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By brantcooper, February 27, 2009 8:39 pm

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'»

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By brantcooper, February 17, 2009 9:51 pm

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'»

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By brantcooper, February 11, 2009 7:50 pm

A CEO of a high-tech start-up recently lamented to me:

I was told I needed marketing, so I hired a PR firm and after 6 months and a lot of money, I got nothing.

Paraphrasing, a local venture capitalist admits:

Most CEOs lack marketing skills.  They need marketing help.

Yet his portfolio is dominated by companies without dedicated executive marketers.

According to the uninitiated,
PR = Marketing = Advertising = Branding = Logo + Slogan = Lots of $$ and yet, sales suck.

Both the initiated and the uninitiated think sales suck because so does the web site, and the collateral, and the webinars, and the white papers, and the demo, and there are no leads, and they’re attending the wrong trade shows, and there are neither counterpoints to the competition nor answers to buyer objections, and the product is missing this feature — no that feature — well, really, both features.

Is this really what’s wrong?

In a seminar on venture financing we put on the other night, one of the presenters rightfully stated that the amount of money the entrepreneur is asking for will be important in determining the type of capital investors willing to fund the opportunity. $3M, for example, is often considered to small for many VCs. While true, I’m not sure the entrepreneurs got the point.

Typically, they’ve already decided they want VC money. So they pick the sum of investment based on the type of money and build their plan around that.
Continue reading 'Who "Gets" Marketing?'»

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By brantcooper, February 9, 2009 12:38 pm

A couple of years ago, a colleague and I began developing a process-oriented way to lead companies toward gaining market traction.  The idea was born out of a conversation my colleague had with a partner at Sequoia Capital about how to significantly reduce, if not eliminate, the classic high-burn, low return tactics of typical B2B software start-ups.

So to oversimplify, the classic failure might look like:

1. Build financial model based on revenue and go-to-market assumptions and present to the Board;
2. Develop product;
3. Hire VP of Sales w/ relevant contacts;
4. Build sales plan based on promises to the board;
5. Hire field sales team;
6. Hire marketing person to support sales;
7. Burn cash, miss milestones;
8. Go back to board with new assumptions;
9. Build sales plan based on new promises;
10. Rinse. Repeat.

Continue reading 'Process-Driven Sales and Marketing'»