Marketing Lessons from Salesforce.com

Over the holidays I had the opportunity to read Marc Benioff’s book Behind the Cloud. The book covers a wide range of topics from company culture and funding strategies to sales models and corporate philanthropy. However, I was surprised at how many great ideas the book contained about marketing, public relations, pricing and product development. Below is a list of the 10 approaches of Salesforce.com that I thought were most compelling. But I would encourage to you read the entire book. I was aware of many of Salesforce’s marketing tactics over the past few years, but Benioff’s book ties all the ideas together into a cohesive strategy that is extremely inspiring.

I Don’t Believe in Elevator Pitches

One of the marketing concepts that I think is highly overrated is the idea of an elevator pitch.  Wikipedia defines an elevator pitch “as a short summary used to quickly and simply define a product, service, or organization and its value proposition. The name ‘elevator pitch’ reflects the idea that it should be possible to deliver the summary in the time span of an elevator ride, or approximately thirty seconds to two minutes.”  For the past few decades companies have trained their sales organizations and sometimes the broader employee base to memorize their elevator pitch so that it can be repeated on demand to customers.

Great List of Content Marketing Ideas

Most books and articles on content marketing skillfully omit the part about what makes great “content.”  Instead they preach ideas – “Thou shalt tweet…Thou shalt friend…Thou shalt blog.”  The preaching is usually followed by an explanation of what these social media tools are and how to use them.  Seriously, it’s almost 2012 – how many marketing professionals are out there who do not know how to use YouTube, WordPress or Twitter?

Eight Great Patent Strategies

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently finished reading Rembrandts in the Attic by Kevin G. Rivette and David Kline.  There were hundreds of ideas in the book about how to strategically manage your intellectual property assets for competitive advantage -far too many to write in a blog post.  But there were eight that I found particularly compelling.

Dusting Off Rembrandts in the Attic

I recently finished reading the book Rembrandts in the Attic by Kevin G. Rivette and David Kline.  I had purchased this book about 10 years ago with every intention of reading it.  But it sat on my bookshelf for nearly a decade until late this summer when Google acquired Motorola Mobility.  The real motivation for Google’s acquisition seemed to be a desire to control Motorola’s warchest of 17,000 patents.  Earlier in the year Google was unsuccessful in obtaining Nortel’s 6000 patents in an auction battle with Microsoft, Apple, RIM and others.  With the subject of intellectual property rights appearing daily in the news I decided it was time to dust off the Rembrandts in the Attic to learn more about patent strategies in the technology sector.

How Social Media is Changing Journalism (and Tradeshows)

Last month I watched a fascinating movie called the Bang Bang Club, which chronicles the lives of four photojournalists in South Africa. The group, which included Pulitzer Prize winners Greg Marinovich and Kevin Carter, conducted a series of high-risk photo shoots portraying the violence and civil unrest that marked the Apartheid era. The Bang Bang Club risked their lives entering urban areas with heavy gunfire to capture photos of the violence for the local and international press. In 1994, two of the photojournalists were injured from crossfire during one of their shoots.  One of the photographers died while the other was hospitalized, but recovered.

Even the Step Brothers Could Get Funding into Today’s Tech Bubble

Everyone is talking about a bubble in Internet stocks as valuations continue to climb higher daily.  However, the trend shows no sign of abatement.  The most recent filing by social gaming leader Zynga suggests it will be valued at over $20 billion when it becomes listed later this year.  Groupon’s June S-1 registration filing placed a similar valuation of approximately $20 billion.  In an explosive IPO this May, LinkedIn sold shares to the public based upon a $4 billion valuation.  Twitter’s most recent financing suggest it is worth $7 billion.  And the biggest social network of them all, Facebook could potentially be worth $100 billion.

What the Federal Government can teach us about Requirements Definition

At some point in their career every product manager has experienced frustrations with their development team over misinterpretations of requirements.  You asked for an Apple-like user experience and you got something that resembled more of a UNIX command line.  Sometimes you think you have communicated the requirements so clearly on paper, but the engineer just did not get it. 

How PowerPoint Slides are Like Friends Episodes

I wasn’t the biggest fan of the show Friends.  After the first two seasons I thought both the humor and plots of the episodes became predictable and routine.  However, it is hard to argue that Friends did not have a significant impact on American culture.  I remember people walking around in the late 1990s emulating Joey’s famous “How you doing?” phrase.  One of the aspects that I liked most about the show was the technique the writers used to name each episode.

New Coke – The Biggest New Product Launch Ever

In April of 1985 the Coca-Cola Company performed what is probably the most legendary and controversial new product introduction of all time.  Coke had been losing market share to its archrival Pepsi for 15 consecutive years.  Coke’s market share had declined from a post World War II high of 60 percent down to 24 percent in 1985.  The executive team was faced with the dilemma of how to revitalize a product that had been selling for 99 years.  The Coca-Cola Company’s approach was to replace its primary product with a newer, bolder version that would draw new customers.