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.
I Made My Shed the Top-Rated Restaurant on TripAdvisor . . . And then served customers frozen dinners on its opening night.
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. […]
Features vs Technical Debt: An Agile Product Management Balancing Act
Product Managers and Product Owners face a constant challenge of balancing priorities. New features or technical debt elimination? The priorities between feature creation and technical debt elimination change as a product moves through its’ evolution.. This post talks about technical debt and some best practices to help teams manage it.
Software Equity Group 3Q18 SaaS M&A Update
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, […]
VendorBumper.com
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 […]
Product Managers: Change the Top of the Sales Funnel: Trigger Driven Prospecting
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.
35 Crucial Stats Every B2B Sales Professional Should Know
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% […]
Free Website Chat. A Great Product Led Growth Story
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.
The Cost of Non-Customer Acquisition: The Ugly Truth
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.
Open Source Competitive Intelligence for Product Managers
The Internet is a wonderful tool for researching your competitors. In this post we will review several free resources that can be used to gather information to support the development and evolution of your competitive analysis. It includes sources for baic company info, investors, revenues for private companies, web statistics like visit history, keyword trends, use of marketing automation technology, user reviews, reverse engineering competitor org charts, etc.