commbasics

Don Tuite formally announced his retirement on April 17 in Electronic Design magazine and it is a bitter sweet moment. Don and I converse regularly on social media and we both live in Redwood City so he's not leaving my life at the moment, but I remember when he first came to Electronic Design after many years as a working engineer.  We had a couple of phone conversations about clients and stories he was working on when we both discovered that we were in the same town. From then on, Don had an open invitation to come down, have coffee, walk in our nearby park, and even take one of our team on a flight in his private plane (which she called the thrill of a lifetime since she had always wanted to become a private pilot). The conversations about technology, politics and social change is what I really enjoyed about Don's visits and calls. We never stayed on the subject very long. Once we got the business done it was on to other topics. It was the discussion of how media was ...

This is the last installment in our series about marketing automation. We’ve looked at how you can afford it , what it really is, and how it helps sales. All of that is icing. Today we’re going right to the cake: How it changes your world. I’m a small businessman working with a select group of clients. I know who they are, what their professional and personal backgrounds are, what they need and what they want. I have a personal relationship with pretty much every current, past, and many future clients. They are people first and a source of revenue second. Once you get to the point of having more than 50 customers, maintaining that kind of intimacy gets difficult. When you are a billion-dollar corporation, it is impossible, and customers cease to be people and become only a source of revenue. Unless you have a healthy marketing automation platform in place, that is. Starwood Hotel Group is a poster child for marketing automation best practices. Every contact with a guest or potentia...

Information changes every day. What we “know” as true today will be a lie tomorrow based on changing individual perspective. Real power is in relationship. Real power is in people. When people trust you, you become powerful. In last week’s post we discussed the difference between customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation (MA) on a high level. Today we want to drill down into why the distinction is important for sales. Made ya look. It isn’t that obvious to most sales executives that we come across because, as we pointed out last week, most people don’t really know the difference between CRM and MA, but also because most sales people are still stuck in the mindset that they need a lot of potential leads before they find a few that turn into sales. In the 21st century, content marketing changes that paradigm. Here’s why… The conventional wisdom about content is that information is power. Many people say that but they have no idea what it means. It means nothing. ...