I am fascinated by a recent Gartner study about the journey of 700 enterprise buyers across the U.S., EMEA, Brazil, India and China. According to a recent interview with Hank…
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Technology Buyers
It’s a buyer’s market, so why do marketers think like sellers?
Knowing your buyer isn’t exactly a new idea. I first learned to interview buyers in the 80’s when I was with Regis McKenna, the PR firm that represented Apple, Intel…
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Marketers need to find a premium-price position for mature products
Almost every product eventually runs out of room to add capabilities that really matter to new buyers. Unless the company can find a premium-price position, the sales people will struggle for every deal through hand-to-hand combat and discounting.
Persona marketing ebook available . . . please pass it around
Anyone who follows this blog knows how passionate I am about persona marketing. For me and countless others, buyer personas have stopped the madness of checklist marketing. But as I…
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A new year, a new decade, a new chance to help buyers find answers to their problems
Judging by the current interest in buyer personas, 2010 could be the decade when companies realize the competitive advantage that belongs to those companies that have the deepest insight into…
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CIO buyer persona needs new messaging
Just about everyone I know is working feverishly to update their messaging strategies. The abrupt downturn in the economy has caused most prospects to rethink their priorities and “buying criteria”–…
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Buyer personas get personal
Working on a buyer persona for a chief information officer last week, my client listed the predictable pain points on the flip chart — shrinking budgets, conflicting priorities, legacy solutions…
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Demo on the first date, anyone?
I’ve been asked to talk about a narrow but controversial topic – whether products should be demonstrated at tradeshows. Some of my colleagues say that this is a bad idea,…
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Right-brained or left-brained marketing
I grew up thinking I’d be a fashion designer. My foray into the computer industry was accidental and (I thought) temporary. There’s a long story here, but the short version…
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Blogging for buyer persona input
Kudos to Tim Buntel at Adobe for a series of blog posts about the buyer personas he needs to influence. After attending the Effective Product Marketing seminar, he developed a…
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