A Slice of Orange

I like the History and Discovery channel way too much. 

Last night was a replay of one of my favorite shows Expedition Unknown, and they were talking about real life vampires. My hero Josh Gates and their experts scoured Eastern Europe for the origin of the use of garlic to ward off vampires, blood sucking, and my favorite, the wooden stake. Turns out, the locals used wooden stakes to keep a body "stuck" in it's casket to not rise again. Unfortunately, most often these poor souls turned out to be folks that were mentally or physically ill and not vampires. 

Sordid history aside, Halloween got me thinking of some sales and marketing practices that really need a stake in them. These are some myths we have seen that must die forever!  

I was recently fortunate to spend a 9-week sales training course with Dan Tyre, an early HubSpot employee, super sales coach, and all-around fabulous (and very enthusiastic) guy. I was "required" to get off my butt, literally and figuratively, to learn how to develop Orange Marketing's client pipeline. And though I have advised people HOW to do it, (thanks to learning from the incomparable Marc Maloy, Amyra Rand, Steve Burrows, and others), I hadn't done the grind of outreach myself.

What I learned may help you  In no particular order, my top 5 lessons learned.

Most new B2B SaaS company websites look pretty similar. Nice WordPress theme with some pretty icons and screenshots, some customer logos. The ubiquitous item is the Contact Us page. But is Contact Us enough? Not even!!

Ok, so you’re being a good startup and you’ve got yourself some marketing automation. That’s awesome, you’re going to need it. While you get it set up, do yourself a favor and keep things organized before you get going too far, because it’s a real hassle to clean it up later, I know this from experience. For the record, I'm not THAT tidy of a person, but I'm forever on the quest. I'm obsessed with the Kon Mari technique, and maybe that's reflected in this article. If you don't have a place for everything, it's all over the place.

Look, there are over 86 Million Google results for "startup marketing". I’ve even written some of them. And I massively believe in getting product marketing right, creating content, and using a CRM correctly and jointly between Sales and Marketing. But one article you don’t see much of has to do with the infrastructure of these programs, and infrastructure can make or break you later, so it’s important to do setup correctly and now.  It's a really meaty topic, so I'm dissecting it in seven parts.