Ken Rutsky

When I used to go to London often and ride the Underground, the constant refrain seen was "Mind The Gap".   Mind the Gap or you could suffer some unmentionable and clearly gruesome fate.   As Online software service providers of all flavors try to create high velocity sales and marketing businesses, they would do well to mind these three gaps: The "It's Not Your Time" gap The "It's Not My Job" gap The "Window Shopping" gap Let's take a quick look at each of these gaps and see how we can minimize the risk of a potential customer "falling through the cracks", which while not bloody and gruesome, is costly and mostly avoidable. 1) It's Not Your Time - Sorry Ms. Vendor, you got me here and I was pretty interested, but you've failed in the three minutes I have to deliver relevant value once I arrived.  I'm not ready for the trial, because you're not showing me any compe... (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)

Breakthrough Cloud Marketing Revolution

Why have I spent the last months writing about Breakthrough marketing?  Isn't there enough written about content marketing and marketing automation?  Can we really transform Enterprise go to market and sales?  Are we just talking about features and benefits?  Well my answers are yes but, yes for sure and no we are not! Figure 1: The Three Stages of Breakthrough Marketing Today's buyer is information overloaded, bandwidth constrained and fiercely independent.  A recent survey by the Corporate Executive Board reported that 57% of the new B2B sales cycle is DONE before the buyer's ... (more)

Don't Punt - Winning the Cloud Marketing Battle

Unless you are a hardcore (American) football fan, or happened to just catch the latest episode of HBO Real Sports,  you may have never heard of Coach Kevin Kelley of Pulaski Academy in Little Rock Arkansas. But if you are a football fan, I'd imagine you may hear about him soon even if you forget about this blog. You see, Kelley's teams haven't punted since 2006.  And in that time he has taken his small 350 kid school into the national top 100 rankings and to three state championships while winning well over 90% of his games... You can Google him and easily learn more...here's a... (more)

Five Reasons We Overvalue Value in Cloud Sales and Marketing

Value Propositions and elevator pitches live in the rarefied air of marketing speak.  They are almost seen as mystical accomplishments reachable by only the anointed among us.  "But what's the elevator pitch" we hear time and time again....Give me the 30 second attention grabber, etc, etc. While I agree that Value matters, and actually matters a lot,  I think as sales and marketing professionals, we've worshiped at this alter for so long, we've lost sight of the end goal.  We've become Value snobs.  Here's are my top 5 reason's why we overvalue Value: We are Product Narcissists... W... (more)