Don’t Lose Deals By Belaboring Business Value – Case Study

In Don’t Lose Deals By Belaboring Business Value, I’d warned that B2B technology vendors risk losing a deal by belaboring business value all the time. In this post, I’ll describe my experience with a startup that failed to heed this warning, and lost the deal – and more – as a result. I was recently … Read more

Don’t Lose Deals By Belaboring Business Value

“Most B2B buyers only care about the value you bring to their business. They really do not care about your products.” When I read this line on LinkedIn, my first reaction was to reply back with the classical Little Feat line “Don’t Bogart That Joint. Pass It On.” I’ve no argument with the first sentence. … Read more

Why Indian Customers Will Flee Abroad Before Indian Startups!

I was introduced to SINE (Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship), the technology incubator at my alma mater IIT Bombay, when I attended the Silver Jubilee Reunion of my Class of 85 in 2010. Since then, my exposure to Indian technology startups has increased. As a budding angel investor, I’ve lately begun to closely follow the … Read more

3 Ways To Find Hidden Pain Areas

There’s a growing realization among B2B technology marketers that positioning their products and services around technology is a fool’s errand. Even compared to a year or two ago, there’s a massive rise in vendors recasting technology offerings around alleviation of business pain areas. This is a great development. We’d like to take some credit for … Read more

How CX Drives Sales

In this day and age of Amazons and Flipkarts, it shouldn’t take much for a business to appreciate the importance of customer experience. Nevertheless, when we recommend certain features to improve the UX / CX of our customers’ products or platforms, we often receive pushback ranging from “when a customer takes a little more trouble … Read more

Big Pharma Turns To CEM For Cure

Medical representatives sell prescription drugs by detailing doctors and canvassing drugstores. They do not contact patients who actually consume the medicines. This makes sense because, in the pharma industry, patients don’t play an active role in deciding what to buy. As we know, the way it works in this business, the physician writes the prescription … Read more

Right And Wrong Ways Of Using Case Studies

All business development teams understand the importance of case studies in B2B technology sales. But, when it comes to producing and using them, we’ve come across two diametrically opposite approaches followed in many IT companies: Kool-Aid: Use case studies for everything Phobia: Shun case studies altogether  Case Study Kool-Aid Vendors in the first category launch into … Read more

Five Ways To Win Lost SaaS Customers Back

Many of us have signed up for free software trials and not upgraded to the paid version when the trial period ended. Some of us might have bought a subscription for the paid version, used it for a few months, and then bailed out. In all these cases, we become the SaaS vendor’s “lost customers”. … Read more

Difference Between Data Mining & Predictive Analytics

I’ve been asked several times about the difference between Data Mining and Predictive Analytics. Well, that’s not strictly true. I’ve been asked only once and that too in the following tweet from @IBMAnalytics visible to me among 15.7K of its followers: https://twitter.com/IBMAnalytics/status/459004965298528256 Replies ranged from the ubiquitous “depends” – will some people begin all their … Read more