Marketing

Build and Amplify Your Reputation

Understanding and shaping perception is the first step to building a successful reputation, and to be an effective marketer, you must do everything in your power to build, control, and stimulate it. It is particularly important for technology startups to cultivate a positive perception - you want to be perceived as successful before you are actually successful. Success can be communicated in three ways: inferred, referred, and proven.

Every CMO Should Try To Sell

About 17 years ago, I was a software sales guy. I had been a product manager for a product that did not exist. We had just gotten a new CEO and he told me to go and create the PRD (Product Requirements Document) for a web-enabled version of our property management and central reservation system. I completed this assignment and the product was ultimately developed ...

Outsourcing Inside Sales

In a B2B technology sales context, the ISR (inside sales representative) is a highly specialized role tasked with sourcing prospects and converting them into sales appointments for outside sales. ISRs are not telesales or telemarketing people. That is, ISRs do not actually sell anything over the phone or online. There is no transaction or order processing. The ISR function is a critical one for startups but it is often a disappointment. In this post, I will discuss the reasons why this function is sub-optimal for most startups.