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Social proof is defined as “looking for others to guide our decisions&# and is also one of the most important techniques in acquiring customers in your company. Many of you have read or at least know the primary thesis of “ Crossing the Chasm &# the seminal book on marketing your products to mainstream consumers by Geoffrey Moore.
Calabasas-based Spotlight , the developer of ticket management software-as-a-service, said today that it has appointed Richard Dym as its Chief Marketing Officer. Spotlight said its customers now include Comcast, MetLife, Nike, Oracle, Time Warner Cable Media Sales, NBCUniversal, Stanley Black & Decker, and Principal Financial Group.
The framework of his book has profoundly altered how I think about the technology market and affects how I thought about building my businesses and how I think about investing in venture capital. Let’s start with the incumbents position in a market. So the startups tend to focus on totally new customers.
One that he particularly struggled with was "word-of-mouth marketing,”which he consistently referred to as "mouth-to-mouth marketing." We adopted his phrasing and made it our mission to devise creative, mouth-to-mouth marketing initiatives. I now realize why guerrilla marketing is not for the timid. we sure do.
And of course the most successful technology companies: Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com [duh], Oracle, Microsoft all have loads of sales people. The most important way to sell a product for an early-stage business (or frankly any stage) is to have strong referenceable customers. How do you get referenceable customers?
A while back I wrote a bunch of posts on Sales & Marketing and have been meaning to get back to that theme for a while. I see way too many startup founders who don’t have experience in selling and probably don’t feel that comfortable going to customers and asking for orders. I only found out through customer meetings.
Whenever I heard why we didn’t feel a sales process at an important customer was going well (or if we lost) I would get involved myself. They are as good at selling you as they are at selling your product to customers. Features don’t win or lose sales – especially in nascent markets. People are buying YOU.
In this interview, Mark discusses how his experiences at Oracle, eHarmony and the Rubicon Project contributed to the creation of his latest venture, SteelHouse Media. 4) Did I read correctly that you were part of the original development team for Oracle Financials? When I joined Oracle, they were essentially ‘the Google’ of their time.
You’ll get sales information from your VP of Sales, marketing information from your VP Marketing, tech information from your CTO and so on. By going on sales calls you pick up directly the feedback of what customers want and also what they’re telling you about competition. Skipping is insidious.
In short, acknowledge they exist, be transparent about strengths & weaknesses and use your differences to talk about how you want to position yourself in the market. Marketing Differentiation – Salesforce.com is one of the most effective marketing organizations in the world because Marc Benioff is a genius at marketing.
San Diego-based MindTouch , a developer of software-as-a-service tools to help companies create self-service, customer support sites, has raised $12M in a Series A funding. MindTouch's software provides customer support search tools, product information, and more to end users. READ MORE>>.
I’ve started writing up some of those sales & marketing lessons and I plan to continue to build that section out over time. Whenever I heard why we didn’t feel a sales process at an important customer was going well (or if we lost) I would get involved myself. Customers buy solutions to solve their problems.
San Diego-based MeLLmo , the developer of the Roambi mobile business analytics software, said today that it has opened up an office in Shanghai, to support the Greater China market. MellMo said the office will serve its customers in the region in the retail, automotive, pharmaceuticals and consumer technology industries.
Vora is the CEO of Acrolinx, and also had served as entrepreneur-in-residence at Foundational Capital, as well as a VP at Oracle and Adobe. Vora also founded Oblix, which was acquired by Oracle, and sits on the boards of Get Satisfaction and NextPrinciples, among other positions.
Currently, we have over a thousand customers, with customers ranging from anywhere from 100 employees to clients with more than a 100,000. Most of the top 100 cities and counties in the country are our customers, and twenty out of fifty states run all their recruiting and HR through our system.
Let’s assume you run a Customer Support software company. Do you simply begin by asking, “I’d love to understand what your objectives are in customer support? You need to identify a customer problem and talk about how your solution meets the needs of that problem. Where are your current pains?&#.
One that he particularly struggled with was "word-of-mouth marketing,”which he consistently referred to as "mouth-to-mouth marketing." We adopted his phrasing and made it our mission to devise creative, mouth-to-mouth marketing initiatives. I now realize why guerrilla marketing is not for the timid. we sure do.
In my role as a business advisor, I often see well-meaning entrepreneurs try to be everything to everyone, which results in many things done poorly, and few totally delighted customers. People are confused by multiple messages, and employees are frustrated trying to personalize customer experiences.
Everyone in the outside world is talking about how great you are but internally you know that your sales aren’t ramping, your product isn’t shipping on time, you have doubts about the quality of your code, you’re not convinced you’re doing a good job on marketing – whatever. Your solution? My advice: don’t.
Growth will slow, partly due to internal limits and partly because the company is starting to bump up against the limits of the markets it serves.” He talks about making things that people want & going after a big enough market. It might be for technical reasons or it might be for customer adoption reasons.
And aside from having great market power (the main reason for Twitter to own the client and the customer) advertising is one of the primary reasons that I believe Twitter needs to own the client applications. Often these were things that would make Salesforce more competitive vis-a-vis Oracle and Microsoft.
Obviously they wish they would have figured this out a bit more quickly, but as a young team I personally cut them a little bit more slack than I would if it were Oracle, for example. Understand the Gravity of the Situation for Your Customers. But if you’re going to say something controversial make it about the market you serve.
Thaeres is a SaaS-based, dashboard solution for mid-market enterprises. We are looking at a market which is primarily mid-level, where they are too big for using Quickbooks as their solution, but they''re not big enough to use an Oracle or SAP. I built the software on my own, initially, and brought it to market.
As a first-timer at Oracle OpenWorld , I’ve been quite impressed by the sheer number of people thronging Howard Street, Moscone Center and the local San Francisco area in business-suits and professional attire. Kevin Akeroyd , GM & SVP of OracleMarketing Cloud and their own Matthew Collins , SVP of Global Marketing.
One of the startup areas where we've been seeing renewed activity in the last few months is in the enterprise software space--specifically, in software-as-a-service applications targeted at corporate customers. I'd used every CRM tool out there--Oracle, Siebel, PeopleSoft--you name it, I've used it. Our customers really like that.
awards dinner on Thursday night I started reflected on what it would take to “change the trajectory&# for Seattle or for any regional market, really. He listed all of the product releases that were up coming, the customers that were in the pipeline and where he saw his competition moving. Are you going to do all of this?
However, mobile devices have not only revolutionized the world of the consumer--they've also made inroads into the corporate market, changing how companies provide access to important information and data to their partners and employees. How do customers use your product? Or, it can come directly out of a database.
Excited about Oracle Open World? I’ve been invited to attend this year by Dun & Bradstreet to learn about how their data solutions power the Oracle Cloud Platform. How can you convert more of them into profitable customers?” ” So where are your customers and what are they talking about?
I''m very interested in seeing how the so-called "marketing cloud" emerges and develops further. There are many silos, and several big players (Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, etc.), My hunch is data aggregation is key.
Should I trust my instincts for founders and products or should I be more focused on the market size or business plan? I tapped my friends at big tech companies (Salesforce, Google, Oracle). But I think there is a down side that I see in startups that raise artificially at prices above what a normal market might value.
The dad was, of course, alluding to Google's frequently-used strategy to make available free services in otherwise paid markets to rattle competition and gain market share for advertising-supported products. Many markets have free alternatives. The boy's father, my colleague, was quick to exclaim, "He was Googled!"
Should I trust my instincts for founders and products or should I be more focused on the market size or business plan? I tapped my friends at big tech companies (Salesforce, Google, Oracle). I like to debate with them how they will land customers and how they deal with the press. What price? With which other investors?
Marketers have long known that people are drawn to exclusivity. Unfortunately, many Big Dumb Companies (BDCs) assume they must unfairly skew the market in their favor by precluding you from freely working with anyone you choose. Note: This is part IV of the four part series. Access part I HERE , part II HERE and part III HERE.
Every engineer who has invented some new technology, or is adept at creating solutions, believes that is the hard part, and it should be a short step to take that solution to market as an entrepreneur. Marketing is fluff and selling is black magic.” We need to get functionality maximized before we focus on customers.”
Every engineer who has invented some new technology, or is adept at creating solutions, believes that is the hard part, and it should be a short step to take that solution to market as an entrepreneur. Marketing is fluff and selling is black magic.” We need to get functionality maximized before we focus on customers.”
Todd Davis: I''m a veteran of Oracle, and had been CEO of an equipment finance company for the construction industry globally. Your customer base is in an age old industry, not known for rapid technology adoption - how have you found reception to your product? That''s leading to rapid conversion in our customer target base.
We've essentially provided a customer a single interface, where they can create and analyze their international presence. The service is for sites targeting foreign markets, who are determining how to better optimize and tune how they are engaging around the globe. Who would be the typical customer for this service?
As we went from a small band of missionaries hell bent on making our idea a reality, raising capital, getting press, and selling to customers – we were all having fun. We built a business with $36 million in bookings and real customers who relied upon our service. In other words, Why now?
Keep these balanced and aligned between people (customers, employees) and process (quality, service, revenue), and keep the scope realistic (eliminating world hunger is too broad). Narrow the scope more realistically to people with specific age, income, and education demographics, that you can realistically reach with your marketing plan.
Keep these balanced and aligned between people (customers, employees) and process (quality, service, revenue), and keep the scope realistic (eliminating world hunger is too broad). Narrow the scope more realistically to people with specific age, income, and education demographics, that you can realistically reach with your marketing plan.
With the power of the Internet, and the impact of the recent pandemic , the world of business services, such as accounting and marketing, have gone more and more remote. Yet the value of real relationships, as with consumer customers, has become critical to your business services growth and success.
get the attention of the market they choose. Having a great idea in the wrong place won’t get you the funding you need, the experienced domain experts you want, or the pilot market results you need for survival. billion dollar sale to Oracle from Bozeman, Montana. It’s just the first of many. Exposure is another key ingredient.
Therese is the former CTO at SunGard Treasury Systems, and has a wealth of experience in the financial software market. The software that BlackLine builds and markets, helps people with the close process, instead of doing it in Excel. However, we found that it's a hard market to break into. Therese Tucker: Here's the difference.
It is an heroic accomplishment in a brutal fund-raising market in which only market leaders can bring in that sort of money. So we brought in experience hand Mark Woodward who had taken 2 companies public and had a storied sales leadership turned CEO career where he learned in academy-rich Oracle. $30 million.
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