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Groupon Wants You To Punish Derrick

January 8, 2012 By

During the holidays, I went through my inbox and unsubscribed from the many vendors that over the last 12 months have continuously sent me offers with little to no value. The process to unsubscribe is usually pretty straightforward and uneventful.

Then came Groupon with this short video:

Needless to say that I did punish Derrick (it’s not you Derrick, it’s me).

The simple addition of this video actually got me to re-consider whether or not I should unsubscribe from Groupon. Well just for a few seconds.

Seriously how many more white teeth cleaning offers can I consume within a year?

Anyhow, this is a great example showing how  you can make a boring experience interesting. I would love to hear some other great examples that you’ve come come across.

Filed Under: Product Marketing Tagged With: ,

Fab 5 Product Marketing Blogs (2012 Edition)

January 2, 2012 By


Last year, I published a list of my favorite sources for Product Marketing content and inspiration. The Fab 5 Product Marketing Blogs became one of the most viewed and commented post on this site in 2011.

As we start 2012, I thought I should highlight a few more bloggers and experts that have greatly influenced me in the last 12 months. Some might surprised you as they would probably not even consider themselves as Product Marketing experts. However they do cover topics such as buyer personas and sales enablement that are critical in today’s product marketing realm.

Congratulations to the 2012 Fab 5 Product Marketing Blogs winners:

  • Toni Zambito – Toni is an expert on buyer persona and his series on “the buyer trends that will influence marketing and sales in the near and foreseeable future” is without doubt the best and most influential write up that I have come across in the last 12 months. As product marketers we should always plan with the end in mind (the purchasing transaction) and map our marketing strategy and sales initiatives around our customer’s buying journey.
  • Tamara Shenk – A new comer on the blogger scene, I first encountered Tamara at the 2011 Forrester Sales Enablement conference in San Francisco where she talked about the need to “not just enable sales people but the entire buying system”. A VP at T-Systems, Tamara is a thought leader on one of the most under valued and yet critical function of the product marketing role. I strongly encourage you to read her thoughts on the sales enablement biggest challenges as well as her insightful perspectives for 2012.
  • Giles Farrow – A product marketing consultant focused on software marketing, Giles is to product marketing what John Gatrell is to product management. He is doing an excellent job at sourcing and sharing some of the best write up on product marketing and marketing topics. Giles has also written a very insightful series on software product marketing that works and he regularly comments on other product marketing experts blog posts.
  • Josh Duncan – Josh is a prolific product marketing blogger, and storyteller, whose passion for the field of product marketing is unparalleled (disclaimer: Josh & I are co-blogging on this site). I am particularly a big fan of his simple yet powerful examples as a result of a family trip to the garden center or a read from the many blogs (and books) he digests on his Kindle every week. Josh is also the host of the insightful Product Marketing Podcast series covering a wide range of topic from product marketing to product management.

Ultimately your list of favorite blogs and bloggers will differ based on 1) what you want to learn about 2) those who will help you to make a difference in your job, and 3) the writing style of the authors

I am always looking for more inspiration so …  who is on your Fab 5 list for 2012?

Image Credit:  Creativity103

Filed Under: Product Marketing Tagged With: , , ,

Zucco’s Equation for Marketing Success

October 27, 2011 By

Earlier this year at our annual user conference, our CEO introduced a simple but very effective framework that he constantly uses to assess new opportunities and lead our company. He calls it Zucco’s Equation for Strategic Success:

  • W2A: Where we are
  • W3TG: Where we want to go
  • HW(GT)2: How are we going to get there

As I sat through his presentation, I realized how important this equation is for us marketers as is it to our executive teams. Too often we lose track of the big picture, spending all of our energy on the very tactical elements of our marketing plans.

Zucco’s Law is very easy way to take a step back and re-assess if your marketing efforts are still in line with the overall strategy. Most importantly it gives you an opportunity for course correction as specified in the 4th rule of Zucco’s Equation for Strategic Success:

  • EA3: Enable, adjust, adjust, adjust

We live in a world where we can no longer rely on yearly plans, let alone bi-annual plans. As new opportunities come up, we need to learn from what works and adjust our programs in real-time yet without losing focus on the big picture.

What’s your secret for marketing success?

Image Credit:  Erik Charlton

Filed Under: Product Management Tagged With:

What is Product Marketing?

October 24, 2011 By

What is product marketing In his new blog purposely titled “What is Product Marketing“, Diego Lomanto is doing a great job at defining the role  and responsibilities of product marketing in the enterprise software world:

“Product marketing is the function within a technology company that focuses on the strategies and tactics that are associated with marketing products including: market segmentation, product strategy, positioning, sales enablement, driving awareness, assisting buyer informational needs, competitive positioning, deal assistance and post-launch interaction with customers”

Like April Dunford, who wrote a similar blog post last year on How do CMOs Define Product Marketing, Diego is offering a framework for those looking for a better answer than the wikipedia definition.

I applaud both April and Diego for their effort at clarifying and promoting the critical role of product marketing in today’s world. Their frameworks are providing a strong foundational basis and should be reviewed, adapted and embraced by every software vendor.

I am also hoping that the upcoming book on the 42 Rules of Product Marketing, based on the successful 42 Rules of Product Management and 42 Rules of Marketing series, will help shed a new light on the rising discipline of product marketing. I was honored to be asked by the 280 Group to contribute to this new book and I look forward to sharing with you my perspectives and product marketing philosophy in an upcoming blog post.

Image Credit:  Oberazzi

Filed Under: favs, Product Marketing Tagged With: , ,

What Kind Of Social Expert Are You?

September 12, 2011 By

Last month I was lucky to attend ProductCamp Austin 7 (#pcatx) and present a session on “Social Marketing in B2B World: Reality vs. Myth”

The key message that I wanted to communicate is that social media and social marketing are two different things.

Social media experts (at least the ones that I have encountered) tend to take a tool-centric approach focused on building an army of twitter followers and Facebook fans.

Social marketing experts start with from a strategic marketing perspective and leverage social media tools as distribution channels as they see best fit.

While I would not go as far as saying that 99.5% of social media experts are clowns (to which Sonia Simone provided a great response on her blog),  I do believe that we, as marketing experts, are best positioned to test the new social media tools and make the case for what best work best for us and our organization.

With that, I also strongly recommend the Content Grid that @joechernov and @jess3 have put together. A great infographic to help you strategize which content you should create and which social media distribution channels you leverage at each stage of the sales cycle.

Enjoy the presentation:

Social marketing in B2B World: Reality vs. Myth

Filed Under: favs, Product Camp, Product Management, Product Marketing, Product Strategy Tagged With: , ,

Keep It Simple, Stupid

August 28, 2011 By

Last week, our top sales rep told us his secret sauce for repeatedly exceeding his quota. He summarized it as follow: “Look guys, just keep it simple” …

  1. Find how who has the money
  2. Find out how much they have
  3. Sell to them as fast as you can

While they are many other best practices that he shared with us, his success recipe reminded me how much we, as marketers, tend to over-complicate things. We like to come up with a messaging full of superlatives and other buzz words, build as many strategies and campaigns as possible,  and produce countless numbers of collaterals and sales supporting tools etc.

While this makes all of us feel good, excess is usually not associated with efficiency. In fact in these days over information overflow, less is more.

Folks in the design world know that perfectly. They’ve even coined an acronym for it: K.I.S.S – Keep It Simple, Stupid. Yet simplicity is not easy to achieve. What makes a striking design stand out is that it contains no unnecessary elements.

As marketers, we should continuously search for those unnecessary elements, whether strategies, tactics, words or tools.  After all we all know that simplicity is necessary in order to properly convey an idea. Think Apple’s iPod 1,000 songs in your pocket.

My (simple) advice: stick to the basics

  1. Know your audience
  2. Identify their buying cycle
  3. Focus on driving revenues

What about you, how do you keep it simple?

 

Image Credit -  ImageLink

Filed Under: favs, Product Management Tagged With: , , , , ,

Why Social Does Not Matter

August 4, 2011 By


You are a professional marketer in the B2B Technology space.

By now, you’ve probably completely refocused all your marketing energy and dollars on the new world of social media. Trade shows are dead and email marketing is so passé. Instead you chat, tweet, IM, like, +1 all day long. #fail.

B2B technology purchasing decisions are not primarily made over social networks. In fact Twitter was ranked as the lowest amongst social sources that influence business technologists’ decision making. That’s according to a recent Forrester Research survey (2011 Social Technographics for Business Technology Buyers).

Now does that mean that social does not matter in the B2B world?

It does. But only when done right can social marketing become a fantastic asset in your B2B go-to-market strategy. When marketers put aside the social hype, the Google + of the day, and focus on building a solid marketing strategy of which social is a component.

This is what I plan to cover this week at ProductCamp Austin 7 if my session “Social Marketing in B2B World: Reality vs. Myth“ gets voted.

From my own professional experience as a practitioner, I will be sharing some pragmatic examples of how social marketing can be successfully leveraged to accelerate your prospects’ buying decision process. I will also share some templates that I found very useful when devising the right (social) marketing strategy.

I look forward to seeing you on Saturday in Austin.

Filed Under: Product Management

Stop Thinking as a Marketer. Start Thinking as a Publisher.

April 10, 2011 By

Earlier this week, I attended the Forrester Technology Marketing Executive Council in San Francisco. The purpose of this spring meeting was to discuss some innovative approaches to improve the effectiveness of marketing programs.

While many ideas were shared, the one theme that came back was the use of creative content to increase the number of sales conversations and to accelerate the buying process.

In his presentation “Organizing, Creating, And Maximizing Rich B2B Content”, Joe Chernov VP Content Marketing at Eloqua, challenged us to stop thinking as marketers and start thinking as publishers. In particular, Joe shared his passion for building ‘remarkable’ content. Content that is informative, memorable and fun such as this blog tree – a combination of a list and infographic – that got the ‘influencers’ engaged in the conversation and helped generate some great results for Eloqua.

Here’s what happened,

  • 700+ tweets
  • 40x average blog views
  • 9 of AdAge top 50 bloggers blogged, tweeted or commented
  • 176 inbound links
  • 49 viewers became sales qualified opportunities

Joe also shared with us his breakdown of content type and metrics based on the various stages of the buying process – a great reference for anyone looking at implementing and measuring the effectiveness of their content marketing strategy

Claudine Bianchi, Navisite CMO, then shared with us a very unique use of videos. While most B2B organizations focus on creating promotional videos for their websites and YouTube pages, Navisite is using videos as meetings follow up with key prospects, basically recording the outcome of the meeting in a ‘white board’ session and sending the video via a service called visiblegains, allowing them to track when the video is viewed and/or passed along within the organization.

Per Claudine,

Using the video adds a critical human element and is great way to differentiate while ensuring the outcomes of the meeting are being shared consistently across all parties involved in the buying decision process.

Simply brilliant.

While we continue to look for innovative ways to engage with our prospects and customers, as marketers, we should never forget that it is our responsibility to tell our story. And the use of creative content can really help us on that journey.

 

Image Credit:  Vin Crosbie

Filed Under: feature, Product Management Tagged With: , , , ,

Why HubSpot is Winning

March 9, 2011 By


Disclaimer: I am a converted HubSpot customer.

I use their software to increase the number of inbound warm leads and convert more qualified visitors into sales opportunities.

They call it Inbound Marketing. I call it my Life Saver Marketing platform.

It’s easy to use and at a tip of a finger, I can blog, optimize keywords, create new promo landing pages, send emails or check who is talking about us on the social sphere – all from a single tool. Most importantly, with its seamless integration with salesforce.com, Hubspot offers a complete closed loop reporting providing both marketing and sales with a single source of truth. That’s huge from an accountability and time saving standpoint.

But this is not what most impresses me.

As a product marketer, I am really fascinated by how this company is marketing, selling and enabling its customers. And the recent announcement of the $32 million Series D round from Salesforce.com, Google and Sequoia is no surprise to me. Here is why and what we can all learn from it:

  • They have a clear understanding of the space they play in. Rather than competing with the big players in the marketing automation software market, they took early on a different approach by building an easy-to-use, multi-purpose one size fit all platform focused on generating more leads and targeted to the SMB space.
  • They are careful with only taking on board customers they can satisfy. Yes you read this correctly. When I bought HubSpot, they were very open with the limitations of their email marketing offering. That’s actually what sealed the deal for me. They were the most transparent vendor I had ever dealt with.  Honesty pays!
  • They are maniacally focused on the success of their customers. They don’t stop to show the love with the PO. They will do anything to get you, the new customer, up-to-speed and delivering value back to your organization. They understand the power of happy customers. And one way they do it very well is by providing their customers with many avenues to share feedback and become a beta tester.

Even more fascinating is the strong marketing community they’ve been able to build. In the last month alone, they’ve generated over 30,000 leads (yes that’s in one month) and their marketing blog, webinars, resources etc are a great source of tips and best practices for any marketer. Most importantly they’ve set themselves as a trusted source before potential buyers even consider investing in their software. This is a huge competitive advantage that they’ve developed and can leverage through their customers’ buying cycle journey.

Now, I am a big believer that @bhalligan and @dharmesh have been planning all along to take over the larger players in the marketing automation and other adjacent markets. People who still believe that HubSpot is only going to have an infuence on the SMB space are dead wrong. And for a simple reason – they solve a critical problem that marketing organizations – irrelevant of size - are all facing: do more with less and be more accountable. And their platform just do that. Better than anyone else I have seen in the market.

It’s only a question of time before we see them expanding in the larger accounts. Something I am pretty sure Salesforce.com, Google and Sequoia would agree with.

What’s your take on HubSpot winning strategy?

PS: I really encourage you to review the presentation on Agile Marketing: The HubSpot Way that Kirsten Knipp presented at the last ProductCamp Austin. Another fascinating example of how HubSpot is leading the pack.

Image Credit:  sleepychinchilla

Filed Under: feature, Product Management

Sales and Marketing: Till Death Do Us Part

February 10, 2011 By

I have recently come across some really good analysis on the alignment gap between sales and marketing.

In his article “3 Reasons Your Marketing & Sales Departments Aren’t Clicking” Carlos Hidalgo is making a critical observation. Marketing and sales organizations typically don’t have a common viewpoint on what alignment should be based:

“The truth is that the right thing around which marketing and sales teams should align is their buyers. Today’s B2B buyer is looking to engage with their vendors and have a relevant 1-1 dialogue. They don’t care about the internal squabbles that may occur between marketing and sales teams. They want to feel attended to. So, marketing and sales need to collaborate on how to have the dialogue with the buyer.

This sentiment is echoed in an excellent research report from Forrester Analyst Jeff Ernst B2B Sales and Marketing Alignment Starts with the Customer (note: you will need to be Forrester customer to access the report. Alternatively read Jeff’s thoughts on his blog).

In particular, Jeff recommends the following to overcome the obstacles of alignment:

  • Develop a common understand of the buyers’ needs
  • Map activities around the customer’s buying process
  • Align marketing and sales initiatives around the customer

I could not agree more.

Marketing is all about moving the customers through their buying cycle journey and only by starting with this common understanding will the so called ‘great divide’ between sales and marketing become history.

I would also like to urge my fellow marketers to stop focusing on what makes us different from our sales counterparts and rather focus on how together we can provide the best buying experience to our customers.

We are all sales people. We are all marketers. Stop the blame game. Start working on your synergies. Till death do us part.

Image Credit:  Flickr

Filed Under: feature, Product Marketing Tagged With: , ,
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