Category Archives: marketing

Is My Idea Any Good?

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I had a fun day yesterday, attending a meeting at Columbia University during lunch then heading down later in the day to Charlie O’Donnell’s Not A Pitch meeting.

Both of these were terrific (hence the fun day) and I learned a lot. And, in loose conversations, it’s always fun to say “I’m heading up to Columbia” and “I’m meeting with a VC”.

But the really great thing about these events was their accessibility. The Columbia meeting was something specific and the Not A Pitch meeting was an idea-generating, information-gathering session. Both were free, were easy to get to, and they provided terrific feedback about people’s ideas.

Have an idea but not sure if it’s any good? Here are two places you can get some direct, free feedback.

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Are You A Good Sales Person?

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But one surprising lesson I’ve learned from my years of experience in the appointment setting industry is that some of the best sales people don’t act at all like the stereotypical “good sales person.”

(Source: Small Business Trends, 4 Surprising Things Great Sales People Say)

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Barcelona FC = Apple Inc

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For long spells Barcelona simply reminded us of their favourite obsession, keeping the ball and exerting a sense of superiority. There are not too many sides in Europe who have the nerve to play with what is essentially a front four and they were quickly in the groove, knocking the ball around, left and right, short and long, waiting for the opening. The philosophy is that giving the ball away is a sin, and yet that is exactly what happened for Drogba’s goal.

(Source: The Irish Times, Drogba gives Chelsea precious lead)

Compare that with this:
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The Daily Scrum, Episode 2

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The Daily Scrum, Episode 2 is now available for download in iTunes.

In this episode, we introduce Mike Maheu to the podcast. Mike is an Agile trainer and evangelist of best practices when implementing Agile. He talks a bit about examples of Agile deployments – tools and methodologies – and we discuss how these software development-specific ideas can be used by non-developers.

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Start Building Relationships With Email Marketing

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People love seeing their own name. It makes them feel is if the email was written to them personally and not sent to thousands. Online services have simple options to directly insert names from your contact database using a template editor.

(Source: Selling Power, Seven Ways to Improve Your Email Response)

There’s much more into this than simply adding a first name. Think about all the data scrubbing you have to do to ensure your list(s) have the correct first name. Then, think about the content itself – does it actually make sense to use their first name? And, how do you use their first name? (ie, Hey FNAME or Hi FNAME or FNAME?).

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