Ken Rutsky

When I talk about Viewpoint, the first question I usually get is, "well, who does this well?" The godfather of Viewpoint in the new era of cloud computing is clearly Salesforce.com.  As I have written here,  SalesForce.com's "The End of Software" created a unique and compelling Viewpoint that aligned with the aspiration and frustrations of their target customers who needed faster and easier visibility into the sales pipeline and performance.  As they and the market have matured, they have adeptly shifted to "The Social Enterprise," seeking to capitalize on the technology, environmental and business shift to social computing.   So far, this seems to be a big win again for Benioff and team as even conservative Gartner Group now calls this category "Social CRM". But everyone calls out Salesforce, so I wanted to find a few maybe lesser know examples of companies who ... (more)

Glider Bikes to SaaS Success

Owen, my youngest, is a typical 3 1/2 year old boy, energetic, physical and fearless. He's been riding on a glider bike for the last year, and loves to blast down hills with his feet in the air, scaring the daylights out of his Dad. For those of you unfamiliar with glider bikes, it's basically a pedal-less two-wheeler that you propel like a scooter with your feet. I've been watching him scoot around on his glider wondering how he would do with pedals, would he need training wheels at all?? Would he be faster than his three older siblings at getting on a "real" two-wheeler? (They... (more)

Poking Through the Clouds

About five years ago, I had the pleasure of sitting through sales training with John Costigan. I remember John's opening as he said something like, "How are you?" and got the typical quiet reaction. John went on to say something like, "when I am asked, I say "OUTSTANDING" and you should too. Because to STAND OUT, you MUST BE OUTSTANDING." Fast forward to last week, when I was having a discussion on positioning with a very successful entrepreneur turned VC. He said, "The only way to win in today's markets is to STAND OUT, create something new." Immediately I thought of John and s... (more)

The 4th C - How the Cloud Changes Everything in B2B Marketing

"The Cloud Changes Everything" is heard so often that it is a cliché. But then again, distributed energy production and transmission enabled our 20th century manufacturing revolution and the interstate highway systems changed our society. Those of us who practice B2B technology marketing are living in the most interesting time of our careers. Not only is social media changing our communications channels faster than our ability to manage them, but cloud economics and delivery is changing our products and our customers. In order to thrive and succeed in cloudy times, we must be dis... (more)

Finding Your Cloud Go-to-Market Viewpoint - Follow the Cash Cow!

In my recent article on High Impact Cloud Marketing, I said: Viewpoint is a framing of the market in the context of your uniqueness.  The uniqueness of your team, your capabilities, and your vision.  Some call viewpoint thought leadership, some vision with a capital V, and some brand. and I called on providers to set a unique and compelling viewpoint to create breakthrough for their marketing efforts. While there are many frameworks and techniques to capturing Viewpoint, however defined, one of the simplest and most effective way I have, and one the first I usually pull out of my t... (more)