A Slice of Orange

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.

Last week Orange Marketing started a series, introducing our newest team members to our clients, friends and partners. We heard from Amanda Berger, who joined our team in May, and now Amber Landeen would like to share her journey of how she became a slice of Orange.

Twice in one week, Kelsey Galarza, Co-Founder Orange Marketing, finds herself quoted in the news,  and this time in MarTech Advisor.  We couldn't agree more with all the suggestions rounded up by John Reese regarding tools needed for higher performance marketing.

Our own Kelsey Galarza was quoted in a story on MerlinOne.com about considerations when building a marketing tech stack. This is a topic near and dear to our hearts, as many of our tech founders can over think this or become enamored with the "hack of the day."

We have sold you! You read why we want you to create content prior to your product launch, and you have read how to easily create content for your product launch. Now we will provide you the basics of promoting your content prior to your product launch, without scaring you half to death.

What do we mean by scaring you? We have read a lot of posts by plenty of inbound marketing agencies that are designed to intimidate you and make you think, "OMG, I need to hire an agency to do all this as soon as possible! But I don't have money. Therefore, I won't do anything."

The founders we work with are super smart. They have all heard about inbound marketing, and they know why they need to focus on putting content on the web, just as soon as they possibly can. And if they haven't, we send them to read 5 Reasons to Start Content Marketing Before Your Product Launch. Then they certainly realize one of the most important things they can do is START softening the beachhead for their product launch with website content. 

But our technology startup founders have very little time or money. Never fear. We can break content production down into 6 simple steps with none of them being all that technical or difficult

A typical mistake that our technology engineer entrepreneurs. startup founders, and sales VPs make time and time again when launching their new product, is they wait to begin anything resembling marketing until well after their product has been fully baked and is GA (Generally Available).

This is likely based on their impression of what marketing does (or does not do) for their business and how much agencies, in general, pick the pockets of unsuspecting entrepreneurs. Marketing becomes relegated to a low priority compared to creating the product, beta testing the product and eventually selling the product to the first lucky customer. We have seen this scenario play out time and time again, and truthfully it simply breaks our hearts.

You've done the hard work! You've created an excellent piece of content. Now what? You need to run a marketing campaign to ensure the world knows about your e-book, white paper, slide deck or new research. 

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!!