Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending
Charles Lambdin recently published a piece on Medium titled “Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending”. In the post Charles talks about his frustrations with the current state of Agile practice.
Charles Lambdin recently published a piece on Medium titled “Dear Agile, I’m Tired of Pretending”. In the post Charles talks about his frustrations with the current state of Agile practice.
The story of the infamous Shed at Dulwich is a great example of how Internet marketing techniques can scam the unsuspecting public. The Shed at Dulwich was a fake restaurant created by Oobah Butler to prove the gullibility of today’s Internet user. I have been involved in technology marketing and sales for almost 20 years. …
The Software Equity Group has published their 3Q18 SaaS M&A Update. SEG regularly publishes comprehensive free research on the state of M&A in the tech space. It is invaluable resource in tracing the key trends and development in the market. A few of the key findings include: Aggregate software industry M&A deal volume (including SaaS,…
I am launching a new side gig today vendorbumper.com. We provide research reports on software companies for buyers looking to build a basic profile of a firm or for marketers looking to update their competitive analysis. Gartner notes that buyers complete 70% of their buying journey before contacting sales. Unfortunately buyers often need to provide…
The objective of this post is to talk about a new strategy for filling the top of the sales funnel with valuable opportunities. The harsh reality is that only a fraction of the mid-market and enterprise scale companies in today’s market will purchase and implement a major new software solution. As Gartner has noted, buyers are completing 70% of their buying journey before contacting a sales rep. Research shows the odds of winning the sale are 74% when you reach decision makers at the right time and help set their buying vision. This post talks about the types of triggers that lead to customers starting a process to identify and evaluate new solutions.
Another installment of great research from OpenView Venture Partners. A few examples: 15. Leads responded to within 5 minutes are 100X more likely to be contacted and 21X more likely to be qualified (LeadResponseManagement.org) 16. Waiting just 10 minutes to respond drops the likelihood of qualifying the lead 4X (LeadResponseManagement.org) 17. Yet less than 25%…
Today I experienced one of the best new product implementations since I got my first iPhone. I installed the Drift chat capability on my website developmentcorporate.com/. Their entry level offering is free forever. It took me 10 minutes from start to finish and it worked right out of the box. I do not expect that people are dying to chat with me about calculating the enterprise value of private companies or open source competitive intelligence for product managers. But chat would be a cool feature.
Acquiring customers is the biggest challenge any B2B software company has. Unless you are lucky enough to have an award winning solution that sells itself like the mythical product led growth companies (Slack, Dropbox, and Expensify), you have to grind it out like everyone else. Display advertising, landing pages, sales development reps, content marketing, marketing automation, sales automation, and CRM systems are the basic table stakes in today’s B2B software sales game. This post explores the reality of demand generation and makes a surprising recommendation to significantly improve sales funnel conversion rates and closed sales.
White Hat competitive intelligence is a skill every product manager should have in their toolbox. There is no excuse for not leveraging competitive intelligence that is freely available on the Internet. Building a baseline competitive intelligence profile takes less than 30 minutes. Facts like these can help separate the myth from reality of a competitor’s true capabilities.
Excerpted from the CBInsights article. Read the entire piece here: https://www.cbinsights.com/research/bezos-amazon-shareholder-letters/ Since founding Amazon in 1994, Jeff Bezos has run his company according to an unconventional set of core principles: don’t worry about competitors, don’t worry about making money for shareholders, and don’t worry about the short-term. Focus on the customers, and everything else will…