Blog Posts

Competitive Intel Is Not About The Checkmarks

"We need to know what we can do that they can't." If I had a penny for every time a sales rep asked me this question! Indeed, most competitive intelligence work seems to be spent producing a matrix with checkmarks that might look like this.

Of course, this kind of comparison is completely useless. It lacks the credibility to be taken seriously by a prospect, it doesn't have the details to be useful.... (read more)

What Happened to Vision Statements?

Every technology company needs a vision. A vision acts as the North Star that guides the company in what it is trying to accomplish. It describes how the world will be different because of the company's efforts and explains how the world will become better when the company succeeds. Yet nowadays, very few companies share their vision statement or even have one.... (read more)

Let's rename the company!

Renaming a company is a surprisingly common occurrence in the technology space. Just the other day, I saw the news about Kofax renaming itself to Tungsten Automation – a bold move for a 40-year-old company. So, let's discuss the reasons behind companies changing their names and review the best practices..... (read more) 

Not Everything That Counts Can be Counted

Every business needs to gauge its performance. Metrics such as revenue, profit, employee count, and market capitalization are how we compare and assess every business. In recent years, there has been a surge in business metrics across various functions, measuring everything from marketing pipeline and customer satisfaction to R&D defects.... (read more)

What Happened to the Age of the Customer?

Back in 2013, Forrester Research declared a new business era that they called the Age of the Customer. In this new era, empowered customers demand a new level of customer service that provides a source of dominance to companies delivering that kind of service. Realizing that, terms like customer success, customer... (read more)

The Lost Art of Content Management

After leaving the ECM space a few years ago, I had the chance to see how companies, those that don't sell content management products, manage their content. What I discovered is a disturbing mess.

In most companies, content like documents, spreadsheets, images, and more is left.... (read more) 

Is Usage Pricing Right for You?

There is currently a lot of buzz around usage-based pricing (also known as consumption pricing), particularly in the SaaS industry. This heightened interest has been largely fueled by the remarkable success of companies like AWS, Snowflake, and Stripe, ... (read more)

The Importance of Killer Apps

Every platform requires applications to be considered a true platform, even if it manifests other typical platform characteristics such as shared technology services, customization capabilities, and APIs. However, it is often the presence of a specific application ... (read more)

The Secrets of Good Messaging

So many companies say they need help to raise their game in messaging. The CEOs and CMOs all believe that they have a great product that delivers incredible value but they are failing to communicate it. Having the right messaging, ... (read more)

Platform or Application... Fish or Fowl?

...A platform strategy is quite different from an application strategy. Platform vendors are courting applications, while application vendors compete with them. Yet, most application vendors claim to have a platform too. So, can... (read more)

Sick of SIC Codes?

Classifying your customers or prospects based on industry segments should be much easier than it actually is. It's actually surprisingly hard. So hard, that Gartner stopped any vertical market sizing and forecasting back in 2017. Chances are that if you measure... (read more)

Four Types of Software Platforms

Many software companies claim to be a platform. That word alone invokes the impression of significance, scalability, good architecture, and a multiplier effect. Being a platform means that something or someone can stand on it. Companies that have a platform... (read more)