Can Subject Matter Experts Destroy Your Company?

July 15, 2010

People have an expert problem. When faced with an expert, they become dumb.
So when you place a subject matter expert in the middle of your company or group, does your group become smarter or dumber?
A bit of both, depending on the personality of the subject matter expert and the personality of the people in [...]

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Please Stop Generic Enterprise Marketing!

June 22, 2010

The biggest challenge for most tech companies is marketing. You often hear companies lamenting poor technology winning out due to superior marketing.
I’m not sure if this is true. Maybe it was poorer technology (read less cool) but was it a poorer solution?
I don’t believe you can have a superior solution without superior marketing. If you [...]

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The Dark Matter of Selling: The Missing 90% of the Sales Process

June 10, 2010

The universe is made of stuff. The fancy term for the basis of this stuff is matter. But based on some calculations, we can only account for 10-20% of the matter in the universe- the other 80-90% is missing. The common term for this missing matter is Dark Matter.
The same concept applies to selling. Only [...]

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When Being Customer Driven is Dangerous

May 6, 2010

Is Being Customer Driven Great?
Being customer driven is great. Tap into the voice of the customer, and channel his wants and needs into compelling products and messages for rapid business growth, high profits, and stellar performance.
How can that be dangerous?
Simple- the wrong customer. You don’t tap into the voice of your TARGET customer in your [...]

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How to Be Test-Driven In Your Blog Marketing: Comments, Subscriptions, Social Media, Links and Traffic

April 12, 2010

I am making the assumption, based on effort and focus, that my articles are interesting and, hopefully, somewhat unique. But, in keeping with the theme of my blog, I need to test that.
Also, my goal is relevant readership. I don’t have any ads on this site and page views aren’t the main goal. A strong [...]

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Powerful Alternatives To Testing Your Message?

March 30, 2010

The alternative to testing? Segment your market until it fits all your assumptions, biases, inclinations and beliefs. Otherwise known as do nothing. Sadly, confirmation bias often leads great volumes of work to the same conclusion as the do nothing process.
You may get lucky, and do well. However, alternatively, the market might not:

be big enough [...]

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Marketing Fact #1: You Are Probably Wrong. Prove Otherwise.

March 22, 2010

You Are Probably Wrong
The theme of this blog is “You Are Probably Wrong. Prove Otherwise”. My second choice was “Only The Paranoid Market Well”.
These are the premises behind TestDrivenMarketing.com- that reality is complex enough that we would do well to test our assumptions, and test them often. Some examples of tests would be win/loss analysis, [...]

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