by Melissa Madian | Tweet this It’s the beginning of 2013, and with it comes the traditional flurry of demand generation/business development/sales reps sending me emails on why I should buy their product/service. I’m always fascinated to learn why a rep thinks I would be interested in purchasing their product and gauging how far off the mark they are. ” Dear Sales Rep: We are not best friends – why would I give you that information? People buy from people, and they pay attention when a colleague’s name is mentioned. Or Twitter. MORE >>

Crossing the chasm is exactly the wrong strategy for many of the newest and most innovative technology products today, especially many cloud services and SaaS products. If you haven’t read  Crossing the Chasm yet, here’s a 1-paragraph primer:  Moore contends that innovative technology products sell first to a market of innovators and early adopters. Later, products can be marketed to a more lucrative mainstream (“majority”) market. If you’re managing such a product and wondering how you should be crossing the chasm, you may be asking the wrong question. MORE >>

Segmentation offers a range of benefits for Marketing and Sales organizations, but there are a lot of ways segmentation can fail. Here are a few, along with MLC’s insights on avoiding these pitfalls: Failing to get the segments right. The most effective segmentation schemes go beyond topical similarities, like industry, company size/revenue, and geographic footprint. Instead, best-in-class segmentation processes split customers and prospects out according to deeper needs, desired outcomes, and priorities. Focusing on the wrong segments. MORE >>

what about the realities of having a broad set of products that range in price by a factor of over 10x? Last week we opened up public access to Eloqua’s best practices community portal where the biggest and most vibrant community of marketers gets to work, tackles challenging business problems, and builds the lead management processes that power their businesses. Given the response to the last post, I wanted to share with you our thinking on transparency, social CRM, and best practice knowledge. The knowledge, best practices, tips, tricks, analysis, and ideas are all there. MORE >>

The first and often largest challenge we see organizations encounter when creating their first insight-based pitch deck is identifying their underappreciated, unique strengths in the market that will lead to them as the only supplier positioned to best fulfill customers’ newly taught needs. In our research over the years here at SEC, we’ve identified several ways the best companies approach distinguishing their differentiators and answering the age old question, “Why should customers buy from us?”. Blog Customer Segmentation Sales & Service Solutions Selling MORE >>