media, entertainment, mobility..etc. This year’s conference in Mountain View, CA on April 16th will focus on Commercializing the Cloud – that’s a fairly wide definition, and one that perfectly mashes with our focus [...]
Making The Most out of Sitting on Panels
Many of us in the technology, media and VC world sit on panels at lot. Many of them are painfully boring. It’s a shame since it’s such a golden opportunity for you to build awareness with your audience for who you are and what you do. And it’s a surprisingly great way to meet people [...]
Is the Cloud term an asset or just marketing hype?
A few things came together for me this week around the Cloud term. I spent time with one of my best customers discussing online accounting, what we should do to improve the product we represent in the UK, and how we should position to beat the incumbent in the small business market, Sage. But the [...]
The Fallacy of Channels: Startups Beware
This is part of my ongoing series on startup advice but also filed under my sales & marketing posts. No advice I give will ever apply to 100% of companies, 100% of startups or even 100% of tech startups. I just want to state that up front because while I believe that this post will [...]
ScanCafe: Great Service, Lousy Spam
That’s yours truly on the left in full glory, albeit a bit scared at a photographer’s studio. Why black-and-white, you may ask? Well, there was no color photography back in 19xx (date censured). This formerly black-and-white photo has turned sepia, but that may just be acceptable over 4 decades (oops, I let it slip out), [...]
In Search of the Obvious – cutting through the marketing mess
When I first tweeted that Jack Trout‘s new book “In Search of the Obvious” had arrived from Amazon, my mate @euan suggested his (excellent) blog is actually easy to find. He called it “The Obvious” because when he started writing about the application of new technology and social media in organizations, he felt that, actually, [...]
The Danger of Crocodile Sales
This is part of my series on Startup Advice. When I worked in London there were a ton of Aussies. I love working with Aussies because their outlook on life seems very similar to what I grew up with in California. Pretty laid back and non-hierarchic. I also loved learning all of their sayings. My [...]
Successful presentations? – go back to basics
Some of us of a certain age come from a time when presentations weren’t created directly on the PC (or Mac) with PowerPoint (or Keynote), or with cool new online tools like Prezi. Back then before laptop PCs and low cost flash drives, if there was plenty of money in the marketing budget, and the [...]
Does a picture paint a thousand words?
I’ve been spending a lot of time in the last few weeks thinking about the basics of presentations combined with how you get the positioning and messaging for your product right. To help I’ve been reading Jack Trout‘s In Search of the Obvious, a marketing book which is all about making sure you focus your [...]
Will Zoho Conquer the SMB 2.0 Market?
(See the Editor’s note at the bottom)Online presentations, spreadsheets, word processing, CRM, project management, recruiting, invoicing, human resource tools — WOW! Zoho has it all. Naturally then I wanted to discuss the future of Zoho with Raju Vegesna (Chief Evangelist) as it relates to Enterprise 2.0. It turns out not much – but not for [...]
