On Marketing

I recently attended another meeting of the Boston Entrepreneur’s Network. The panel this month included Jerry Bird, vice president of the Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation. MTDC is a venture capital firm set up years ago by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and focused entirely on investments in Massachusetts firms.

The program that evening dealt with business plans: How to construct them and how to present them to the investment community. The speakers were all members of the investment community. In other words, they were the people who read business plans and decide where to invest. If you were an entrepreneur looking for funding, that panel was a great source of expert advice!

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I was thinking today about established companies and why they have such a hard time launching products in new categories. Or digesting a start-up that is launching such products. Somehow, the launch effort just doesn’t get off the ground. Sometimes this is obviously due to lackluster marketing effort. But maybe, even with the kind of blockbuster launch only a large company can muster, it doesn’t work.

Why is that? We tend to blame “largeness” or “bureaucracy” or the “politics” of large companies. But I don’t think that’s the real reason. New launches fail in established companies because they require the company to have multiple personalities.

Let me explain.

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I recently spent some time with Jane Adamson and Rick McPartlin of The Revenue Game. These folks are consultants who focus on helping their clients (small and mid-sized businesses) figure out why they are not meeting their revenue targets. It seems that most companies in this situation look at simple-minded fixes like changing their sales commission structure or launching a new ad campaign. But Jane and Rick usually find that there are more systemic issues — for example, their client may not be making a clear offer to their prospective customers because they have not clearly defined the offer they wish to make.

Jane and Rick have a number of diagnostic tools that help them dig down to the root causes of revenue shortfall. But one of these caught my eye because it is so relevant to a company’s marketing strategy.

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Back in April, Mike Volpe of HubSpot presented an excellent webinar on the potential for using social networking sites as marketing tools. Mike’s presentation changed my view of social networking as a useful business tool. It also confirmed another important marketing trend I’ve been noticing — a trend that may make your current marketing programs totally ineffective (or even detrimental).

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