Posted by Editor on June 18th, 2009
MDV Venture Partner Geoffrey Moore recently participated in a Genius.com sales-focused webinar hosted by CEO David Thompson. Their discussion focused on Geoffrey’s recent Harvard Business Review article, In a Downturn, Provoke your Customers, which challenges old consulting-based methods. He shared perspective on why this bold approach is critical to success in today’s tough market and provides tips about how to help sell even when “the budgets aren’t there”.
The conversation prompted many questions, which Geoffrey went on to answer, such as:
Q. If you sell to multiple verticals, should you toggle between solution and provocation?
A. Think of provocation based selling as a pick and solution selling as a shovel. The former is for creating budget, the latter for consuming it. As long as there is budget in play, you do not need to provoke. But wherever the answer is, we don’t have budget for that, then provoking is warranted.
The higher order question may be, how much resource can we devote to provocation-based selling, given that it does not scale the way solution selling does. This is a very real issue, and it could lead you to restrict your focus to a single vertical. In that case, make sure you pick the one that has the biggest upside for your company.
For more on the questions raised and answers shared, continue reading the full Q&A here.
Tags: sales, sales strategies
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Posted by Editor on March 30th, 2009
This contributed article by Matt Cutler, Visible Measures Vice President of Marketing and Analytics, was written for Ad Age
Consuming internet video is a full-contact sport — the initial viewing experience is just a gateway to the commenting, rating, sharing and even remixing or mashing up the original video content. And what brand doesn’t want to tap into this new class of consumer behavior, making their ads “go viral” (cough) and picking up millions of “free” (cough, cough) impressions?
But our experience shows there’s a world of difference between building a video campaign intended to go viral and actually having the target consumer embrace and extend it. The interest gap between embraced and stalled viral video ad campaigns is massive: as much as 20 times in terms of total campaign reach.
Read more here:
Tags: online video, video metrics
Posted in Marketing | 1 Comment »
Posted by Editor on March 5th, 2009
By Geoffrey Moore, MDV Venture Partner
What you are likely to find in a downturn is that niche markets will take precedence over mass markets. That is because the most compelling value propositions—the ones that move even a tight-fisted customer to spend in tough times—tend to be local rather than global. Thus the financial services industry will be under enormous pressure to spend on compliance solutions, the health care industry on productivity solutions, and the media and advertising communities on better targeted marketing solutions. General purpose productivity investments, by contrast, are more likely to be put on hold.
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