As I mentioned before, non-marketing people tend to view marketing as this expensive, monolithic necessary evil, dominated by wasteful “Madison Ave” style marketing, i.e., advertisements, logos and slogans.
In a nutshell, Marketing=PR=Ads=Marcom=Branding.
This is far from the truth. Understanding the basics of marketing and whom to hire for marketing help, is critical for CEOs and technologists to understand.
The key thing to understand is that the type of marketing is highly dependent on Who you are, Who your customers are, and What stage your business is in. Here’s a quick and dirty primer:
Continue reading 'Marketing for Technologists'»
I have a great opportunity to test out some theories and to follow the principles advocated by the likes of Eric Ries, Andrew Chen, Sean O’Malley, Dave McClure and Sean Ellis. I thought I’d keep a running blog on our progress.
I won’t name the company until the time is right, but I’ll tell you a little about it:
- Company is self-funded. This is a good thing. Not only is it a bad time to seek funding, it’s a great time to prove the business model prior to funding.
- Product is barely started. This is a good thing, as well. This should enable us to run customer development principles in parallel with development. The days of figuring out who your customers are after product completion (often after funding) hopefully will soon be over.
- Team of 3: vision guy, domain expert and business development (CEO); developer; marketing guy (me, FWIW).
- Business plan assumes a Freemium model, with additional revenue from highly targeted advertising, lead selling, and a la carte purchases.
Week 1 Tasks:
- Document Business Hypotheses – market segment, customers, pain, acquisition methods, etc.
- Identify 100 potential users to interview.
- Identify 50 potential partners to interview.
- Create interview process and objectives.
- Create MRD based on “vision.”
- Identify key metrics for proving model.
- Prepare blog launch using company domain.
Comments welcome
As with most marketing terms, the phrase “market segment” is often tossed about carelessly by entrepreneurs, technologists, and yes, even by some marketers. To my mind, however, segments are a cornerstone of market-driven business plans. Market segments are fundamental to a process-oriented view of taking technology to market and building business plans from the “bottom up.”
In 1991, Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm defined a market segment as:
- a set of actual or potential customers
- for a given set of products or services
- who have a common set of needs or wants, and
- who reference each other when making a buying decision.
Most of this is pretty intuitive. In a nutshell, a market segment is comprised of like buyers who share the same pain. But there’s more to it. The reference part trips some people up. The key point to understand is that the customers and potential buyers must be willing AND able to reference each other.
So, for example,
Continue reading 'Market Segments'»
I just got off a webinar about lead gen in today’s economic environment. I was pleased to see several process-oriented and metrics driven marketing recommendations, including:
- need to be revenue focused, rather than # of leads focused;
- marketing taking greater responsibility for pipeline management;
- measuring, testing, refining every step of way through pipeline;
- identified information and activity overload problem;
A few key points still missing, IMHO.
First, in today’s environment, business needs to be profits-focused, not just revenue-focused. This is a critical distinction. An expensive advertising campaign may add more leads to your pipeline, some of whom eventually buy. You’ve increased revenue, but hurt the short-term bottom line. (Arguably there may be longer-term benefits from raising “awareness” through advertising.)
Second, this may just be a language thing, but I’m guessing not. Marketing and sales professionals continue to talk about the “sales process,” e.g., the necessity to create activities and produce collateral that “nurture” customers through the sales cycle. Despite the fact that this webinar correctly identified information overload as a problem, the end recommendations still pushed for “getting all the information the sales team needs into their hands.” Step back! This is classic reactive marketing and emblematic of VP of Sales (& Marketing) driven marketing.
Key question to ask: what is the buyer’s process.
Third, “who is the prospect” was asked at the end of the webinar, when it should have been slide 1. Even if your company was able to handle multiple segments before the economy tanked, you need to reassess to determine what are your profitable segments now. See point 1.
Comments welcome.
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Themocracy