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My 2018 Book Report
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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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.” […]
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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 […]
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A Primer on Developer Marketing
TL;DR marketing to developers is hard, and you are probably doing it wrong. The unstoppable rise of the developer My former Acquia colleague David Churbuck introduced me to RedMonk’s Steve O’Grady and his 2014 book about how developers are taking over the world, called The New Kingmakers. The idea is that successful companies empower developers […]
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When Sales and Marketing Best Practices Become Average Practices
No one got fired for buying IBM? In the 80s, IBM dominated tech from the desktop to the datacenter. Buyers often picked IBM because they were safe choice, not the right choice. It didn’t matter. Buying IBM became the accepted best practice for CIOs. It was an emotional decision, not a rational one. People generally don’t […]
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Is Specialization Bad for Startup Marketing?
We’re starting to run a Scrumban process in RapidMiner marketing. Scrumban is a great way accelerate output by creating more transparency around priorities in the hectic world of startup marketing. We’ve got our Scrumban board, with all colorful kanbans beautifully laid out into various columns. RapidMiner’s Scrumban board, blurred As we get into Scrumban, we often […]
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You’ve been asked to cut your marketing budget. Now what?
Unicorpses. Layoffs. Bursting bubbles. Winter is coming. Every day there’s a new story on the 2016 techpocalypse. Having lived through the 2000 dot com crash, this is nothing like it. But something has changed, so let’s start with a quick recap of how we got here. Starting in late 2012, tech companies began to raise […]