Value Propositions and elevator pitches live in the rarefied air of marketing speak. They are almost seen as mystical accomplishments reachable by only the anointed among us. "But what's the elevator pitch" we hear time and time again....Give me the 30 second...
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Velocity Marketing Evolution – How to Achieve Extreme Marketing Breakthrough, Pipeline Velocity and ROI
Today's buyer is information overloaded, bandwidth constrained and fiercely independent. A recent survey by the Corporate Executive Board reported that 57% of the new B2B sales cycle is DONE before the buyer's first formal contact to the selected vendor. ...
Cirque Du Soleil and Setting the Stage – Viewpoint Abounds
(Note: Viewpoint is a critical part of my Breakthrough Marketing Framework, to learn more about how it fits with Value and Velocity to create impact and breakthrough, read this post...Ken ) Walking across the Santa Monica pier, my senses rose to an unusually high...
Driving High Velocity Pipeline – Experience, Engagement and Delivery
It's been almost a year since I starting blogging about the role of Experience in the new Cloud Go To Market strategy. In my post on Bridging to SaaS Success; A Basic Blueprint, I said: Go To Market Tactics: E -> E: Evaluation to Experience. Today's go to market...
Tilting to Abundance: Using Value to Outsmart Your Competition, And They Won’t Even Know It!
In his seminal work 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, Steven Covey introduces a concept of an Abundance Mindset, Wikipedia describes it like this: Covey coined the idea of abundance mentality or abundance mindset, a concept in which a person believes there are...
Finding Your Viewpoint, It’s All a Cash Cow to Me!
(Note: Viewpoint is a critical part of my Breakthrough Marketing Framework, to learn more about how it fits with Value and Velocity to create impact and breakthrough, read this post...Ken ) In my recent blog on High Impact Marketing, I said, Viewpoint is a framing of...
Never Punt – Winning by Challenging Conventional Wisdom
Unless you are a hardcore (American) football fan, or happened to just catch the latest episode of HBO Real Sports, you may have never heard of Coach Kevin Kelley of Pulaski Academy in Little Rock Arkansas. But if you are a football fan, I'd imagine you may hear...
Delivering Breakthrough Marketing: Viewpoint, Value and Velocity
Most CEOs I talk to have a jaded, if not skeptical view of marketing. While they recognize the importance of marketing to their long term success, they have a hard time understanding and measuring how well marketing is doing. And while more mature organizations have...
Are You Experienced? – A Declaration for 2012?
When I was a wet behind the ears sales rep in the Rolling Meadow's Illinois branch office in 1986 (yes, they had computers back then :)), I remember the big sign that hung on the wall;Calls + Demos = SalesNow this office sold everything from PCs to copiers (yes, IBM...
Poking Through the Clouds, Three Strategies for STANDOUT Category Positioning
About 5 yrs ago, I had the pleasure of sitting through sales training with John Costigan. I remember John's opening as he said something like, "How are you?" and got the typical quite reaction. John went on to say something like, "when I am asked, I say "OUTSTANDING"...
Find Your Glider Bike – Paths to Successful SaaS Transitions
I am constantly surprised at how much my 4 kids teach me, but sometimes it's really cool!!! Owen, my youngest is a typical 3 1/2 year old boy, energetic, physical and fearless. He's been riding on a glider bike for the last year, and loves to blast down hills with his...
Getting Your Head Around Mindset – Driving Successful Transformations
(Ken's note Sept 2016 - This is an older blog, but a relevant one still) I recently finished my blog series on Bridging to SaaS Success, and I've been thinking a lot about one part of that framework, Mindset. I talked about the SaaS mindset, and said, "Mindset is made...
Tale of 2 Panels- The Cloudy Future Of Enterprise Tech Sales
A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending the Goldman Sachs Cloud Computing conference in Menlo Park, Ca. Goldman put an amazing group of companies and execs on stage. Particularly interesting to me was the conflict in opinion between the "Selling SaaS...
SaaS Go To Market – Why Experience Rules
This is my fourth blog in my series on Bridging to SaaS Success and today I'd like to focus on Go To Market Strategy. Once we have shifted our mindset from product to serviceand ourorganization from linear to circular, we must now bridge our go to market strategy,...
Surround the Customer – Why You Must Rearchitect Your Organization for SaaS Success
Continuing my blog series on bridging to SaaS success, today I want to talk about transitioning from a linear to a circular organization architecture. Once I have adopted a SaaS Mindset, the next think I need to do is build the supporting infrastructure to SaaS...
Rather than piling on Amazon…let’s talk SaaS mindset
July 3, 2012 Update: I wrote this post over a year ago, in April 2011, when Amazon had a significant outage. In the wake of this weeks outages, I thought it was worth reposting...) April 2011: The easy thing to do today would be to pontificate about the Amazon...
Bridging to SaaS Success – A Basic Blueprint
(June 2012 - A quick note and update: While I originally wrote this series in early 2011, today it seems both slight dated, but also more relevant than ever. While I still see packaged software vendors, nearly 100% now have significant SaaS/PaaS and IaaS efforts...