An exit is an exit….
An exit is an exit…. This is what one thoughtful friend said to meet soon after Tesora was sold to Stratoscale last year. I was fortunate to stay on with them for another few months and work with a team that reminded of the legendary hospitality of my friends in Israel (special thanks Uzi Krieger, Uri Baum, Yifat Danieli, Maya Green, Shira Sarid-Hausirer and Ariel Maislos). I also spread my Agile Marketing gospel while picking up a few new tricks along the way. In the process, I realized that working with a team 7 time zones away from a leased office was not my long term destiny. This brings me to the present. It started with a quick Skype message from a favorite former boss, Ken Rugg. Something about getting the band back together. It would be an opportunity to return to my roots (product marketing) for a growing company in the open source software space (sounded like a familiar song). In back in December I joined EnterpriseDB. The team is great and we will be marketing EDB Postgres including cloud database products and managed services. See John Babers, I finally updated my LinkedIn profile. Transitions are never easy and I am fortunate to have many FOTS (Friends of the Slice) for moral support along the way. There are too many to name but here are a few that require a shout out including Lori Cohen, Lora K. of Scratch Marketing, Richard Delahaye, my marketing plumber David Karp, fellow Polar Bear John Evans, Doug Shelley, Matthew T. Grant Ph.D., Marc Osofsky, Glenn Rossman, Bill Baker, Lorita Ba, Alex Campanelli, Andrea Jackson, Ian Bruce, William Toll, Sumeet Sabharwal, Carole Bailey, and the Any Excuse crew. As always, I will continue to shamelessly network and take care of my peeps. If you should find yourself in Boston 128 area, there are many excellent lunch options in the area including the best Sichuan food on the east coast. Finally, Roland Smart and I are still podcasting. Slowly marketers are waking up to the transformational powers of Agile. If you are trying it, we would love to chat. If you are just curious about how people are trying to make it happen then subscribe. Well, an exit is an exit…. and lots more. Thank you to all who were a part of my wild ride and bright future. And as always stay tangy my...
Ten reasons why I’m a #mktgnerd
know I haven’t been blogging and tweeting much lately (too busy in startup land) but I can’t believe you left me off your list of #mktgnerds. While I lack any empirical evidence, I hope that you will consider the following evidence to justify my inclusion.
The summer of Frank part deux?
When Attachmate completed its purchase of Novell and I found myself “on the street”, I thought I was all set for another summer of Frank. The great news, however, is that I received a job offer about 48 hours after my “departure” from Novell. My new role is leading marketing for Correlsense, a private software firm in the application performance management space. It has a bunch of happy customers, interesting technology, great investors and strong revenue growth – things I am very excited about.
Are benchmarks for losers?
In baseball, there is an old adage that “stats are for losers”. This refers to the fact that fans often resort to talking about the stats of their favorite team or players when they are losing. In pro sports, winning is what matters – all else is background noise. Most recently I was discussing effective metrics and the role of benchmarks with a friend when it was then it dawned on me that one could reasonably argue that, like in baseball, “benchmarks are for losers”. Don’t get me wrong. I am a numbers geek and love meticulously calculated points of reference. They are very useful as a sanity check to make sure you are in the right zip code when launching a new marketing program or trying something completely different. My main complaints with benchmarks are as follows: Specificity – In the B2B technology marketing, many benchmarks are aggregated across wide range of categories and in the end I can never seem to get that elusive number for my specific market segment or market leading competitor. Mediocrity – Benchmarks are often stated as industry averages. Sorry, but I am not interested in being average. Local optimization – Great, your PPC clickthrough rate is between your industry benchmark of 1-2%. Your part of the world is “meeting expectations”. So what. That number is directionally interesting but your CEO wants to know what revenue and pipeline you are driving. How are you contributing to the overall results of the business? Laziness – Calculating marketing influenced revenue and pipeline is a hassle. It often requires some CRM alchemy and (gasp) assumptions about attribution. Worse yet, enterprise CRM systems make it virtually impossible for the average marketer to scrape, match and join the tables to connect leads to revenue. Those who can make this work have a huge advantage and can avoid the benchmark-based metrics trap. Expectations – Winners look to set the standard of performance rather than measure themselves against the average. The choice is yours – you can use benchmarks to measure yourself against average performers or you can strive to set the standard. In my opinion, comparing yourself to benchmarks will never make you a winner. Only continuous improvement and pushing programs beyond worn performance assumptions will. Winners disregard old assumptions about the way things are done and try new things to reach new performance levels. Unless you have firm comparables from industry leaders then you are likely comparing yourself to the middling your market and are destined to be average at best. I’ve ranted about ruthlessness before and without true results-driven metrics and benchmarks how can we truly hold...
Ten signs you are a skeptical marketer
You ask for goals and metrics before a project starts You search for analogous historical programs to give you sense of potential results You ask too many questions when a vendor uses jargon or overly technical terms You talk with others who have tried this type of marketing before You push vendors for CPA or pay for performance deals You make vendors give you the full volume price until a medium is proven You don’t believe the hype about anything that is hot You start with a low cost test whenever possible You believe in results over rate cards Your colleagues ask you to critique their programs to help improve results. Did I mention I am hosting a new webinar and podcast series for the Skeptical CMO ? Did I miss any...
And you may ask yourself-well…how did I get here?
The Talking Heads were playing on the radio as I made my trek to the train this morning. I imagine many people are asking this very question today about their personal and professional lives. What did I do to get into this situation? I guess the better question now is “what do I do to make the the most of my future opportunities”? All the cliches about hard work and “making our own breaks” aside, now is the time to think about what could happen before it happens. Many times in my professional life I am asked to help people locked up with too many “priorities”. My strategy is simple. Make a list of everything that is on his/her mind and force rank them by priority (A, B or C). I know we want it all but we can’t. It is better to make a decision about priorities than have it emerge based on unintentional neglect. The decision will be made now or later. Isn’t it more empowering to make it yourself than have it make itself? So what are you doing to make the hard...
