Seller Power In Online Marketplaces

Buyer power in online marketplaces is obvious. Choice of platforms, sales returns, seller rating and venting on social media are among the many ways in which buyer is king in online marketplaces. Platform power is also fairly obvious: Blacklisting errant sellers and withholding payments to them are some of the tools available to the platform to flex its … Read more

Drive Engagement With Error Messages!

Yes, you read that right. This post is really about how brands can boost engagement with their consumers by using error messages. Normally, error messages are bland: Record not found Your search yielded no results Page not found. You can’t blame the programmers who typically write them because, sometimes, you can’t do better. As @nicksantos points … Read more

IT Services Company Boosts Qualified Lead Generation

Here’s our latest success story: IT Services Company Boosts Qualified Lead Generation Campaign management best practices improve Inside Sales effectiveness This midsized IT services company has an inside sales team with 20+ SDRs that run outbound marketing campaigns to midsized businesses in USA, Europe and Australia. The company owed its initial growth to aggressive outreach … Read more

Two Secrets Of Driving More Sales To Existing Customers

In 4 Major Mistakes B2B Companies Commit To Lose Clients, Ian Dainty declares that B2B technology companies lose “farming” business by failing to communicate with existing customers about their value delivered, new offerings, and so on. It’s a no-brainer that customers will defect from their incumbent vendors if they’re not kept informed. However, I’m not … Read more

Crack Multicountry SEM Campaigns With This Hack

Many midsized IT companies sell in multiple geographies (e.g. USA, UK, Germany) but have their marketing organization centralized in their home country (e.g. India). When they run search engine marketing campaigns, they’d want their ads to only show up in their target markets (that lie outside their home country). This means their corporate marketing would … Read more

Indian IT Industry Shouldn’t Drink The “Move Up The Value Chain” Kool-Aid

Every now and then, the Indian IT industry has been exhorted to “move up the value chain” (read develop products) or face extinction. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard the value chain Kool-Aid in my two decade career in software but the latest one was in the LinkedIn article entitled The Kirana … Read more

Digital Marketing Must Get Rid Of Fly-By-Night SEO Operators

We focus on the SEM and CRO elements of digital marketing and work with third party SEO service providers whenever the technique could be useful in a specific campaign. (For a primer on the difference between SEM and SEO, see my blog post entitled SEO or SEM?.) Through the years, we’ve found it extremely hard … Read more

Empowering Frontline Is Still Key To Customer Delight

Those of you that have read the all time classic business book In Search of Excellence might recall the anecdote of the automobile company that rushes a part by helicopter to a customer whose car has broken down in the middle of a desolate highway. Needless to say, the company wins the customer’s loyalty for … Read more

Why Advertisers Must Pay For Ads Seen By Bots

There’s a raging debate about ad visibility in recent times. Much as I’d like to think it’s triggered by my post Don’t Fall For The ‘Invisible Versus Unseen Ads’ Charade, the real reason doesn’t matter. The crux of the issue is that advertisers are claiming that ~15% of their online ads are seen by bots, … Read more

A Truly Indian IT Company Will Join Fortune Global 500 Earlier Than Predicted

In the latest GLOBAL 500 list published by FORTUNE magazine in August 2015, WAL-MART STORES (USA) ranks #1 and WUHAN IRON & STEEL (China) ranks #500. EDIT: The above table has been revised to reflect the correct profit of Wuhan Iron & Steel, which is US$ 54.5 million, not billion. The world’s 500 largest companies collectively … Read more