March Marketing Madness 2018

Got your brackets filled out?

Should be an entertaining month of basketball with upsets, Cinderellas and, maybe, Virginia not winning it all.

A few years ago, Honeycomb client Ostrato asked us to create a fun video to celebrate the NCAA Tournament.

Click the image to watch...



After that video production, we helped Ostrato execute a "startup pivot" and rebranded the company as ParkMyCloud, which has been super successful, leading to high numbers of new clients and a new round of funding.

While you are watching your favorite teams and updating your brackets, take a few seconds and check out these articles:

1. Unilever CMO Keith Weed: Three things all marketers can do to eliminate ad fraud, Marketing Week
2. 7 Mistakes You’ll Make in Marketing Performance, MarTech
3. Five Big Business Trends to Watch in 2018, Fortune
4. Google Tag Manager Checklist – 68 Ways To Prepare A Website, Reddit Marketing
5. Startups are cheaper to build, but more expensive to grow – here’s why, Andrew Chen

If you have a few marketing priorities that aren't getting enough attention, email me and we'll schedule a quick call to review Honeycomb's capabilities.

Spring Has Sprung...Finally

Sometimes it is hard to concentrate when the sun stays out longer and weather gets warmer.

Take a few minutes and check out these must read articles:

1. 7 of the Best Mother's Day Ads We've Ever Seen, HubSpot
2. Intel, Mobileye, and Smiling Curves, Stratechery
3. 7 steps to help you prepare for a marketing cloud/email service provider transition, MarTech Today
4. This Sales Plan Moves the Needle on Every Success Metric, First Round Review
5. The Four-Letter Code to Selling Just About Anything, The Atlantic

Sign Up for Straight to the Point

Just sent out Honeycomb's latest monthly newsletter- Straight to the Point. I've been sending this email out once a month for 4+ years and I get a lot of positive feedback.

See below for a list of the articles I mention.

Not a subscriber? Sign up here.

1. The Ultimate Database of Growth Hacking Tools, (I'm not sure if this is the "Ulitmate" list, but it's pretty comprehensive)
2. 13 SaaS Marketing Pros Reveal Their Lead Generation Strategies, New Breed
3. How to Turn Bloggers (and Other Influencers) Into Your Brand Champions, MarketingProfs
4. 16 Startup Metrics, Jeff Jordan, et al
5. 5 Startup Landing Page Teardowns, 500 Startups

Great Deck: "Wave Theory of Startups"

I read a lot of articles, posts and presentations.

This one caught my eye.

 "Wave Theory of Startups"


 

Wave Theory of Startups: Braving the funding, sales and hype cycles from Guy Turner

Startup City: The Urban Shift in Venture Capital and High Technology

This report seems to align with what I'm seeing here in DC.

Startup City: The Urban Shift in Venture Capital and High Technology - Martin Prosperity Institute

The key findings are as follows. 

Bay Area still on top: As a whole the San Francisco Bay Area — which includes greater San Francisco and Silicon Valley — accounted for more than 4 in 10 of all venture capital dollars invested across the entire United States. 

The city of San Francisco leads the way: San Francisco proper now attracts a larger volume of venture capital investment than Silicon Valley. East Coast Acela Corridor ranks 2nd: The Boston-New York-Washington corridor on the East Coast has emerged as the second major center for venture capital investment. 

New York City is a rising startup hub: Metro New York is now the nation’s third largest center for venture capital. Nearly 80 percent of the metro’s venture investment was invested in the city itself. 

College towns attracting venture capital too: College town tech hubs like Austin and Raleigh-Cary in the North Carolina Research Triangle have long been magnets for venture capital, but Boulder, Ann Arbor, and Lawrence, Kansas attract considerable venture capital on a per capita basis as well.  

Talent matters: Venture investment tracks the geography of talent, especially the percentage of adults who are college grads and the creative class. Eds and meds don’t matter for tech: While many states and cities have pinned their hopes on education and medical centers, our research finds little to no significant statistical associations between eds and meds employment and venture capital. 

Tolerance does matter: We find venture capital investment to be associated with several markers of the diversity of metros, including their shares of immigrants and gays.

10 Reasons You'll Never Raise A Dime For Your Startup

LOL. Pretty spot on overview of what not to do when fundraising.

10 Reasons You'll Never Raise A Dime For Your Startup- Forbes


1.) Your Leadership Skills Are Lacking
2.) Your Team Falls Short
3.) No Traction With Customers
4.) No Proven Business Model
5.) Your Approach With Investors Is Wrong
6.) Pitching The Wrong Investors
7.) You’re Not Coachable
8.) Lack Deep Domain Expertise
9.) Failure To Understand ‘Lean’
10.) Blindness To See You Need To Fix All Of This

Is DC becoming more of a technology and startup center?

Is DC becoming more of a technology and startup center? Seems to me that there is a a lot more activity than there used to be.

Washington area pops onto tech radar as alternative to Silicon Valley - Washington Post

“Silicon Valley is the hub of the tech industry. I would say you ignore it at your peril,” said Joe Payne, who sold Eloqua, his Tysons Corner-based software company, to Oracle last year.

But the Washington region is creating a selling point in stability and predictability. Take Tim Sullivan, who in 2004 was seeking West Coast investors for cybersecurity company Fidelis Security Systems. Venture capitalists in California insisted that he move there, but he declined and found East Coast investors for the company, which has since been sold to contracting giant General Dynamics.

Sullivan, who now heads a cybersecurity company with a Chantilly office, said he’s never had trouble finding qualified engineers in the Washington area, and he thought turnover would drive his costs higher on the West Coast. “If people feel like the venture’s not working out, they may not stick it out and they may look to the next hotter venture,” he said.

Here Are The Hottest Companies In Tech Right Now, According To Goldman Sachs

Here Are The Hottest Companies In Tech Right Now, According To Goldman Sachs - TechCrunch

I think we’ve established by now that what happens in Vegas actually never stays in Vegas. And, as you can see by the agenda obtained by TechCrunch that’s embedded below this post, the Goldman Sachs Private Internet Company Conference scheduled to take place in Sin City over the next two days is no exception.

The Goldman Sachs conference for private web firms is one of the most high-end and hush-hush events in the tech world. It’s essentially like the Hackers Conference or dinners at Sheryl Sandberg’s house or Fight Club, except for tech executives who are likely to soon go through an IPO or big M&A deal. If you’re on the invite list, you’re in pretty good company — and the first rule is that you don’t talk about it to others.

Reading List!

Here are a few articles that caught my eye, for your light beach reading:

How to Destroy Teams and Become Losers - Leadership Freak

Five Ways to Improve Your B2B Social Marketing Strategy ROI- Inbound Marketing

How Startups Can Triple Their Custome Base in Year or Less-Tech Cocktail

The Monster list of startup submission sites for free listing -The Startup Videos

Weekend Reading

Six articles I'm reading this weekend. Anything catch your eye, that you think I should read? Let me know...

1. 10 Lessons From Digital Pioneers on How To Become a Digital Success


2. Marketing Resources for Startups – Go from Zero to Traction in 90 days


3. Recession Forecasting Ensemble (RFE) and market timing


4. 30+ Ideas To Create Great Content For Your Customers


5. Write E-Mails That People Won't Ignore


6. How To Improve The ROI Of Your New Product Launch 

Oh, and today was the Nationals' first spring training game. Giddyup!

Aligning Sales and Business Goals...Even Possible?

I've providing b2b marketing services to technology companies since 1999 or so. In that time, I've heard a lot of the same issues pop up at many firms. One of the them is the pain that is generated when a company is making a change in strategy, direction or focus- and the sales team becomes reactionary and resistant.

A common example of this is when a product based company realizes that its products are becoming commodities and attempts to re-position itself as a solutions or services company. This change always seems to cause consternation with the folks who have been happily selling the products. With good reason...lol.

I just read a very good article by Steve Blank, a Silicon Valley luminary about just this issue. It is a very good read, and you should read the whole thing...but here is a snippet...

The Land of the Living Dead 

I see this same pattern in early stage startups. Early sales look fine, but often plateau. Engineering comes into a staff meeting with several innovative ideas and the head of sales and/or marketing shoot them down with the cry of “It will kill our current sales.” 

The irony is that “killing our current sales” is often what you need to do. Most startups don’t fail outright, they end up in “the land of living dead” where sales are consistently just OK but never breakout into a profitable and scalable company. This is usually due to a failure of the CEO and board in forcing the entire organization to Pivot. The goal of a scalable startup isn’t optimizing the comp plan for the sales team but optimizing the long-term outcome of the company. At times they will conflict. And startup CEO’s need a way to move everyone out of their comfort zone to the bigger prize. 

Burn The Boats 

In 1519 Hernando Cortes landed in the Yucatan peninsula to conquer the Aztec Empire and bring their treasure back to Spain. His small army arrived in 11 boats. As they landed Cortes solved the problem of getting his team focused on what was ahead of them – he ordered them to burn the boats they came in. Now the only way home was to succeed in their new venture or die. Pivots that involve radical changes to the business model may at times require burning the boats at the shore.