Archive for 2002
Marketing Portfolio Management in New Ventures
The best practices in marketing hi-tech new-ventures more closely resemble that of a targeted portfolio management than that of a general portfolio management. Within this logical construct for marketing and sales, expenses are allocated within a selected portfolio of activities that are dependent upon the economics of the market being served. Under modern financial portfolio…
Read MoreTrade Shows, Part 3: Maximize the Impact
In the second article of this series, we explored a model to show the value of trade shows. While our model demonstrated the possible value, it did not fully explore the means to maximize exhibit floor value. Maximizing the value of a specific marketing event requires integrating the event with our other marketing tools. In…
Read MoreTrade Shows, Part 2: A Value Model
Trade Shows are costly marketing efforts. They take sales people out of the field and restrict them to an 8X10 piece of carpet for a couple of days. What justifies the cost of trade shows? Trade shows are a marketing function hence they better perform a marketing task. In this case, they perform the task…
Read MoreTrade Shows, Part 1: Show me the Value
Trade Shows, Booth Duty, Event Calendar. Why do we do this? Where is the bang for the buck? If we are to conduct business seriously, we have to have reasons associated with our actions. We can’t waste our time and money on activities that don’t improve revenues or decrease costs. Yet, we attend trade shows…
Read MoreMarketing as Full Cycle: Jennifer Sherwood of Systems & Software
According to Frederick Webster of Tuck School of Business, marketing is charged with three distinct areas of responsibility: (1) communicate to the market the value proposition of their product for demand stimulation, (2) determine product strategy to improve their value proposition, and (3) craft the corporate strategy to capture the uncovered opportunities. While many new…
Read MoreListening to Markets: Michael Alter of SurePayroll
When firms want to escape hand-to-mouth business and enter a somewhat predictable high-growth market, business leaders have to change from opportunism and cost based decision-making into a market driven mentality. This kind of a growing-up sometimes requires sacrificing immediate cash flow, exploration, and intuition while replacing it with investment, commitment, and data-based decisions. We may…
Read MoreTalking to Markets: David Freeman at Geodesic Systems
When company names appear in my column, I have noticed a trend of corporate officers contacting me to ask how I learned about their existence or got my information. Much to their dismay, I often reply that I did research to find them searching VC portfolios, i-Street lists, and of course, old May Reports. (So…
Read MoreIs Rolodex Marketing the Right Answer?
It seems to be a dominant philosophy among many managers that the mark of a great sales person is the size of their Rolodex. I call this “Rolodex Marketing.” The logic flows along the lines of: (1) Salespeople create and manage customer relationships to drive profitable transactions. (2) The more relationships salespeople already have, the…
Read MoreNanoBrief
Chicago is getting some good hype in Nanotechnology. For those of us used to IT, let’s discuss the basics of nanotech. A nanotech device has dimensions on the order of a nanometer to thousands of nanometers. While this sounds like a huge range, 1 or 1000, the critical dimension is always on the order of…
Read MoreSelling Messages
During the last month, I have attended a number of trade shows with vendors selling business software and hardware to large corporations. There is a distinct change in successful selling messages from the tech vendors. They’re focusing on ROI and money saved. In the late 90’s, it was considered acceptable to state that a piece…
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