Posts by Josh Zywien

Aligning Sales and Product Management: One Way to Win More Business

Via Business 2 Community on No Responses

Sales and product teams aren’t typically the best of friends. But aligning sales and product management can go a long way toward building a stronger company.

aligning sales and product management

When it comes to aligning sales and product management teams in expansion-stage businesses, the relationship should come natural. After all, says product manager Jock Busuttil, customers need something, the product team can build it, and the sales team can sell it — which means creating that alignment should be the simplest thing a technology business does. Unfortunately, Busuttil explains in a post for Business 2 Community, that’s not usually how it works.

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Video Marketing: 5 Steps to Capitalizing on the Video Boom

Via FastCompany on No Responses

Online and tablet videos are a red hot content marketing currency — and they’re about to get hotter. Find out how to take advantage of the video marketing boom.

video marketing

With more than four billion hours of video watched on YouTube every month and some research suggesting that customers that watch a brand’s video are 85 percent more likely to purchase that companies’ products or services, it’s no wonder why video marketing is all the rage today. And that excitement is only going to grow over the next five years, says videographer Kerrin Sheldon in a guest post for FastCompany. Is your company positioned to embrace and capitalize on that video boom?

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Cracking the Code: 5 Tips for Communicating with Software Developers

Via Entrepreneur.com on No Responses

For most non-technical entrepreneurs, communicating with sales, marketing, and customer service team members is easy. Communicating with software developers? Well, that can be a bit more challenging.

communicating with software developers

In a perfect world, all of the employees in high-tech companies would speak the same business language. That way, founders and CEOs could communicate their vision in one fell swoop — saving themselves time and frustration, and ensuring that everyone would be on the same page. Unfortunately,  that’s not really how it works. In fact, as Nelly Yusupova writes for Entrepreneur, communicating with software developers often requires non-technical entrepreneurs to different approach entirely.

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3 Sales Scripts to Conquer Common Sales Objections

Via Inc.com on No Responses

Sales can sometimes feel like you’re repeatedly slamming your head against the wall. Unless, of course, you’re well prepared to overcome the most common sales objections.

sales objections

Most seasoned salespeople have heard them before. “I can get a cheaper solution from another vendor,” or “I didn’t have a good experience with your company in the past.” Both are the kind of common — and cliche — sales objections that drive sales pros nuts. But as respected sales pro Tom Hopkins tells Inc.com’s Geoffery James, all you really need to overcome those sales objections is a good script, a smile, and a little persistence.

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photo by: Phil Roeder

Brand Marketing and Big Data: Are You Ready for Marketing’s New Era?

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Big Data is here to stay, and it’s creating significant brand marketing opportunities for savvy marketers. Are you prepared to embrace it?

brand marketing

In a guest post for Branding Strategy Insider, J. Walker Smith, Executive Chairman of the The Futures Company, writes that like Noah and The Flood, marketing insiders and media types alike have been foretelling the era of Big Data for some time now. Yet, as it relates to brand marketing, few B2B marketers seem to really understand it and even fewer seem to be embracing it effectively.

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Heaving a Hail Mary: Football Lessons for Launching a Product

Via Good Product Manager on No Responses

It might not be the most obvious analogy, but football can teach startup founders and technology entrepreneurs quite a bit about launching a product.

launching a product

Like an NFL team with a sputtering offense and a porous defense, many startup and expansion-stage technology companies struggle with the process of launching a product. Inevitably, writes Jeff Lash on his blog How to Be a Good Product Manager, that results in ineffective and costly go-to-market failures that leave those companies with no choice but to heave a Hail Mary.

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photo by: Phil Roeder

Corporate Decision Making: Empowering a Culture of Decision Democracy

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As the founder of a growing startup or expansion-stage company, it can be difficult to relinquish or redistribute corporate decision making to anyone other than senior-level executives.

corporate decision making

But according to entrepreneur Robert Jordan in a post for Forbes.com, corporate decision making does not need to start at the top of your company’s hierarchy. In fact, it might do your business a world of good to empower employees to make some key decisions (and mistakes).

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The Price is Wrong: Why Acquisitions Fail

Via Business Insider on No Responses

Acquisitions can often provide a lucrative and exciting exit for entrepreneurs and their shareholders. They can also be a headache if founders don’t understand six reasons why acquisitions fail after they’ve been completed.

why acquisitions fail

While acquisitions tend to provide thrilling windfalls for startup founders and their shareholders, the afterglow of those exits don’t often last long. That’s because, as serial entrepreneur and University of Michigan professor Jim Price writes in a post for Business Insider, history shows that most M&A deals are never as sweet as they initially appear, and there are numerous reasons why acquisitions fail in the end.

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Positive Influence: Using Social Media Influencers to Boost Your Brand Message

Via CMSWire on No Responses

Whether you like it or not, your market’s key social media influencers — not your website or marketing materials — are sometimes the medium through which your most important customers and prospects first hear your brand’s story.

social media influencers

In a post for CMSWire, Dan Berthiaume suggests that B2B customers are increasingly relying on other people — namely, the key social media influencers in your space — to learn more about your company and its products or services. As a result, Berthiaume says B2B marketers must ask themselves a critical question. Is the story that those influencers are telling a positive one?

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Is Native Advertising the Future of Content Marketing?

Via B2B Digital Marketing on No Responses

While native advertising may be a new term, it’s not a new idea. And it might be opening new doors for marketers to deliver their content to much larger audiences.

advertising

What is native advertising? In a post for B2B Digital Marketing, Eric Wittlake explains that it’s not a groundbreaking concept. Quite simply, it’s a term that encapsulates the intersection of advertising and content marketing, and the destruction of the wall that once stood between advertisers and publishers. But the simplicity of native advertising ends there.

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