A year ago today, I challenged myself to read err listen to more books in 2018. Thanks to a long commute and Audible, I hit my goal. Here’s a quick review of all the new books I read in 2018 (in alphabetical order) with my unscientific rating at the end. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies [...]
Bad Bros and Bad Blood: a Summer Vacation Book Report
Hey kids: I know you hate all that summer reading you get assigned at the end of every school year. But when you grow up, you’ll discover that reading books is actually the best part of your summer vacation. Here’s what I read on my summer vacation. Brotopia — by Emily Chang I already knew most of the [...]
How to do A/B/N testing in a Pardot Engagement Stream
Want to do A/B testing in a Pardot Engagement Stream? You can’t 😦 Well, not without a little bit of customization. Here’s a simple workaround for doing A/B/N testing in a Pardot engagement stream using a Salesforce APEX trigger. I won’t get into the details of building an APEX trigger, so if you aren’t comfortable with [...]
Debunking Five Analyst Relations Myths
Analyst relations is easily the most misunderstood function in marketing. I’ve been involved with analyst relations — or AR — for over a decade, working on dozens of Gartner Magic Quadrants and Forrester Waves. I’ve experienced the impact that analyst relations, when done well, can have on growth. And I know how much time and effort it takes to [...]
What I Learned Building an App on the Drift Platform
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away — I was a Computer Science major at the University of Illinois. I grew up programming in BASIC on a variety of hardware, including my beloved TI 99/4A and then later a Commodore Amiga. My parents came up with a brilliant strategy to get me to learn [...]
Your Best Startup Strategy is Better Execution
It’s the most wonderful time of the year. No, not that time. The other one. The time where your startup gets together and starts planning for the upcoming year. Some of you have already finished this process, but with my fiscal year ending in January, I’m currently in the midst of it. That’s why this [...]
Lessons Learned Shifting to Product Qualified Leads
The Death of the Marketing Qualified Lead? A little over a year ago I wrote an article about killing the marketing qualified lead. Here’s a quick refresher: Once upon a time, sales and marketing hated each other. Sales complained about never having enough leads, and marketing complained that sales were terrible at following up and [...]
Predictive Account Based Inbound Agile Marketing Automation
We’ve hit peak Account Based Marketing. I’ve received 5 emails this week from vendors extolling the virtues of ABM. I’ve been invited to one dinner, two lunches, received a $50 Amazon gift card, and was told by Marketo that “According to 97% of marketers, account-based marketing (ABM) achieved a higher ROI than other marketing initiatives.” [...]
When Marketing Personas Fail
Marketing personas are those fictional people with the clever names like Statistical Stephen at RapidMiner or Marketing Mary at HubSpot. Personas are formed through extensive quantative and qualitative research, and who represent the ideal prospects for your product. Goofy names aside, complete getting alignment across your target personas and more broadly across your entire customer [...]
How to Send Almost Anything to Microsoft Teams using Webhooks and Zapier
Microsoft Teams is set to take on the new breed of collaboration apps like Slack and Hipchat. Each collaboration area is called a Team — and each Team can have multiple channels. Within a channel you have all the basics like chat (with emojis!) and document sharing, but it really gets interesting when you connect Teams to [...]
