Marketing Management

Marketing Operations Best Practices-- Webinar July 16th

by Sridhar Ramanathan

Join us for a Webinar on July 16th at 8am PT/11am ET. We'll have terrific guests speakers - Judy Ash, Director of Strategic Marketing, NetApp, and Jennifer Pockell-Wilson, Director, Global Marketing Operations, Polycom. Learn how to gain executive management approval and drive fast results.

• Discover how to implement Marketing Operations best practices in your organization


• Learn how to gain executive management approval and cooperation while circumventing internal roadblocks


• Hear best practice success stories and advice from leading experts in Marketing Operations

Space is limited. Reserve your Webinar seat now by clicking here.

Posted June 23, 2008 | Permalink

A Good Resource on Services Pricing

by Sridhar Ramanathan

I want to pass along to you a nice report from RainToday entitled “Fees and Pricing Benchmark Report: Consulting Industry 2008.” While it’s mainly aimed at consulting firms (marketing, IT, management, etc.) I think it has very useful insights for managed service providers (MSPs) and outsourcers. They examined hundreds of firms and found that the most profitable firms did the following:

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Posted June 11, 2008 | Permalink

A New Paradigm for Telesales – Introducing Myndnet

by Sridhar Ramanathan

I’ve written a lot about lead generation harping on the issue of poor lead quality and disappointing lead handoffs between marketing and sales. One of the solutions to this “alignment” problem is hiring a good telesales or inside sales firm that can do the job of filtering “raw” leads generated from marketing efforts and delivering only well qualified leads to the sales organization. And usually these “brick and mortar” firms are well worth the money costing about $2000-$3000 per sales opportunity they deliver assuming an average initial selling price of at least $50K. The only challenge is that these firms have downsides—ramp up can take six months or more, fees are too often not tied to performance, retainer contracts lock clients in for at least one year, and employees of these firms are cold calling experts rather than warm introduction producers who are one or two degrees of freedom away from your target decision-maker.

Enter Myndnet. Rather than hire telesales employees, they post client requests for quality leads (or business opportunities) on their website and to their membership of hundreds of individuals in the marketplace who signup to be Myndnet Pros. These “Pro” individuals that Myndnet screens rigorously might be freelance HR recruiters, sales/marketing professionals, IT employees, consultants, editors, analysts, etc who want to make a little extra money by providing introductions to people they know who might be actively looking for the client’s product or service. Think of this as the “open source approach” to telesales, a truly different paradigm than the call center model.

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Posted May 29, 2008 | Permalink

Successfully Implementing Positioning in Organizations

by Reena Kapoor

I’ve now worked on several strategic positioning projects for clients and have come to the realization that the harder part is not developing strong positioning for companies or their products. The greater challenge actually lies in implementing it successfully. Don’t get me wrong. Developing strong, distinctive and meaningful positioning is crucial. And – contrary to popular belief – it actually takes effort and skill to create it. Sridhar Ramanathan my partner here at Pacifica Group (a Conifer alliance) actually wrote a blog entry describing the characteristics of good positioning. He’s right on.

But I am sure you’ve heard the countless stories where a lot of time was spent and a fancy positioning was created only to gather dust. While positioning can be targeted at any stakeholder, for the purpose of this article, I am going to focus on positioning targeted at customers. I want to talk about how and what determines that a positioning will be successfully implemented. Some of it has to do with the development process, some with characteristics of the output and some with your internal company workflows. Here are some of the factors I have found to be crucial:

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Posted April 3, 2008 | Permalink

Turning Anxiety Into Advantage

by Sridhar Ramanathan

My fellow consulting firm owners and corporate exec buddies often ask me, “Aren’t you nervous about being self-employed and supporting a family of six on an unpredictable salary?” The answer is “yes.”

In the early days of my practice, I found myself very worried about the up and down nature of consulting after I’d grown so accustomed to the steady paychecks over my twelve year tenure at HP. Now after being in business for seven years, I actually find anxiety to be a very useful leadership tool.

This isn’t entirely an original insight. Andy Grove warned us long ago with his book Only The Paranoid Survive. My point is that it doesn’t have to be scary and painful if you embrace anxiety as another useful emotion like anger, frustration, etc and put it to good work such as in driving change in an organization. Here are just a few thoughts on how anxiety has worked for me and how it could work for you as well.

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Posted March 23, 2008 | Permalink

Corporate Integrity and the Role of Marketing

by Sridhar Ramanathan

One of the bright spots in IT spending today is enterprise software and services that support the alphabet soup of compliance regulations (SEC, SOX, PCI, HIPAA, FISMA, OSHA, etc.). One of our clients, SAP, is doing a great job capturing share as the market for governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) software is expanding rapidly. Perhaps one of the key motivators for this growth is fear: fear of facing stiff financial penalties and/or even prison sentences for non-compliance. Examples in the business software industry alone include: Computer Associates’s execs being jailed for SEC violations and McAfee facing a $50M penalty for accounting trickery. But compliance is actually further down the Maslow hierarchy of needs. Corporate integrity would be a higher rung which calls corporate managers to “do the right thing” and elevate the organizations’ contribution beyond its immediate stakeholders.

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Posted March 19, 2008 | Permalink

Campaigns that Count

by Sridhar Ramanathan

Ask a CEO about “marketing campaigns” and they usually think of high profile public relations, creative advertising, email marketing biltzes, sales promotions, etc in order to cause a spike in sales. Okay that’s not bad. It wouldn’t be far from the wiktionary definition of “campaign” which is “a series of operations undertaken to achieve a set goal; as, an election campaign, a military campaign, an advertising campaign.” The real question is what separates the few, effective campaigns from the majority of campaigns that don’t deliver what CEOs expect? Read Mike Gospe’s book “Marketing Campaign Development” and you’ll see spelled out very clearly how your team can produce far better results than the CEO and VP of Marketing may even expect.

What’s the secret? What are the characteristics of marketing campaigns that deliver? Here’s a litmus test that I can posit from Mike’s book:

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Posted March 2, 2008 | Permalink

The Power of Excellent Messaging

by Sridhar Ramanathan

We are not a branding firm per se at Pacifica Group. But as former executives, we’ve hired and managed firms that are the best in this craft. So we’ve gained an abiding appreciation for good messaging work and what it takes to deliver it. Most CEOs and even VPs of Marketing think messaging is about a good tag line. That’s probably 1% of the value-added of smart messaging work. And it’s also not a quick workshop with the executives. It can take weeks of very hard work to distill the essence of a company/product into hard-hitting words.
Here are some recommendations for you to consider when hiring a messaging firm. But first, let me contrast good messaging versus mediocre messaging. Here’s an excerpt from Oracle’s newly acquired unit, Siebel CRM on Demand which competes against Salesforce.com. Then below is Salesforce.com’s story.

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Posted October 7, 2007 | Permalink

On Selling to a Small Business Owner

by Sridhar Ramanathan

Recently I wrote about Warrillow’s book “Drilling for Gold” because I found it a terrific resource for marketing to the small medium sized business. He categorizes owners into mountain climbers, craftspeople, and freedom fighters. I’d like to share with you a conversation I had with a classic mountain climber, Dr. Roy Saldanha. He runs a moderate sized (35 employee) veterinary hospital in Riverside, California. I interviewed him to find out what sales and marketing approaches really worked best from his perspective. And I’d encourage you to pose the same four questions I ask of him to your own small business customers and see what new insights you get. You might be surprised.

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Posted August 2, 2007 | Permalink

What I’ve Learned from Blogging

by Sridhar Ramanathan

Hard to believe that it’s been three years since Elise Bauer and I launched the Pacifica Group blog. Elise is, of course, light years ahead of me with her wildly successful recipe blog (Simply Recipes) which she started over four years ago. She was the one who inspired me (nay pushed) me to create the company blog, and I’ll be eternally grateful for that. So what have I learned from this experience?

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Posted July 11, 2007 | Permalink

Book Recommendation – Made to Stick

by Sridhar Ramanathan

Here’s a book you’ll finish in one sitting because it’s so good---entertaining yet insightful. Have you ever wondered why some “stories” or “urban legends” seem to pop up again and again? Chip and Dan Heath kickoff the book with the famous “kidney heist” story in which a man wakes up in a hotel room bathtub filled with ice. A note on his chest tells him to call 911 because his kidney has been stolen. Companies can learn a lot from understanding what makes some stories (or messages) stick and why most are unmemorable. They boil it down to six principles:

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Posted July 11, 2007 | Permalink

It’s All About User Participation

by Sridhar Ramanathan

Last week I attended a breakfast seminar at the Institute of Management Consultants (IMC) Northern California chapter in San Francisco. My partner, Jeff Thompson, is a board member so how could I refuse? Plus the topic was intriguing enough– “Expert Panel Shares Internet Secrets to Grow Your Business.” Panelists were: John Girard, CEO of Clickability, Chris Peterson, CEO of Chautauquacom, Celeste Bishop, President of Bishop Market Resources, Cal Lai, CEO of Sitoa, Redge martin, President of Clars, and moderator Rebecca Morgan. All of them use Web 2.0 technologies/tools to improve user participation for their businesses.

Some of the best examples of active user participation and user ownership of content are: Wikipedia, YouTube, MySpace, Yelp, and Angieslist. These sites provide 100% user generated, free content. Cal describes this as the “nodes” having the power not the central “host”. That makes sense for consumer websites but what about for businesses? I share here the anecdotes that I personally found very interesting.

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Posted June 11, 2007 | Permalink

Demand Generation: Are You Making Your Prospects Lie?

by Sridhar Ramanathan

One of the dirty little secrets of online marketing is that the leads you generate are only as good as the data that the customer prospect chooses to share about themselves. And very often they lie. Ok, I’ll admit it. I’ve lied too. I might lie when I want to download an interesting looking whitepaper but don’t want a phone call from a sales rep within five minutes of the download. I might say I’m an engineer instead of President of Pacifica Group just to throw the dogs off my scent. Or I might intentionally transpose the phone number to guarantee they can’t reach me. I suspect I’m not alone in the friendly fudging that’s going on every day. So what can we do as marketers to encourage truthful responses from our target prospects? Here are a few thoughts on the topic.

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Posted February 20, 2007 | Permalink

The Power of No

by Sridhar Ramanathan

One of the most powerful statements you can make to someone is “no.” It can immediately trigger some strong reactions ranging from quiet resentment to outright rage. In my little kids, it can trigger a tantrum. We let our kids watch thirty minutes of the movie “Cars” last night and boy were they unhappy when we said “no” to more movie time. So clearly it’s a powerful word. But is there a more effective of way of saying “no” without triggering all the sound and fury that comes along with it? Here are a few stories and suggestions I want to pass along.

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Posted February 19, 2007 | Permalink

Where's the Thirteenth Donut?

by Elise Bauer

"Where's the thirteenth donut?" my friend and branding impresario Rich Binell likes to shout, especially when confronted with a company whose customers are satisfied, but not spectacularly so. "Who wants to be just good? We want to be great!" He usually adds, emphatically. What Rich is referring to is the age old practice of bakers to add a thirteenth donut when one orders a dozen, thus making up the "baker's dozen". The question is not, how do we meet our customer's expectations, but how do we consistently and surprisingly exceed them?

Think about it. The best way to please someone is to exceed her expectations. The best way to upset someone is to not meet her expectations. (In fact it has been said that all upset comes from unmet expectations.) If you start viewing your business from the view of managing the expectations of your customers, you'll be a step, no a leap ahead of everyone else.

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Posted January 19, 2007 | Permalink

Marketing to the SMB

by Sridhar Ramanathan

Over the holiday I read four business books but only one stood out as a “must read.” The book is “Drilling for Gold” by John Warrillow, and it’s full of very practical and insightful approaches to winning in the small/medium business (SMB) market.

Here are some US Census Bureau statistics that surprised me. There are 5.9M companies in the US with fewer than 2,500 employees. But 14% have no employees (just owners), 61% have four or fewer employees and 37% have 5-99 employees. Warrillow does a brilliant job in blowing up the “SMB” into actual segments and delineating some very sharp differences between them. Warrillow presents three useful archetypes that help us understand business owners.

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Posted January 9, 2007 | Permalink

When to Fire your PR Firm

by Sridhar Ramanathan

“I waited too long fire my PR firm” is right up there with other top regrets like staying too long in a job and waiting too long to fire an employee. And if the average tenure of a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is now 23.2 months that means you can’t afford to wait around and fire the firm too late in your tenure. This blog entry offers some litmus tests or “red flags” that tell you it’s time to fire your PR firm. And if firing seems too harsh, just skip down to the last section were we offer tips for getting more performance out of your PR firm.

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Posted December 23, 2006 | Permalink

Everybody Loves Raymond – Lessons from an Entrepreneur

by Sridhar Ramanathan

Flying back from San Diego, I sat next to a very engaging entrepreneur, Raymond Mendoza. Thirteen years ago he founded Short Circuit Car Audio Repair, a small business that fixes car stereos on behalf of car dealership service departments. He’s got 1200 dealership customers and a staff of audio electronics experts who work right here in San Jose (rather than the Philippines, his home country, but that’s a different story on the downsides of offshoring). I’m writing this blog entry because I am struck by how similar his success factors are to what I’ve seen in the best technology companies in terms of channel sales execution. Here’s a summary of what are perhaps universal principles.

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Posted November 16, 2006 | Permalink

Gold Nuggets from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Summit 2006

by Sridhar Ramanathan

This week I attended the annual Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council Summit meeting in San Francisco. Surprisingly, it was disappointing compared to last year’s summit. The talks and panels were more descriptive (reporting facts, opinions, and views) rather than prescriptive (sharing of best practices and recommendations). Thankfully, there was one speech that made the whole event worthwhile for me. As is my habit, I want to share with you here the gold nuggets I took away as a council member.

The notable talk was by Deepak Advani, CMO of Lenovo. If you haven’t heard of Lenovo, you will. Lenovo is the Chinese owned company that bought IBM’s PC division. Advani captivated the audience of a couple hundred marketing executives by telling the story of how Lenovo, a company that started with $25, 000 investment, eleven engineers, and a bungalow in Beijing, went on to acquire IBM’s PC division including the legendary ThinkPad brand for $1.25B.

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Posted October 6, 2006 | Permalink

Is Your Product "Channel-Friendly?" -- Part II

by Sridhar Ramanathan

Last night I had the privilege of addressing about 75 product managers at the Silicon Valley Product Management Association. My talk was entitled Is Your Product "Channel-Friendly?” Click here to Download slide deck

SVPMA board members told me that the level of audience interest and interactivity was unusually high. Definitely a timely topic. Half of my talk was about understanding the “channel.” The other half was a call to action for product managers to improve the likelihood that their product would produce brisk channel sales. I gave them the following litmus test to guide their actions. These tests come from having studied some of the most successful product companies that sell largely through the channel.

• Do you have a compelling, one sentence value proposition?
• Do you offer attractive margins for the channel (e.g. > 30%)?
• Can a channel sales rep prepare a quote in less than 5 minutes?
• Does it take less than 90-days to close a purchase order?
• Do you have a killer demo that channel reps can deliver in less than 15 minutes?
• For each dollar of your product sales, do you leverage $2-3 of other channel product sales?
• Do you create a reason for reps to call again within 6 months of initial purchase?
• Do you have a goal to drive down support cases?

At the end of the talk, I asked for a show of hands for each question. Surprisingly, only one third to half the audience could answer yes to each question, and no one could say yes to all eight. The point here was not to be right on all eight points but rather to drive changes in the product organization that will very positively impact channel sales. I welcome your reactions.

Posted October 5, 2006 | Permalink

The Joys of Mentorship and SVPMA

by Sridhar Ramanathan

Just over five years ago we were turning out the lights in a startup called Firetalk Communications. Like so many startups we, the exec team, couldn't bring cash in faster than it was leaving the door. I only worked there a year after leaving HP but it was a rich learning experience and a place were I made lasting friendships. My partner, Elise, was an SVP and the key business leader there. I share this story because it was a place of mentorship for me--both receiving and providing mentorship. One of my product managers was Jasmine de Gaia, a gifted Stanford grad full of ambition and talent. Somehow she came to see me as a mentor and I enjoyed giving her the benefit of my career lessons. Nothing is more rewarding than seeing one of your team members flourish. She went on to join Lucent as a product manager and was one of the founding executives of the Silicon Valley Product Management Assocation (SVPMA). It's a huge privilege to be asked to speak there next month, and I owe it to Jasmine. I'm very proud of Jasmine and wish her well as her career continues to blossom. Next time, I'll write about one of my mentors, Lenny Alugas (now Symantec VP).

Posted September 20, 2006 | Permalink

Trust – The Key to Sales

by Sridhar Ramanathan

Two ebooks showed up in my intray this week that I would consider must-reads. Coincidentally, the central message in both books was that trust is essential to sales.

Seth Godin, author of bestselling marketing books, writes in the RainToday’s The One Piece of Advice You Can’t Sell that “there is only one thing that matters when you’re selling professional services. Only one. Does the person who is buying from you (and her boss!) trust you?” I would contend that this is true for selling anything from services to software.

Brian Carroll, CEO of InTouch, writes in Eight Critical Success Factors for Lead Generation that “customers regularly illustrate the need for sales people who call on them to understand both their business and their needs while being sensitive to the pressures under which they operate. Sales people who meet these criteria become known as trusted advisors, and trusted advisors get the sale.” Brian goes on to show how marketing is here to create conversations with prospective customers that build trust by delivering value over time.

Posted August 12, 2006 | Permalink

Your Lead Generation Machine—Well Oiled or Ready for Overhaul?

by Sridhar Ramanathan

Virtually every organization has a process for moving prospective customers from the very first contact (e.g. advertising) to contract phase (e.g. purchase order). This contact-to-contract process usually requires excellent teamwork between the marketing, inside-sales, and sales teams. The sub-process that gets a lot of attention these days is lead generation or demand generation as it’s called more broadly. How do you know if your organization has a well-oiled machine for lead generation or is in bad need for a major over haul? Here’s a simple checklist to give you a sense for how much room for improvement there is relative to companies that have mastered this process or system. Technically, we should assign weights for each of these but, for a first pass, just answer yes or no.

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Posted July 19, 2006 | Permalink

The Power of Word of Mouth

by Sridhar Ramanathan

Today I was struck by how powerful my wife’s mom’s club is in terms of word of mouth. Gina, mother or our four kids, is a board member of the Livermore Mothers club. She was drawn to this community of moms who support, inspire, and share experiences with one another. Like most moms, these are often the “economic buyer” of the household. And that makes them a powerful force in Livermore because they talk about their buying experiences---the good and the bad.

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Posted July 15, 2006 | Permalink

Leading High Performance Teams

by Sridhar Ramanathan

This week I was invited to address 80-100 engineering managers later this month on the topic of leading high performance teams. This “by the bay” high tech firm, asked me to share good management practices from my years as a senior manager at HP and at Pacifica Group where we serve a diverse client base. I’m no Peter Drucker or Ken Blanchard but I do have a few philosophies and observations to share. The specific question I’m answering here is: what can a manager do to lead the team to higher performance levels? Here are my suggestions. I’d be most grateful to hear your reactions before I bake them into the PowerPoint presentation. So please comment on this blog or shoot me an email to sridhar at pacifica-group.com.

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Posted July 9, 2006 | Permalink

Customer Loyalty Deserves the Royal Treatment

by Sridhar Ramanathan

Why is it that businesses so often take for granted their most loyal, repeat customers? I had a real taste of it this week when I switched my cellular service from Sprint to T-Mobile. I was a loyal Sprint wireless customer for six years spending in total $6,120 and expected to spend another $5,000 at least over the next five years. With all the enticing phone promotions going on, I thought it was time to replace my aging phones. When I called Sprint to see if they could give me a couple free phones in return for a two-year contract renewal, I was surprised at the resistance I got, and was put off by the hard sell on services I didn’t even want. I was treated like a “churn” customer, one who switches back and forth at the drop of a few pennies and a hot promotion. But I wasn’t one of these. I tried walking into a Sprint store hoping I’d get better treatment but was disappointed again.

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Posted July 2, 2006 | Permalink

Assessing the VP Job Offer --Due Diligence Questions

by Sridhar Ramanathan

“Now that I’ve got the job offer for VP Marketing, what due diligence questions should I be asking?” asked my dear friend, Doug, this week. Over the last five years, we’ve seen our share of executives transition in and out of jobs with our clients. These suggested questions are based on having seen both perspectives—the company’s and the executive’s. I think you’ll find them generalizable to most senior management jobs.

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Posted July 1, 2006 | Permalink

The Marketing Database -- A Precious Asset

by Sridhar Ramanathan

One of the issues that we hear Marketing VP’s bemoan is the state of their customer list or marketing database. This seems to be the case whether it’s a startup or a Fortune 50 tech company with millions of customer records in the database. Sales managers have sales force automation systems designed just for them (e.g. Salesforce.com). And support folks have customer relationship management systems (e.g. Oracle's PeopleSoft/Siebel). But what database solution is built just for marketing managers? Well, there’s an emerging category called marketing automation which addresses the very problem of list management and lead nurturing. Here are commonly cited pain points and our recommendations.

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Posted June 24, 2006 | Permalink

The Power of Customer Seminars

by Sridhar Ramanathan

As a member of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, I get asked from time to time to participant in their “Dinner Dialogues.” These are intimate settings in which Donovan Neale-May (Executive Director of the CMO Council) does a masterful job in facilitating a dialog with 10-12 industry executives. He asks penetrating questions and provokes discussion on timely topics. The highly engaging evening resulted really in two things: 1) great networking with peers, and 2) honing the value propositions for the sponsoring vendor’s offering.

It struck me that this format (the customer seminar) is really one of the most efficient and cost effective methods in a multi-modal lead generation process. We’ve put on similar venues called “Lunch and Learns” for one of our clients, and found them a good way to educate, inform, and motivate prospects into action. Some of the key ingredients for successful customer seminars are:

• Personally invite prospects
• Bill the event as informative and interactive (not a sales pitch)
• Secure a dynamic facilitator or speaker who encourages discussion
• Capture notes on participant comments so you can personalize follow up later
• Go for the close by asking permission to follow-up later
• Follow up, follow up, follow up

Posted June 23, 2006 | Permalink

ROI Calculators – A Credible Sales Tool

by Sridhar Ramanathan

Return on Investment (ROI) calculators seem to pop up everywhere. You probably used one yourself when re-financing your home or deciding on whether to buy or lease a car. So it’s no surprise that high tech companies rely heavily on ROI models to help justify the purchase of their product or service. Some are as simple as 3-4 clicks (see Yahoo’s for pay-per-click campaigns) and some are a few pages to prove a reasonable payback (see Outsourcing Institute for sourcing or Cisco's for wireless bridges. Here are three recommendations on how best to use your ROI calculator. We close with why you might commission an ROI calculator if you don’t have one already.

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Posted June 10, 2006 | Permalink

Is Your Product "Channel Friendly"?

by Sridhar Ramanathan

A lot has to happen right to drive real revenue with your channel partners. We’ve had the fortune of working with storage companies such as Seagate, Bell Micro ($2B+ storage distributor) and security products companies (Symantec, Cisco, Reactivity, InfoExpress, and others). This experience has really helped us see that it’s not enough to do the usual tactics to drive revenue---marketing distribution funds, partner rep training, web portals loaded with sales tools, lead gen campaigns, advertising, promotions, one-to-one sales rep bonding, etc. All of that is expected. What’s essential is a product suited to the channel. Here are our recommendations.

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Posted May 7, 2006 | Permalink

The Importance of a Corporate Story

by Sridhar Ramanathan

If you're a Marketing executive you probably already appreciate greating messaging skills. We've had the wonderful opportunity to work with some of the finest messaging strategists--Rich Binell and Greg Galle of C2 LLC. In the spirit of sharing best practices, we encourage you to checkout this link where the C2 guys show you why it's important that your company have a story.

Posted April 28, 2006 | Permalink

Military lessons for Marketers

by Sridhar Ramanathan

Wayne Pollard has an excellent article published in CMO Magazine entitled Hannibal, CMO. It is both an entertaining and insightful paper. Military history has much to offer marketers by way of examples of competitive strategy and leadership. His paper reminded me of the Battle of Lexington and Concord in which the American militia shot from behind trees and walls breaking the rank and file line approach of the British. Ultimately, Lord Percy commanded the British to retreat which built confidence for the fledging American militia to win other battles. And this story is not unlike the B2B battleground of CRM players. Upstart, Salesforce.com grew from nothing to $400M in five years by attacking behemoths, PeopleSoft and Siebel, by similar "tree shooting." Rather than head-to-head offense, they flanked by penetrating the sales organization. Their icon is a " no software" sign.

Posted April 22, 2006 | Permalink

Leadership Focus -- Results versus Activities

by Sridhar Ramanathan

One of my favorite bloggers is Guy Kawasaki, ex Apple executive and CEO of Garage Technology ventures. He is both entertaining and insightful as he delivers daily advice for entrepreneurs. His recent posting, “How to Prevent a Bozo Explosion” is a must read if you are committed to stamping out bureaucracy and mediocrity in your company. One of my own pet peeves is the tendency to focus on activities rather than results. As leaders, we owe it to our organization to delineate expected results from all the urgent/important and, all too often, urgent/non-important activities that consume people.

Here’s my view of the results that sales and marketing professionals must deliver.

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Posted April 22, 2006 | Permalink

Marketing Investment Allocation -- What’s Your Risk Profile?

by Sridhar Ramanathan

My wife and I recently hired a certified financial planner to help us with our personal finances. Like many MBAs, I tend to focus more on making money than on managing it smartly. We learned that proper allocation of investments across stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and cash will yield better returns than the S& P 500 index or playing the market over the long term. The key is getting the right allocation in place and making minor tweaks perhaps quarterly and not on a reactive, daily basis. I believe the same approach can be applied to marketing investment to produce better long term results. How? Let’s look at a couple extremes.

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Posted April 14, 2006 | Permalink

Customer References – The Golden Sales Tool

by Sridhar Ramanathan

One of the most valuable sales tools is customer references. Sometimes these are easy to come by. For example, if you're the auditing firm or PR firm of record. Sometimes it's nearly impossible. Security software vendors face the hardest time. Often their customers' corporate policy is not to admit security weaknesses that drove the purchase. Most cases are in between. So what can your marketers do to sway customers to want to speak out publicly on your product?

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Posted April 9, 2006 | Permalink

Best Practices in Demand Generation

by Sridhar Ramanathan

In this article, I want to share with you best practices in demand generation. We’ve worked with many clients in this area, and I’ve been particularly impressed with Charlie Shafton, Director of Marketing Programs at Aspect Software. She has a rigorous and grounded approach to demand generation. Here’s an interview with her that I think you’ll find useful whether you’re an executive or a marketing program manager.

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Posted April 2, 2006 | Permalink

A Marketing Lesson on “American Inventor”

by Sridhar Ramanathan

Have you seen the latest show on ABC called “American Inventor”? It’s a fun show featuring inventors who pitch products. Most ideas are crazy but some are very cool. I really enjoyed the 14 year old kid who invented a portable air conditioner that hooks onto your car window and cools the car down so your dog won’t suffer heat exhaustion (or worse) while you’re shopping. The judges were taken by the boy’s passion but shot down his idea saying it was not compelling enough. Their issue came down to market size. The boy showed a flip chart with calculations based on the total number of dogs in the US. His mistake was that it was a “top down” projection rather than “bottoms up”. Even experienced entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley make the mistake of top down forecasts.

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Posted March 20, 2006 | Permalink

Seth Godin at Google

by Elise Bauer

Author and Internet marketer Seth Godin gives a talk at Google on marketing. The talk is 48 minutes long and includes questions and answers from Google employees.

Bottom line? If you can't make something remarkable, don't even bother to make it.

By "remarkable" Seth means, something worthy of being remarked upon, or talked about. Your best marketing comes from word-of-mouth of your most impressed customers.

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Posted March 5, 2006 | Permalink

Marketing’s Contribution to Closing Deals

by Sridhar Ramanathan

When people think “Marketing” they often think “advertising”, “PR”, or “promotions.” But Marketing can also play a valuable role in helping sales reps close deals. How? We offer three areas where Marketers can focus their efforts, where the rubber meets the road---at the point of sale. We believe a purchase occurs when all three factors exist---motive, means, and belief. Let’s look at each of these.

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Posted February 7, 2006 | Permalink

Gold Nuggets from the CMO Council Summit

by Sridhar Ramanathan

As a member of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, I was especially pleased with this year’s CMO Council Summit event in Monterey last week. I found it both useful and unique because it’s where Marketing executives share best practices on a number of important topics. Here’s a collection of quotes (or paraphrasing) that stood out in my mind:

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Posted November 2, 2005 | Permalink

Do You Know the “Voice” of Your Customer?

by Mike Gospe

How well do you know the business issues driving your customer’s decision process? Without this bit of strategic insight, your company’s vision may fail to take root or a well-intended product may turn out to be irrelevant or difficult to sell.

You can greatly improve your chances of succeeding in today’s marketplace if you focus your efforts on addressing the business issues that face your key customers. Consequently, it is more important than ever that you know "the voice of your customer" and that you use this knowledge to create competitive solutions that deliver real business value. A well-run Customer Advisory Board can be a highly effective tool to gain feedback on strategic priorities and company direction while solidifying relationships with top customers. (This same approach works equally well when addressing partners and suppliers, not just customers.)

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Posted October 19, 2005 | Permalink

Insights for Marketers - What I learned as a Sales Rep

by Sridhar Ramanathan

I have been a high tech marketer for eighteen years, many of which were at Hewlett-Packard, and all this time I never walked in the shoes of a quota carrying sales rep. Recently I had the opportunity to do real, quota-carrying sales on behalf of some enterprise software clients of mine. In the span of twelve months, I closed over $1M while experiencing great wins and tough losses. And boy did I learn a lot about sales! More importantly, I learned about what we can do as marketers to increase our impact on sales. Here are a few nuggets that I took away from this experience.

1. Handing off leads --- A lead is not a lead

My key frustration as a rep occurred when Marketing folks acted as if their job was done when they had delivered a “lead” when it was really just an inquiry, a response to a marketing program, or even a raw contact. Conversely, as a rep I always gravitated to “warm” introductions instead of buckling down and burning through lots of cold calls. Some truths I learned:

• Reps will do anything to avoid cold calling and greatly value warm prospects
• Over 2/3 of so called “leads” are not ready for sales action
• A lead is almost never the ultimate decision-maker but just a door opener
• Reps do not and should not nurture leads into real sales opportunities. That’s a Marketing job

Marketer tip: Get agreement upfront on the definition of a “lead” that is passed to Sales and ensure commitment to action. How? Have a closed loop process which you track carefully. For example, look at the organizational hand-offs from raw inquiry (Marketing effort) to qualified lead (Inside Sales effort) to valid sales pursuit (Sales effort). Marketing automation packages can really help track lead progress from start to finish.

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Posted July 4, 2005 | Permalink

Being Smart about Competitive Intelligence

by Sridhar Ramanathan

Andy Grove said “only the paranoid survive” referring to the hyper vigilance that all businesses should have when it comes to competition. Your product marketing managers are usually the ones charged with being the keepers of competitive information. But they often struggle to meet the demand for current, relevant competitive information. Why is that? It’s too much work for the people who know the most about competitors (sales reps and applications/systems engineers) to enter and keep the data fresh in a repository somewhere. Plus these field folks aren’t motivated to input competitive information.

So what should you advise your Product Marketing Manager to do? I recommend you send the practices below to them so they can do a better job gathering and disseminating competitive intelligence on an ongoing basis.

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Posted June 24, 2005 | Permalink

Sales and Marketing - A Sibling Rivalry or Business Partnership?

by Sridhar Ramanathan

Sometimes sibling rivalry is a good thing. It can actually push kids to carve out their identities more distinctly and to perform better. The same is true in the business world. CEOs often encourage some healthy tension to push the organization to higher levels of performance. Between Sales and Marketing, for instance, you want Sales to push Marketing to define winning products while Marketing should be pushing Sales to keep prices up despite pleas for deep discounts. The same tension exists between Engineering and Support. Support would love more design for supportability built in, and Engineering would love not to worry about documentation and supportability needs.

But sometimes sibling rivalry goes too far. Often I hear CEOs of technology companies talk about the virtual fist fights between Sales and Marketing when it comes to handoffs. Having one VP of Sales & Marketing, unfortunately, does not always remedy the issue. In fact, some of the conflicts between the silos directly lead to longer cycle times between first customer contact and final contract. This clearly hurts revenue growth. So the problem statement then is: how do I ensure the best, fastest handoffs between Sales and Marketing? What’s the right goal congruence between the two functions?

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Posted June 4, 2005 | Permalink

Bringing Edge to your Marketing Team

by Sridhar Ramanathan

Ask a Sales VP "did you make your quota last quarter?" and you get a "yes/no" answer. Ask a Marketing VP, "did you make your numbers last quarter?" and you get a blank look. Why is that? Most CEOs don't hold their Marketers and PR firm as accountable as Sales because, presumably and mistakenly, they've been told that you can't really measure Marketing output. I disagree. You can and should hold Marketing's feet to the fire just as much as any other function. Here's how.

First off, I must tell you my bias is that Marketing is here to drive demand that yields profitable sales. Full stop. Therefore, I am not a fan of big ad budgets or of lavish trade show spending just because the competition is there. Rather, I believe in surgically targeted awareness campaigns that condition the target audience for a laser-beam focused lead generation campaign separating out the real buyers.

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Posted March 6, 2005 | Permalink

The Bottom Line in Growing Top Line

by Sridhar Ramanathan

My enterprise software clients often complain about how brutal this economy is for closing deals, or why the sales process is torturously more difficult these days. The list of selling challenges grows longer ever day—decision-makers who really aren't, risk aversion causing paralysis, too many vendors chasing too few prospects, merger/acquisition activity has people focused on job preservation not ROI for the business, etc. There's one immutable reality in sales. Sales is a veritable "funnel." The more you put in, the more you get out. Even a small improvement in some key ratios will make a direct, immediate impact on sales. Let's look at three parameters in particular:

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Posted January 25, 2005 | Permalink

Be a Thought Leader!

by Elise Bauer

Small companies have to work hard to get visibility, especially when the market is crowded with competitors all vying for the same business. In high tech they face the added dilemma that IT departments don’t want to buy from a small unknown vendor, and the vendor can’t become large and reputable unless it has major customers. So, how does a company become better known with limited resources? By becoming an industry thought leader.

What’s a thought leader?
A thought leader is a recognized leader in one’s field. What differentiates a thought leader from any other knowledgeable company, is the recognition from the outside world that the company deeply understands its business, the needs of its customers, and the broader marketplace in which it operates.

Trust is built on reputation and reputation is generally NOT built on advertising. It is built on what others say about you. Become a thought leader in your field and it won’t matter as much how big you are. Companies will look to you for insight and vision. Journalists will quote you, analysts will call you, websites will link to you.

How does one become a thought leader?
Before one takes the first actionable step, a fundamental shift in mindset is needed. Thought leadership requires a spirit of generosity - generosity of one's time, intelligence and knowledge. It requires a trust that by being open with what you know, and by sharing your time and knowledge, the world will reward your efforts. With that in mind, here are steps that will help you on your way to being a thought leader:

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Posted November 10, 2003 | Permalink

Writing a Creative Brief

by Elise Bauer

Many creative marketing projects get underway without a clear sense of expectations between the marketing folks requesting the project and the creative folks delivering upon it, resulting frequently in lost time and expensive rework. A marketing brief is the best way for the marketer to clearly lay out a framework for the creative team. The process can be driven by either side - creative or marketing - but both sides need to agree on the brief before the work can commence. Here's the Creative Brief Template (click here for printable version) I used at Apple Computer for many years.

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Posted October 7, 2003 | Permalink