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. ...

The biggest barrier to adoption of marketing automation (MA) is a complete lack of understanding of what it is and what it does. That is also the single biggest barrier to effective use of customer relationship management (CRM) software.  The biggest barrier to adoption of marketing automation (MA) is a complete lack of understanding of what it is and what it does. That is also the single biggest barrier to effective use of customer relationship management (CRM) software. According to the Content Marketing Institute , (CMI) which issues reports on the state of the content marketing),the use of content marketing as a strategy is growing and is prevalent in growing companies. However, only 39 percent of the companies reporting having a strategy are claiming to see results, which tracks well with the stat that 35 percent have a documented strategy.   To check those numbers, we approached more than 50 companies in the past year and asked them if they were doing and we focused ...

This will be the first of several posts on the value and application of third-party marketing automation software. We will cover several aspects of this to simplify your understanding including: The difference between CRM and marketing automation software (surprisingly, most people are wrong) How it helps your sales team (more than they might realize) How does it affect content (a LOT!) Where to find the ROI and prove it to the boss (easier than you might think) But in this first part, we are going to address the two biggest questions: Who should you use? Can you afford it? Who you should use There are dozens of providers of this software and over the past two years, Footwasher Media has been checking out about 20 of the top rated. There are as many lists rating them as there are providers being rated so they don’t offer much help. Most of the rating is based on the number of customers using the service and their revenue. We decided on a different set of criteria: what customers say a...

A corporation has a vested interest in growing the trust of their customer base. Without an independent voice outside of the company (as in the semiconductor industry) they can’t survive in the market with their typical marketing BS. They need to provide trusted content. The tech media world is all atwitter (pun intended) over the collapse of GigaOm yesterday. Yes, it was a loss. The site was one of the first of the tech blogs, it was among the most respected in a world filled with self-aggrandizing click baiters (e.g. The Verge, Venture Beat and Tech Crunch ), and it offered what may be the deepest, most thoughtful coverage of the tech world, from semiconductors to gaming. But it could not make enough money to stay alive, much less give back some of the $22 million it took in from investors. Above the wailing laments of the reading public is a steady drumbeat of independent tech journalists claiming they have discovered the secret of profitable journalism in the tech world. Among th...

I've written on this subject before but it bears some repeating. Explaining what you do, who you are and how you do what you do is not as important as being able to explain why you exist as a company. That seems fairly simple but I find very few companies that can do that well, if at all. Of course you know why your company exists. You've been eating, sleeping and bathing in the reason for a long time. To you it is fairly obvious now. The problem is, you are not explaining well enough it to the market. Before anyone will care about the who, what and how, you have to explain the why in terms they understand. We've been working with several companies dealing with this issue. They are not seeing the sales or leads they expected from their program. They blame the sales automation program, or the marketing department or "the stupid customers." In reality, when you take a look at their content, they are ready to work with people who have already bought their product or ...