Tag Archives: Salesforce.com

Cyber Lessons from Black Friday

Black Friday offers an important lesson for cyber (i.e., enterprise software) solution marketers. 

Bombarded by Black Friday

Cyber lessons from Black FridayOver the last few weeks, we’ve been bombarded with a never-ending stream of Black Friday TV commercials. These included a litany of TV commercials for BMWs and other cars on sale for Black Friday. Maybe it’s all due to a surge in self-gifting, although experts were predicting a drop for 2014.

In a world where everything from clothes to cars was on sale on or around Black Friday, retailers were competing against just about every other retailer for the $381 that the typical shopper spent this past weekend, according to the National Retail Federation.  That included direct competitors offering similar goods, indirect competitors who offered different goods that solved the same problem (say, giving a nice gift) and what I’ll call Share of Budget competitors who solved different problems but competed for the same budget.

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Filed under Solution Marketing Strategy, Solutions, Value

Solution Marketing Best Practices – Presentation at ProductCamp Boston

ProductCamp Boston


Learn from Leaders Including Intuit, PowerAdvocate, HubSpot, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce.com, Among Others

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Filed under Case Studies, Presentations, ProductCamp, Resources (additional), SIVA - Elements of Solution Marketing, Solution Marketing

Join Me At ProductCamp Boston

ProductCamp Boston

Solution Marketing at ProductCamp Boston!

I’m psyched to be attending the second ProductCamp Boston tomorrow.  If you’re already planning to attend, I hope you’ll attend the two sessions I’m planning to present/facilitate.  And please make sure to vote for these sessions during morning voting!

  • Solution Marketing Best Practices (Presentation and Discussion)
    Today, customers want more than software products alone – they want comprehensive solutions that solve their business problems. During this presentation, we’ll look at how leading software companies are using solution marketing.  You’ll learn best practices and gain new ideas that you can use in your organization.  Companies included: Intuit, PowerAdvocate, HubSpot, IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Comcast, Salesforce.com and Amazon.  Watch the preview on Brainshark.

Thanks to the ProductCamp team for organizing what looks to be another great unconference.

Look for a future blog post on ProductCamp.

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Filed under Presentations, SIVA - Elements of Solution Marketing, Solution Marketing

Twitter and Customer Innovation

Solutions solve customer problems.  And so it stands to reason that those customers or software users probably know a thing or two about their problems.  They might even have a few novel ideas about how to solve their problems.  And they need you, the solution provider, to build complete solutions that combine the ideas and best practices of customers and users, along with your company’s innovative software and services.

Solution Innovation - The Solution Marketing Blog

It's about the customer

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Filed under Social Media, Solution Marketing, Solutions

Twitter on Salesforce.com: Technologies Change But Business Problems Don’t

By: Steve Robins

In over ten years of marketing solutions, I’ve learned, well, a great deal. Lesson #267 (give or take): technologies change quickly BUT many general business problems evolve at a much slower rate. Continue reading

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Filed under Case Studies, Information, Social Media, Solutions