What’s Working in Marketing

All too often, industrial companies set product prices based on their incremental costs and wind up under-valuing their products. If hardware-based products are priced incorrectly, can this be avoided when prices are set for software deliverables that have very low incremental costs? How can a company get software revenue when they encourage hardware sales by [...]

On January 31st, ISA’s Marketing & Sales Summit hosted a (virtual) standing-room only crowd for their webinar, “Preparing Sales to Sell a New Solution.” Matt Leary, Principal at Solutions Insights, and Dr. Peter Martin, VP at Invensys Operations Management, wow’d the crowd with practical advice and been-there-done-that examples. Thank you to our speakers and also [...]

I have lots of friends who work in traditional sales roles. The interesting issue is that fewer and fewer have traditional sales titles. The ones that do — inside sales, telemarketing, field sales, sales rep, etc — have to work extra hard to overcome the bad vibes of the stereotype. Daniel Pink, author of a [...]

Many of the marketing and sales techniques we take for granted were invented over 200 years ago by Josiah Wedgewood (yes, of Wedgewood china fame). The NY Times wrote an interesting article in 2009 about a sad event…Wedgewood’s bankruptcy. Josiah was an unlikely hero. He was the 13th child of an impoverished potter; a childhood [...]

In a tight economy, most people love a good deal. Heck, I love a good deal even when the economy is purring. So it’s really no surprise that Groupon is taking off. According to their site: Groupon negotiates huge discounts—usually 50-90% off—with popular businesses. We send the deals to thousands of subscribers in our free [...]

One of the reasons I love Twitter is I get introduced to new people and thinking that I wouldn’t have normally known about.  One of those examples happened today, when I was reading my stream and @Ardath421 tweeted this article written by @bobapollo. Bob shared information from a recent webinar where Sirius Decisions published results [...]

At this year’s ISA Marketing & Sales Summit, Scott Sommer and I tag-teamed again for the third year in a row to talk about the intersection of marketing and sales.  Since the theme for this year was “In Search of the Holy Grail:  Integrating Marketing and Sales” we put together a presentation that looked at [...]

The theme for the upcoming ISA Marketing & Sales Summit “In Search of the Holy Grail: Integrating Marketing and Sales”, and the Summit is running a blogging contest to win a iPod Touch if folks blog about a topic relevant to the upcoming Summit.  So, here’s my “entry”… although I’m not really qualified to win..I [...]

We’re still recovering from the ISA Marketing & Sales Summit in Boston last week. It was the 4th annual event and, I think, the best ever. We had a great group of speakers from the automation industry, and engaged senior-level attendees from marketing and sales. It was 3 days of interesting conversations and idea exchange. [...]

We’re marketing gurus…not masters of world economics. But we know what to watch for when it comes to the ups and downs in our industry. We’ve heard a lot of talk that the economy is picking itself back up off the floor. And we are seeing some good news in manufacturers’ financials. So if our [...]