This is the next commentary from guest blogger John Craig, a veteran of commercializing mobile technologies. We welcome your feedback.
By John Craig
Obtaining a lighthouse customer is a critical first step in starting a business. It establishes your credibility as a seller, and creates a repeatable case study that captures the needs of your target market. The follow-on step is differentiating your business relative to the competition. Having something that others cannot easily duplicate or manufacture is critical to establishing a secure beachhead in your chosen market.
Sales may now be the least of your concerns. What may now undo you is your own marketing prowess. Your reputation is now dependant on how you execute on your next contract, and there are a number of key factors that hopefully you have prepared for.
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This is the latest contribution to this blog by Associate Bob Bailly, a Calgary-based neuro-marketing practitioner.
By Bob Bailly
My recent posts have looked at what we can learn about our business behaviour from a neuroscientific point of view. We’ve looked at how our brains have evolved and how this affects the way we behave and act. Neuroscience teaches us that the cerebral brain – the part of our brain that thinks and that differentiates humans from all other species – is a relatively recent evolutionary development, and that we are largely influenced by the living vestiges of more primitive brains within us. The decision-making part of our brain is reptilian, which allows for some useful predictive modeling.
My work, however, is not just about brain science. I believe that modern business has much to learn from all of the evolutionary sciences. Despite the drive to incorporate more and more new technology into our daily lives, we are creatures of our evolutionary past in in other ways.
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By Francis Moran
It is an article of faith that startups need funding.
For most, that means chasing external investors, whether they be friends and fools, angels or venture capitalists. Any CEO who has gone this route knows it can be an almost all-consuming task that gobbles up an inordinate share of that most restricted of resources, time. The biggest risk, besides failing to secure the necessary dollars, is that focus on the most critical objective of a new startup, developing and bringing to market an actual product, can take a back seat whilst the funding search is so fully engaged.
Too many startups fail to realise that there could well be another horse in the race to secure the money necessary to fund a new venture, a horse that is often running neck and neck with potential investors and that could, with a little judicious jockeying, beat the field to be the first past the funding post.
That horse is called your first customers and I am always amazed that so little attention is paid to this option.
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This is the fifth article in a continuing series that will feature case studies and anecdotal stories from entrepreneurs, consultants and veteran marketers about their efforts to develop, implement and measure marketing programs to bring technology to market and grow market share. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
In Part 1, we introduced Host Analytics, an enterprise software vendor that delivers a suite of corporate performance management (CPM) tools through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. We discussed how the company initially positioned itself as a “faster and cheaper” alternative to established competitors such as Hyperion – a vendor later acquired by Oracle from which many of Host Analytics’ founders had come.
By the late 2000s, Host Analytics had come to realize that its initial value proposition no longer represented the firm’s true value and wasn’t supporting its position as an emerging market leader. It needed to rebrand and reposition itself and take advantage of the fact that SaaS had begun to go mainstream as a delivery model for many enterprise applications and had found greater acceptance among finance professionals.
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This is the fourth article in a continuing series that will feature case studies and anecdotal stories from entrepreneurs, consultants and veteran marketers about their efforts to develop, implement and measure marketing programs to bring technology to market and grow market share. We invite your feedback.
By Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
In the past two months, Oracle has agreed to purchase RightNow Technologies for $1.4 billion, SAP has taken SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion, and IBM is buying DemandTec for $440 million.
What do all three of these deals have in common? An established enterprise technology vendor is buying a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendor to broaden its own product portfolio and bolster sagging sales.
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