Marketing

If you are building a product (or service) that is intended to help companies and people over the longer-term you have a dilemma on how to get them to long-term.

People have short-term attention spans and may not have the staying power to see things through if they don't start seeing benefits over the short-term. If they abandon your product before they see the value, you have a problem.

You might try to lock them into a longer term contract. The problem is that while you have the money, they still might stop using your product or at least have lost interest. If […]

In my prior post I listed 15 business challenges and received another eight (8) and counting additional ideas from the crowd. When I wrote the list I purposely stated similar problems a few different ways to see if they would form “bunches” in the responses.

Based on preliminary feedback (I’ll post an updated list later in the summer), the following are the top 5 statements/challenges:

1. Hiring good people and long-term employee retention; having the right people.
2. The people in the business are so busy with serving customers and keeping the business alive they don’t have time to work on the […]
   

I recently saw a fido ad on TV. They usually have dogs in their ads and because of that they seem to catch my attention.

In the most recent one one guy is talking to another guy and hucks a big water bottle into the distance and a dog brings back a cell phone. Then the guy says something like, this cell phone contains parts made from a recycled water bottle. Apparently fido sells several that do.

Ok, nice.

But fido doesn't make cell phones. They resell cell phones made by other companies.

They provide voice and data services.

How much recycled plastic is in […]

Entrepreneurs who build software products really know their product inside and out and have a lot of a passion for it. This is great and bad. Bad because sales often become dumps of technology, facts and features instead of truly listening to the customer.

As well, technology companies tend to focus on the product first and sales afterward.

Telling a story right from the get go is a way to bridge the gap between building and selling.

Paul Kenny gives a good presentation on how this works (posted on Joel on Software). If you are in technical sales […]