Comments on: Marketing, Sales & Dating https://ceobootcamp.com/marketing-sales-dating/ Transform your Company in just 2 Hours a Week Sat, 07 Apr 2007 22:00:50 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.1 By: Tim Gibbens https://ceobootcamp.com/marketing-sales-dating/#comment-151 Sat, 07 Apr 2007 22:00:50 +0000 http://thesmallbusinesscoach.com/blog/2006/08/17/marketing-sales-dating/#comment-151 The key to a successful relationship is definitely communication. I look at my mother and father who have been together for well over 50 years and if you ask how they did it. They will tell you they knew how to talk to each other. The same is true for a company it’s customers. If you don’t know what your customers want, and if your customers don’t know what you are offering, then you have a problem.

-Tim

]]> By: Neville Franks https://ceobootcamp.com/marketing-sales-dating/#comment-150 Fri, 18 Aug 2006 21:56:29 +0000 http://thesmallbusinesscoach.com/blog/2006/08/17/marketing-sales-dating/#comment-150 Hi John,
Great post. Sounds a lot like the exchange we had recently. 🙂

Some background. I’m a full time, one-person software development, publishing, marketing and sales company. And of course provide great support. I’ve been doing this successfully for around 20 years now and have just two products.

My first product fits your “dating” analogy quite well and the techniques you outline corresponds to what I do. ie. The market for the product is easy to define and therefore target.

My new product (Surfulater) is a whole other story and marketing for it is proving very challenging indeed.

Surfulater is a product that can be used by anyone that spends any time using the Internet to look up or research information. It could be someone wanting information on a medical condition, planning a holiday, doing analysis of their competitors, doing school homework, writing a Sunday Sermon and on, and on. In a nutshell therein lies the problem. The potential customer base is incredibly diverse and saying its “anyone that uses the WWW” doesn’t really help, when you are trying to organize a “date”.

The reality matches what I’ve said. Our customers are from all over the place and are using Surfulater to capture and retain knowledge about all sorts of things, many of which I would never even have thought of. And the great news they all love Surfulater and think it is an incredibly useful program.

So where to from here. Well our discussions concluded that I need to try and identify some specific groups of people out of the diverse pool and work out how to get in touch with them. I’ve not had much time to do this yet, but I’m certainly going to try. We also agreed that I need to stop programming all day, every day and devote time to marketing, which I am doing, but not enough.

My initial reason for contacting you was a ‘cry for help’ which you generously responded to. The problem remains that there are many people out their with great products (forget ideas) who continually struggle with marketing and can’t find the assistance they need to get over the hurdles, and I’m one.

Time to wrap this up and go and do some marketing or maybe write some more code. 😉

On a final note here is another date story that’s well worth reading: http://blog.surfulater.com/2005/11/07/if-your-software-was-on-a-date/

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