Thursday, March 28, 2024
HomeUncategorizedWeekend Startup Marketing Reading April 20

Weekend Startup Marketing Reading April 20

I’ve been on vacation this week and spending more time on the beach than on the internet. That said I did come across a couple of neat posts this week. Enjoy!

William Mougayar of engagio had a great post over on StartupNorth this week about his lessons learned over the past 3 years. I agree with a lot of what he has to say here about relationships, the danger of believing your own story if nobody else does and how helping people is important. I don’t agree with him that selling to enterprises is a dead end – but I do agree that it’s very, very different from selling to individuals. (full disclosure, I am an advisor to engagio)

Mark MacLeod at startupCFO had a nead post called Vision can Come Later talking about startups that start as services businesses that later transition to product businesses and the resulting domain expertise that comes with that. His thinking is very much in line with mine on that topic – there is no substitution for hands-on market experience.

The Content Marketing Institute has a summary of the results of the Brandpoint 2012 Digital Content Marketing Survey with some interesting data around social content, outsourcing and storytelling.

Earlier this week I posted about what startup folks are looking for in a marketing hire. MarketingProfs has a related post this week called 7 Traits of an Ideal Marketer. I agree with all of this in particular the desire to have marketers that have had some sort of sales training and also the need for great writing skills.

That’s it for this week. I’ll be in China next week working and eating as much food as I can in 6 days. I’ll be posting here but if it takes me a while to respond to comments, I will blame that on my spotty internet access. Have a great weekend.

 

RELATED ARTICLES

18 COMMENTS

  1. Thanks April for the ping back on Engagio’s story. I didn’t say that selling to the enterprise is a dead-end. It is more difficult and different than a consumer app,-that’s for sure.

    For a start-up, my point was that the best way to penetrate an enterprise is via a SaaS-based product that can infiltrate easily and where the user and usage have consumer-like characteristics. That’s a disrupting factor itself. Of course, the exception is very well funded startups that can afford a direct selling model.

    So, to come full circle on this, I think it’s the enterprise direct selling that “could” kill a start-up from the point of view of reaching a sustainable, repeatable, growing business. It’s expensive to build a sales force (even via inside sales).

    • Hi William,
      I don’t think that Saas means you don’t need a sales force. Almost all have inside sales and my team just bought a Saas based HR system from a startup with both inside and outside teams. Consumerization of enterprise IT is real and that in itself means there is a lot of opportunity there. I think where startups fail in enterprise is they fail to understand the purchase and budgeting process. Because we are all consumers, folks don’t have that problem in B2C. Plus we have the Instagram style companies where we don’t have to worry about revenue at all which certainly seems easier than selling at least in the early stages 😉
      April

Leave a Reply to David Crow Cancel reply

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Most Popular

Recent Comments

Ashawndra Edwards on Choosing a New Vertical Market
marcelene28 on Startup Marketing Podcast
Name: Johanna on How to Name Your Startup
Samuel Riksfjord on A Value Proposition Worksheet
Vivian Dilberd on Startup Marketing 101
Krissie Thornton on A Value Proposition Worksheet
Krissie Thornton on A Value Proposition Worksheet
David Locke on Startup Marketing Vs. Art
Justin Graf on Startup Marketing Vs. Art
Randomarketer on Startup Marketing Vs. Art
i2i-management.com on 3 Startup Branding Mistakes
Tim Johnson on Startup Messaging
Paul Bevan on Vertical Marketing 101
Tim Johnson on Vertical Marketing 101
Tim Johnson on Vertical Marketing 101
Alex Nimson on Vertical Marketing 101
Tim Johnson on Influencers Suck
Tim Johnson on Influencers Suck
Tim Johnson on Influencers Suck
Faisal on Influencers Suck
Kerry on Influencers Suck
Jonathan Beech on Influencers Suck
Martin Stimp on A New Marketing Framework
Tim Johnson on A New Marketing Framework
Sam Title on Press/Media Pages 101
Jonathan Beech on How to Name Your Startup
Tim Johnson on How to Name Your Startup
Johnson Choy on Startup Marketing Podcast
Andy Donovan on Startup Marketing Podcast
Maggie Jones on Startup Marketing Podcast
Joseph Dill on Startup Launches RIP
mrsprpro on Startup Launches RIP
topsy_top20k on Startup Launches RIP
JonMaster on Startup Marketing 101
topsy_top20k on Startup Marketing 101
Tony Wilson on I’m the #1 PM Blogger!
Jason Serres on I’m the #1 PM Blogger!
My boss is a Flintstone on Collateral Damage: Building a Content Plan
Steve Matthews on Spam is not Marketing
Mara Krieps on Finding First Customers
Carole-Ann Matignon on ProductCamp NYC
Adam Bullied on ProductCamp NYC
Andreas on ProductCamp NYC
Stewart Rogers on ProductCamp NYC
Roger L. Cauvin on The Art of the Customer Quote
April Dunford on Making it Real
April Dunford on Marketing Penalty Cards
April Dunford on Unhappy Customers Complain