Five Favorite Marketing Hacks

Five Favorite Marketing Hacks
There’s no greater marketing challenge for a startup than a budget that is almost non-existent. Whenever I work with entrepreneurs who are in a low to no-budget situation, one of the first things I ask them is: How much skin are you willing to put in the game? Because in the entrepreneurial world, passion and scrappiness are going to be...

Learning About Your Customers For Free

Learning About Your Customers For Free
I had coffee a few weeks ago with an investor. One of his portfolio companies is having some growth problems and he’s been thinking that maybe they need to spend money on marketing help. The company is a farm-to-market retail store in a somewhat obscure location without much customer foot traffic. Because the company is small, can’t...

Blowing Up the B2B Sales Funnel

Blowing Up the B2B Sales Funnel
Last night I read an article from the Harvard Business Review called What Salespeople Need to Know About the New B2B Landscape. The authors talk about the implications of the latest B2B research from Gartner, the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company. The research offers up a new way of looking at the...

Time to Add a Marketing Strategy Resource to Your Team?

Time to Add a Marketing Strategy Resource to Your Team?
I recently had lunch with Ankur Gopal, an entrepreneur who whose B2B technology company, Interapt, is growing rapidly. It was exciting to hear about what he’s been learning as his business grows, and when our discussion turned to marketing, he asked me two great questions: 1. TIMING: How will he know when it’s the right time in his...

I Want My Brand To Be Like Intel Inside

If I only had $5 for every time I heard a client say “I want [insert brand/company name here] to be like Intel Inside.” While I wouldn’t be rich, it would certainly buy me a nice dinner or two. In fact, I was hearing this so much, and from one client in particular, that I finally decided to do some research into how much my...

Communicate To Your B2B Customers Visually

Words Aren’t The Only Way To Communicate To Your B2B Customers Recently, one of our B2B clients decided to invest a significant part of their marketing budget to exhibit at the Licensing Expo in Las Vegas. The client is essentially an engineering company which produces a piece of equipment used to execute in-pack and on-pack consumer...