Being the Client My friend and colleague Sophie Miller, a long-time sales executive in the direct marketing industry, once said, "In my next life, I want to come back as a client." She didn’t mean it this way (I think she meant it as "I want to be in the driver’s seat next time ’round"), but this is great advice for any member of an entrepreneurial team in a software or services business that serves other businesses. The good news is, it doesn’t require the afterlife to achieve it! Mariquita and I have done some work in our spare time the past two years for two different organizations to help them out with their technology. One is our golf course,…
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Business
Everyone’s a Marketer, Part II
Everyone’s a Marketer, Part II In Part I of this posting, I talked about how everyone’s job function is increasingly touching customers and therefore, in our networked world, everyone needs to think like a marketer. This posting has the same theme but a different spin. From the perspective of the individual person (in a company, and in life), marketing is central to success, although the definition of your target market needs to change with the circumstances. Interviewing for a job? How good a job have you done building the brand of you (your list of accomplishments)? How good is your collateral (resume)? Want to get an increase in your department’s budget or buy a new piece of hardware? Have you…
Everyone's a Marketer, Part I
Everyone’s a Marketer, Part I While there’s a specific marketing department at most companies, I think in today’s inter-connected, service-oriented business, everyone in the company is a marketer. Ok, it’s probably more true in some industries than others, but consider these pockets of marketing activity from non-sales/marketing personnel: – Our front line customer service manager, Anthony, is on the phone with hundreds of customers each week answering questions about their email subscriptions or helping them unsubscribe. His mission? Make sure they understand our services and try to get as many of them as possible to stay on with us. – Our client data coordinators Jeremy and Tom talk and email with clients regularly as we send data back and forth…
What Does Business Feel Like?
Mariquita and I spent last Saturday helping out our cousins, Michael and Marianne, at their wine shop, Hudson Wine Merchants, in Hudson, NY. I wrote a posting about one of our other trips up there earlier this year on how running a two-person proprietorship is an awful lot like running a larger company. Last weekend, my takeaway from working in the shop was in some ways the opposite. Yes, business is business, and yes, you worry about some of the same broad things when you run a business of any size, but it FEELS different to run a small retail shop. What does it feel like? Well, quite frankly, it feels like business. Here’s what happens at the store in…
Toys Wur Us?
(With full credit to my colleague Mike Mayor for the title) Today’s announcement that Toys R Us was probably going to sell its retail toys business to focus on the better performing and higher margin and less Wal-Mart-threatened Babies R Us business made me a little sad. It’s really no different than the way Sandy Weill turned American Can into Primerica asset management. Or how Jack Welch sold off GE’s small appliance business and built the company into a financial services powerhouse. Companies transform themselves all the time in search of better earnings and higher multiples. But although it’s “just another” one of those corporate evolutions, I can’t help the notalgiac reflections on running up and down the aisles of…